RUTHFULLY YOURS

Should private companies that provide users with encryption technology be required to assist law-enforcement and intelligence services to defeat that technology? This question is a more pressing one in the wake of November’s Paris terrorist attacks. But it is a very tough question that has vexed both the government and providers of communications services for years.

Part of what makes it so difficult is the new facts of life. As I noted during the debate over the NSA’s bulk-collection of telephone metadata, we are operating in a political environment that is night-and-day different from the aftermath of 9/11. Back then, a frightened public was demanding that the government do a better job of collecting intelligence and thwarting terrorist plots. Of course that sentiment was driven by the mass-murder of nearly 3,000 Americans, coupled with the destruction of the World Trade Center and a strike against the Pentagon. But it also owed in no small measure to the fact that government had done such an incompetent job gathering and “connecting the dots” prior to the attacks. There was a strong public sense that intelligence agencies needed an injection of muscle.

Today, the public’s sense tends in the other direction. There have been spectacular abuses of government power (e.g., IRS scandal), and intrusive security precautions infused by political correctness (e.g., airport searches). Americans understandably suspect that government cannot be trusted with enhanced authorities and that many of its tactics are more about the appearance of security than real security.

Every member of the military has a personal duty to report the facts they encounter truthfully to their superiors. That goes for everyone from the lowliest private to the four-star generals who report directly to the president.

But what happens when the colonels and generals disagree with the facts their junior officers and civilians report to them, not because they think the facts are wrong but because they want to satisfy their civilian bosses’ political agenda?

That’s exactly what is going on at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), according to the allegations made against CENTCOM senior officers by about 50 intelligence analysts. Several reports say CENTCOM analysts have taken these allegations to the Defense Department Office of the Inspector General, which has determined that there is enough substance to the allegations to compel a major investigation into how CENTCOM’s commanders handle intelligence that doesn’t comply with President Obama’s agenda.

CENTCOM, like other joint commands, has responsibility for an area of the world. CENTCOM’s responsibility includes 20 countries encompassing the entire Middle East and much of western Asia. It is responsible for defending America from whatever emanates from the most dangerous part of the world.

It’s been more than two weeks since the terrible attacks in Paris. And what has been the response? French President Francois Hollande has tried to bring the U.S. and Russia into a wider anti-ISIS coalition. That effort, predictably, has gone nowhere because of the stark differences between the U.S. (which sees Assad as part of the problem in Syria) and Russia (which sees Assad as the solution). The fracas over Turkey’s shoot down of a Russian fighter has further splintered any attempt to create international solidarity against the Islamic State.

So where does that leave us? With a slightly intensified air campaign against ISIS that has now been joined by French aircraft and possibly soon by the British, too, assuming that Prime Minister Cameron wins parliamentary approval, as appears likely. In retaliation for the bombing of a Russian civilian airliner, the Russians have already dropped some bombs and missiles on Raqqa, the ISIS capital, although they are saving most of their firepower for more moderate Syrian rebels. And the U.S. has slightly increased the tempo of its air strikes — it is now willing to target ISIS oil tankers (after warning the drivers to leave their trucks) but still not ISIS oil wells, apparently for fear of causing environmental damage!

Unfortunately, there is no reason to think that air strikes alone will defeat ISIS any more than they have ever defeated any other determined foe in the past century.

Yet President Obama, having considered his options, has apparently decided to continue with the present strategy of relying on air strikes and limited advisory assistance to Iraqi and Syrian forces. Instead of confronting the growing ISIS threat, he insists on denigrating it. The onetime “JV team,” which supposedly wasn’t ready for the big leagues of terrorism, is now labeled by the president as “a bunch of killers with good social media,” which is about as accurate a description as calling Barack Obama “a community organizer with a nice airplane.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelledeen/2015/11/30/the-iran-deals-slow-death/

Back when the negotiations were still under way for The Deal between Iran and the P5+1, I accurately forecast the outcome would be a “No Deal Deal.” I described it this way:

Obama/Kerry/Rhodes won’t take “no” for a definitive answer, so we’re probably going to see a new form of creative appeasement. Short version: It will be a “no deal deal.” Iran promises to try really really hard to be nice and we pay for it. Everyone agrees to commit to a “real” agreement by the end of the year. Iran gets money–the continuation of the monthly payoff, and under-the-table arrangements like the gold shipment the South Africans delivered to Khamenei–and we get smiles.

There is no deal, per se–nobody signs anything–but we get the worst of it any how. If John Kerry thinks that’s enough for a Nobel Peace Prize, he’s got an even lower opinion of the judgment of the Oslo crowd than I do. And he may be right. Chamberlain was widely praised as a great peacemaker for a while, and Carter was greatly admired when he proclaimed we had given up our “inordinate fear of Communism.” And we’ll keep talking, won’t we? And Obama just reiterated–at the Pentagon no less–that guns don’t defeat ideologies, only good ideas do.

The hot air spewing at the Global Climate Summit is settled and irrefutable evidence of man-made global warming. rsk

Henry Kressel for thirty years was the senior partner in the technology practice of Warburg Pincus, one of the most successful private equity and venture capital firms, after a distinguished scientific career at RCA Labs. Norman Winarsky runs the venture capital division of SRI International (originally founded as Stanford Research Institute), one of Silicon Valley’s great idea factories. In this compact volume they offer a step-by-step guide to creating world-shaking new companies with billion-dollar market valuations. Why reveal their secrets? In fact, there are no secrets, only a set of filters that eliminate the vast majority of contenders from the running.

This is a cautionary tale more than an inspirational one, and many of the book’s deepest insights are found in its diagnosis of what went wrong with seemingly bulletproof ventures. Great new companies require the right technology for the right market niche, the right management for the right customers, the right investors for the right executives, the right financial controls for the right take-off trajectory. It sounds simple, and it is. It requires vision, experience, contacts and common sense to bring all these elements together in one venture. There are very few venture firms with the brains and bandwidth to do it all, but the ones who do produce a remarkably high number of hits.

Kressel and Winarsky have no use for the popular notion that start-ups should fail until they succeed, “pivoting” to things that work by trial and error. They write:

Failure has become de rigeur, particularly in software start-ups that initially require little capital and small teams. The idea seems simple enough: you start with an initial venture concept, put together a team, and launch the venture. You develop minimally viable products, keep testing different market and product hypotheses, and pivot based on the market feedback you get. You expect to fail repeatedly and hope to eventually get to product-market fit.

For an old Cold Warrior the scene on a bright October afternoon was surreal: America’s Second Cavalry Regiment crossing a Romanian river on a Soviet-built tactical bridge assembled by the Romanian Army, while overhead Vietnam-era MiG 21s carried out mock attacks, with German-made antiaircraft guns manned by Romanian crews simulating the destruction of the intruding MiGs.

The symbolism of the river crossing brought home to me the precarious condition of the U.S. military presence in Europe. American armor crossed on Romanian bridges because the Army has no tactical bridging in Europe. Romanian antiaircraft guns at the crossing sites highlighted the fact that our Army has no mid- and low-level antiaircraft weapons to protect America’s ground forces in Europe.

The Second Cavalry’s lightly armored Stryker vehicles that crossed on Romanian bridges worked well in Afghanistan against the Taliban. But they would turn into burning coffins when confronting Russian tanks. Numbers tell an even more frightening story: At 30,000, there are fewer American soldiers protecting Western Europe, a piece of the planet that produces 46% of global GDP, than there are cops in New York City.

How shall we rate the state of the world? Take a look around — from Islamic State atrocities in Sinai and Paris, to the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan, to China’s efforts to control the South China Sea, to Russia’s intervention in Syria, to the stabbing intifada in Israel.
You might be reminded of the classic exchange in Woody Allen’s movie Play It Again, Sam. The scene takes place in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Allen spots an exotic-looking brunette staring intently at an abstract painting. Plucking up his courage, he sidles up to her and asks: “That’s quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn’t it. What does it say to you?”

In an accented, bored-sounding voice, she answers: “It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of man forced to live in a barren godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and degradation forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos.”
“What are you doing Saturday night?” Allen asks.

“Committing suicide.”

“How about Friday night?”

So there we are. How do we move forward? Let me begin by offering a few thoughts on how we got here. And then allow me to play National Security Adviser to the next president and offer some ideas for how best to conduct US future foreign policy.

The word “hubris,” from the Greek, refers to overbearing pride or excessive presumption. In his latest book, the distinguished British historian Alistair Horne takes us on an episodic journey through the violent first half of the 20th century to see where and how hubris led to military debacles costing millions of lives and leading to the downfall of warlords, regimes and empires. It is an eminently provocative and readable volume in no small part because Mr. Horne, who has written more than two dozen books on modern European history, here ventures into what for him is the new territory of East Asia. Readers are the beneficiaries of this voyage of discovery.

Even students of military history are unlikely to know much if anything about the 1939 Battle of Nomonhan, fought between the Japanese and the Soviets in one of the world’s most rugged landscapes, the bleak steppes between then Japanese-occupied Manchuria and Soviet-dominated Mongolia. Mr. Horne brilliantly reconstructs this long-forgotten battle—featuring tanks clashing on the trackless wastes—and connects it to future military cataclysms, including the battles of Moscow and Stalingrad a few short years later. It’s as if he has discovered a hidden spring from which mighty rivers of blood were to flow.

In the closet of Abdalrahman, eighth-century caliph of Spain, this note was discovered after his death: “I have now reigned above fifty years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honours, power and pleasure, have waited on my call.…In this situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: they amount to fourteen: O Man! place not thy confidence in this present world.”

In a footnote to this item, in the fifth volume of “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” Edward Gibbon writes: “If I may speak of myself (the only person of whom I can speak with certainty), my happy hours have far exceeded, and far exceed, the scanty number of the caliph of Spain; and I shall not scruple to add, that many of them are due to the pleasing labour of the present composition.”