Snowden

In the last week or so I have told several people that I was reading the "Snowden book" or that I was going to write a blog post about "Snowden".  Many people's response surprised me.  They asked me "who is Snowden?"  Edward "Ed" Snowden was a big fucking deal for several months about six years ago.  On many days he dominated the news.  There was intense interest in who he was, where he was, what he was up to, what he had done and why.

But in a pattern that has unfortunately become all too common, any legitimately newsworthy thing, and Snowden was definitely legitimately newsworthy, fades to the point where few people remember anything about it in an astoundingly short period of time.  He has written a book called "Permanent Record".  It was published recently and I finished reading it a few days ago.  The title is anodyne enough that it does not telegraph to most people why he was a big deal so let me explain.

Snowden spent several years as a contract employee working for various parts of the US intelligence community, what he short hands to the IC.  He also spent several relatively short stints as a direct employee of the Federal Government.  Most of the time he was directly employed by the Federal Government he worked for the CIA.  In all cases he was a computer guy.

Toward the end of his period of employment he collected a large number of top secret documents.  He did this in a way that did not alert anyone that anything was amiss.  He was also able to smuggle these documents out of the high security facility he worked in without being caught.  He was then able to leave the country after contacting various members of the press, again without alerting anyone that anything was amiss,  Finally, he turned the documentation over to the press who promptly started writing and publishing stories based on the contents of these documents.

He saw himself as a whistleblower who was performing a necessary public service.  Others had a far less flattering opinion of him.  He was promptly charged with espionage and related crimes.  For complicated reasons he ended up stuck in Moscow, although he has steadfastly contended that he has in no way cooperated with the Russians and had no classified information with him when he ended up there.  Needless to say, the fact that he ended up in Moscow, where he still lives, added to the sensationalism.  And that led to even more saturation press coverage of him at the time.

So who is Snowden, what did he do, and why did he do it?  He wrote the book to answer those kinds of questions.  As to the "who", he was born in North Carolina in 1983 to a military family.  Although he was and is very smart, he was a poor student who initially did not want to follow in the family tradition.  But then 9/11 happened.  That caused him to reverse course and join the Army aiming to become part of an elite unit.  An accident during training resulted in a medical discharge that put an end to that plan.

He slightly altered his trajectory.  He still wanted to be of service to the government but figured he was better suited to doing computer things in the IC.  That's not as easy as you might think to do.  But he figured out how to do it and once he got a foot in the door he was very successful almost from the start.

He had demonstrated a high level of computer ability from an early age.  That turns out to be an area of expertise that was and still is highly valued within the IC.  He ended up doing what I call "system administration" work, something he was very good at and a specialty that was in continuous short supply.  (He goes into great detail about subspecialties and draws distinctions that, while they are meaningful to him and to me, add needless complexity so I am going to ignore them.)

Broadly, system administration involves the construction and maintenance of computers, computer systems, and the networks that tie them all together.  The system administrator's job is to tie it all together and to make the result perform effectively as an integrated unit.  It is up to others to figure out how to make what the system administrator creates and keeps running do useful work.

He was not a "programmer".  Programing work is more task specific.  They make the pieces that make this computer or system or network do a specific thing.  But frankly there is a lot of overlap between what programmers do and what system administrators do.

Snowden, for instance, could write programs but didn't consider himself that good at it and it did not interest him.  But there is a programmer-like activity that he was very good at.  He could write "scripts".  These, in turn, allowed him to automate a lot of the routine tasks system administrators needed to perform to keep the computers, computer systems, and networks, running smoothly.  Writing programs and writing scripts are very similar activities.  I know.  I've done both.

The difference between programming and system administration has more to do with outlook than the nuts and bolts of the job.  A programmer's typical concern is with all the details necessary to perform a very specific activity that is typically a small part of a much larger process.  System administration is much more "big picture" in its outlook.  What's the main goal?  It turns out that the skills are nearly identical.  It is only the outlook, and to some extent the tools, that change.

In reading the book I saw a lot of myself in Snowden.  I saw him as a kindred soul.  But there are differences.  I was born in 1947, roughly 35 years before he was.  To state the obvious, it was a different time.  I wrote my first computer program as a freshman in college.  He was six years old when he wrote his.

He grew up surrounded by people who worked for the government.  I didn't.  He felt much more constrained by his environment.  I was comfortable with the environment that I grew up in.  His parents divorced while he was growing up.  Mine didn't.  He felt a need to "hack" the system.  For the most part I just wanted to make the system work better and more efficiently.

Then there is the broader environment we came of age in.  I grew up during the Vietnam era.  This caused me to think carefully about things like right and wrong and what the moral thing to do is.  Just the tenor of the times led me to be far more skeptical of institutions including the government.

He grew up during the "safe" '90s and in a military family.  He got his sense of right and wrong from his family.  And his environment bred a high degree of trust and acceptance of the government, its leaders, and its policies.  Military people don't make policy.  They implement policies made by others, whatever those policies may be.

In that environment being apolitical is appropriate behavior.  That is, until 9/11 happened.  At that point he had no experience or expertise with which to form a judgement independent of that of the government.  The government said "we are the good guys, they are the bad guys, and they have done a bad thing to us for no good reason".  The only appropriate response he could think of was to join the army so he could take the fight to the bad guys.  So he did.  My thinking on the subject was much more nuanced so it led me in a different direction.

One thing we shared, however, was a belief that if you sign up to do a job you should do your best to do it well.  We take our responsibilities seriously and we resent others who have a more cavalier attitude toward theirs.  We also expect our supervisors to also take their responsibilities seriously.  And part of a supervisor's responsibilities should be a concern for when things are and are not being done right.

If a subordinate finds something that looks wrong he or she should report it to his or her supervisor.  That supervisor should take the report seriously and, in normal circumstances, undertake an investigation.  But once sufficient proof has been developed and verified that a problem exists then the supervisor has a duty to move to get the problem fixed or to explain why things should remain the same (the abnormal circumstance).  Doing nothing is NOT an option.

Both of us kept score.  If problems were not handled appropriately, we took note.  And we looked for patterns.  At least initially Snowden was naïve.  He expected supervisors to do their jobs.  He was surprised when people up the chain of command did not respond appropriately.  They were much more "don't rock the boat" than "let's go ahead and fix the problem".  With a cynicism born of Vietnam, I was equally disappointed but less surprised and more careful when management fell down on the job, than he was.

There is another important way we are different.  John Le Carre, the great spy novelist, was a part of the British Intelligence Community before he turned to writing novels for a living.  There he came to the conclusion that con men make the best spies.  Spies need to be expert liars and manipulators of people, for instance.

He addressed the subject at length in fictional form in one of his books, "A Perfect Spy".  He has said that it is the most autobiographical of his spy novels.  In it we find that Pym, the protagonist, is the son of a con man.  And a lot of the skills that made him successful as a spy were things he learned at his father's knee when he was a child.  Both Le Carre and I believe this carries over to the real world of spying.  Con men and spies use the same skills.

I would make a terrible spy.  I can't lie worth shit.  I am terrible at reading other people.  And I make a horrible con man.  Snowden, on the other hand, is proud of the scam he pulled off as a six year old.  He also relates various schemes and scams he employed to get out of school work and otherwise "game the system".  This is a skill he takes pride in.

There is a hacker technique called "social engineering".  It consists of conning people into doing things for you that they shouldn't and with them letting you do things you are not normally allowed to do.  Here's a simple example from a past era.  A hacker would call a telephone operator and behave like a telephone company repair man.  If the ruse worked then the operator would let the hacker perform "systems" functions that, for instance, bypassed the billing system.

Successful spies are good at social engineering.  Snowden was good at social engineering.  I am not.  That's enough of that.  Let's get back to the book.

As reported above, Snowden went to work for the IC.  This is harder to do than you would think but he was a better researcher than I am and he figured out the process.  He then proceeded to game it (in a good way) to both get into the system and also to end up where he wanted to end up.  At this point he still felt bad about not having gotten in the fight as a soldier as a result of his boot came injury.  So he wanted to be at "the pointy end of the spear" when it came to postings.  He wanted to do field work in dangerous places.

But his plan backfired.  The managers he had so successfully impressed chose to put him into a cushy position in Switzerland instead, not exactly a hardship post where they are shooting at you.  But he prospered.  He is a very good systems engineer and he developed and implemented various significant improvements to the computer infrastructure that is now ubiquitous in intelligence and pretty much everywhere else.  His bosses continued to like him and his work (more good social engineering) and he was flagged as a rising star.  Another thing he leaned was that contracting was the way to go.

For various stupid reasons the Federal government has shifted away from work being done by government employees and toward work being done by contractors, people working for firms that are hired by agencies to do the actual work.

A cynic (I plead "guilty") would say that this is so that there are a lot of companies with a lot of executives that can contribute to political campaigns, participate in the "revolving door" between government employment and civilian jobs, can give elected officials bragging rights about how many federal dollars are spent in the district, etc.

The shift from using government employees to using contractors is always sold as being economical and permitting additional flexibility.  But that is 100% BS.  Here's what Snowden has to say on the subject:

The extent of my access [as a contractor] meant that the process itself might be broken, that the government had given up on meaningfully managing and promoting its talent from within.

Anyhow, Snowden "revolving door"ed between government employment and being a civilian contractor a couple of times.  For the most part he found it easier to move to whatever work he wanted to move to by being a civilian contractor.  Being a civilian contractor also paid a lot better.

He rightly questions this system particularly when it comes to system administrators.  System administrators are like janitors in that they see everything.  Janitors see it in the trash.  System administrators see it on the file systems of the computers they administer and across the networks they monitor.  As such, they are the ones who need to be the most trusted people anywhere in the system.  So, from a practical point of view, they have the highest effective security clearance of anyone.  This may or may not be reflected in their "official" clearance level.

So why should a contractor, who owes whatever allegiance he might possess to a company like Dell or Booz Allen (two of the companies Snowden worked for), work diligently to preserve and protect the government and its interests?  Shouldn't you want you want these people above all to have interests that are tightly aligned with those of the government?  Yet it seems that these most critical jobs are the first to be outsourced.

There is (or used to be) a strain of thought in conservativism called "strict construction".  The idea is that if you want to understand what is and is not Constitutional you should look at the plain text of the US Constitution.  Beyond that, it is also appropriate to look at what the founding fathers had to say at the time.  See what their general thinking was on an issue.

Then look closely at what they had to say about various components that were put into or left out of the Constitution.  Words written and thoughts thought at the time should guide you.  The Constitution does not need updating to allow for new and changed conditions that have come into being between then and now, they say.  The sole exception applies to the various amendments to the Constitution that have been approved since.

There are also large "militia" and "gun rights" groups associated with conservatives.  They note that the US was born in revolution so revolution is always an option.  If, of course, there is a "just cause" and the powers that be are not moving appropriately to redress this just cause.

Snowden lays out a case for his actions based on these two concepts.  He first analyzes the plain language of the Constitution,  For instance, the fourth amendment reads "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized".

He then argues that much of what the IC routinely sweeps up falls into the category of what the fourth amendment says should be "secure" from government snooping.  He then goes on to argue that warrants are not properly issued that would permit the government to snoop in a Constitutionally appropriate manner.  In short, Constitutionally speaking, the IC is way out of line and something needs to be done about it.

His argument is completely in line with mainstream conservative thought when it comes to strict construction.  It is also completely in line with other constitutional and civil liberties experts from other parts of the political spectrum have to say.  So this, in Snowden's thinking, constitutes a "just cause".

Then there is the matter of the remedy.  If the institution is moving to correct the wrong than no action is warranted on Snowden's part.  But he amply documents in the material he caused to be released, and to which he had legal access as a systems administrator before then, that the leaders of the IC put these policies in place on purpose.  They worked hard to do exactly what they did.

And since then they have taken many steps both to keep these policies in place and to make sure that word of them did not leak out.  So Snowden rightly concluded that any effort to take action while staying within the system was doomed to failure.  And that, according to the logic espoused by the militia/gun people, justifies "revolutionary action".  So here too Snowden's actions fall squarely within the boundaries of conservative thought in this area.  In this case, however, many people located along other parts of the political spectrum would and did beg to differ.

But so far what I have described is Snowden's opinion of the material he had uncovered.  Let's take a look for ourselves at what Snowden found that so concerned him.  And to do that properly we should first take a step back.  You see, for Snowden, history started with 9/11.  He made no effort to find out what had come before.  But I have been interested in this subject for decades.  I am, for instance, currently reading a 750 page tome that covers the history of intelligence activities starting with ancient times and going forward from there.

But we don't need to go so far afield in either time or place.  It turns out that in the period between the first and second World War there was a time when a US intelligence agency received a copy of every single international telegram transiting New York.  Domestically, the FBI operated a "black bag" unit for many years.   It specialized in illegal break-ins.  The FBI also tapped phones, usually legally but often not.  But this sort of thing was so difficult and expensive to do that all government agencies combined could only go after perhaps a few hundred people.  Yet there are hundreds of millions of people in the US.

All this is "security by obscurity".  Almost everyone is safe from being spied upon, not by reason of the fact that it is illegal, or that regulations prohibit it, but by the fact that it is so difficult and expensive that only prominent people get targeted.  Passing laws, writing regulations, putting effective controls in place, can all help (and have helped in the past).  But with the computerization of everything and the internet-ization of everything, the fact that there are a lot of us is getting less and less effective as a protection.

The cost and difficulty involved in snooping has dropped precipitously in recent decades.  In the run up to 9/11 it was relatively hard to snoop on people.  And, as a result of Watergate and a big scandal that erupted a few years later that involved the FBI spying on groups who were peacefully organizing against the Vietnam war, the laws were fairly tight and the IC fairly careful.  Snowden was apparently unaware of these and other pre-9/11 examples of IC overreach and the waxing and waning efforts to control it.  I don't know if his behavior would have been different had he known.

According to Snowden, the IC were blamed for missing 9/11 and accepted the blame.  I think the situation in more complicated but, in the interests of brevity, I am going to skip over that.  In any case, after 9/11 the Bush administration asked the IC "what do you need to do better next time?"  The IC's response was "give us a lot of money then cut us loose from regulation and oversight so we can us do anything we think is appropriate".  The result was the USA/PATRIOT Act, which gave the IC a ton of money and authorization to do pretty much anything they wanted to do.

The resulting buildup had only been under way for a few years when Snowden joined up.  So he had a front row seat on the worst excesses.  One of the things the IC asked for and got was wide authority to access pretty much any kind of data about anyone.  That was bad.  But what made it even worse was that they got authority to make it illegal for the companies on the receiving end of one of these requests to even acknowledge the existence of the request.  The law forced telephone companies, for instance, to lie about the very existence of a subpoena from the NSA asking for "all telephone records of all calls".

For those who don't follow this sort of thing as closely as I do, there are three principle agencies involved in all this.  The NSA is responsible for SIGINT, SIGnals INTelligence, anything they can find out about radio signals, the internet, and such like.  The CIA was responsible for HUMINT, HUMan INTelligence, roughly everything else.  But both agencies were restricted to activities happening overseas.  In other words, prior to 9/11 both the CIA and the NSA were expressly forbidden to spy on US citizens, especially if they were in the US.  The third agency, the FBI, was responsible for both SIGINT and HUMINT within the US and with respect to US citizens.

One of the main causes of 9/11 was "silo-ing", one agency not working closely with the others but instead keeping what they knew "in a silo".  As a result, nobody had the full picture.  The other main cause was a lack of focus.  The Clinton Administration had a cabinet level committee monitoring Al Qaeda.  The Bush administration shelved that.

So modest changes, primarily making all the agencies work together better, would have been enough to prevent another 9/11.  But the IC saw an opportunity and took it.  And things were set up so that there was basically no oversight.  Just the way an out of control bureaucrat likes it.  As a result, the IC was completely out of control at that time.

Here's Snowden's take on how the IC viewed themselves and 9/11:

The general sense of having been manipulated by the Bush Administration and then blamed for its worst excesses gave rise to a culture of victimization and retrenchment.

In that environment the IC is not going to ask itself "are we going too far?"  Instead, they are going to say "we need everything so that we always have enough dirt so we can successful defend outselves the next time something goes wrong".  So they tried to collect everything and to save everything.

When the Obama administration came in they could have tightened things up, cleaned things up, and reigned things in.  But they didn't.  Obama pretty much went along with everything IC related that he inherited from the Bush administration.  Snowden is justifiably harsh in his book for Obama's actions, or rather inactions, in this area.  This is a criticism I second even though I am an Obama fan.

Snowden concludes that "I had been protecting not my country but the state".  And by "state" he means the IC.  Later, he says "it was time to face the fact that the IC believed themselves above the law, and given how broken the promise [of meaningful oversight] was, they were right".  In short, "they'd hacked the Constitution".

This line of thinking led Snowden to believe he had to act.  And he felt that he was uniquely positioned to do so.  As a result of the early successes I mentioned above, Snowden was given an unusual degree of latitude.  In the middle of all this he found out he had Epilepsy.  He used this as an excuse to move to Hawaii and into a less stressful job.  But part of what was going on with him was that he had figured out that he would actually have access to more information from a "lower level" (think janitorial) position there.

This proved to be true.  While there he implemented a system for broadly collecting information from across the intelligence community and summarizing it in one handy spot.  He managed (social engineering) to sell the project as one that would benefit the IC.  But this was the foundation of the data collection that produced the wide range of documents he later provided to the press.  The details are interesting.  If you want to learn more about this, read his book.

His revelations did do a lot of good, in my opinion.  People had not had convincing evidence of how wide spread and invasive the data collection being done by the IC was.  And remember where I said the NSA and CIA were prohibited from domestic activities.  Post 9/11, that was no longer true and the reason we know this is because the Snowden documents told us so.  It turned out there was a lot of spying on ordinary US citizens going on.  The IC was collecting vast amounts of information on the routine activities of all of us.

Snowden's book is more of a memoir than a "this is what the documents reveal" so you will have to go elsewhere for a more complete description of what he revealed and what was changed as a result.  I will touch on just one thing.  There is something called the FISA court.  At the time of the Snowden revelations it was simply a rubber stamp.  Whatever the IC asked for, no matter how outrageous, the FISA court approved it.

That has changed and we know it has because of the Mueller Report.  Substantial detail on certain FISA warrants was provided therein.  As a result, we now know that the IC has to submit substantial documentation to get a FISA warrant and that the court takes its job seriously when it comes to making sure that a sufficient case has been made before issuing a warrant permitting the IC to go forward.

Have the changes been sufficient to make me happy?  Not even close.  But the situation has substantially improved.  And remember "security by obscurity"?  The IC has created a gigantic system for vacuuming up all kinds of information.  But traffic on the internet has grown by leaps and bounds since Snowden's revelations.  And this means that even with the IC's budget, which was more than $77 billion back in 2013, it gets harder and harder to filter the useful information out of the torrent we collectively now produce.  The playing field is slowly tilting back toward "security by obscurity" and that's a good thing.

As I noted above, there are a lot of people who are unhappy, to put it mildly, with Snowden.  But, like so much of modern politics, any kind of serious analysis is completely lacking.  As I noted above, Snowden's thinking is squarely in line with strict constructionist and militia/gun-rights thinking.  So they should be his most ardent supporters, right?  Wrong!  They are his most ardent detractors when, if they actually believed what they say they believe, they should be his most ardent supporters.  Opinions on the left are scattered.  But then there is no consensus position about these issues on the left.

Now, let me cover the story of how he ended up in Russia because it's short and fun.  As I laid out above, he had a plan for every step of the way and his plan worked.  Except he didn't have a plan for the final step, how to get away.  So he made it to Hong Kong, a place he selected as being press friendly (at the time) and lacking a US extradition treaty.  So far so good.  He was able to meet with journalists there, transfer the data to them, and spend some time with them explaining what they now had.  Also, so far so good.

But then they published.  As expected, he was immediately targeted.  To get away he needed to go to a country that would provide shelter and rebuff efforts to extradite him.  Hong Kong was not up to that task.  So he picked Ecuador.  We'll never know if that choice would have worked out because he never made it to there.

The Obama Administration immediately made it hard for him to travel by putting pressure on every country they could to deny him permission to overfly their territory.  So the only feasible route his supporters could figure out was Hong Kong to Moscow to Cuba to Ecuador.  He succeeded in getting on the plane in Hong Kong and the plane took off from there on time.

But while it was in the air the Administration took the additional step of revoking his passport.  So when he landed in Moscow he no longer had a valid passport so he could not leave.  Efforts to secure a new passport, say one issued by another country, failed.  He spent 90 days in the Moscow airport before the Russians decided to grant him limited residency.  So he now lives in an apartment in Moscow with the woman who was his girlfriend and who is now his wife.

Snowden claims the Russians have gotten no intelligence out of him.  Others have other ideas but, so far, there is no credible evidence contradicting Snowden's story.  The US government would like to embarrass Snowden.  The best way to do this would be to demonstrate that the Russians got a significant amount of material out of him.  But they have yet to go down this path.

Finally, we are confronted with the deepest of ironies.  The IC made a power grab in the wake of 9/11.  And for a long time it worked.  They got a big budget and authority to do pretty much whatever they wanted.  It was the dream scenario of every power hungry bureaucrat.

Obama pretty much left them alone in the early part of his administration.  The Snowden revelations caused the IC to be reigned in to an extent.  But they still had the giant budgets and way more maneuvering room than they had had before 9/11.  And if Hillary had been elected the good times would no doubt have continued.

But she wasn't.  And President Trump has nothing but contempt for the IC.  He believes foreign leaders like Putin over what the IC has to say.  The amount of injury this has done to the IC dwarfs whatever harm Snowden might have done to them (and I claim that in the long run he benefited them).

Sure, they still have the bloated budget but that's pretty much it.  As Trump trashes long standing alliances and cooperation agreements other countries, they have become more and more reluctant to work with the US IC.  And that severely constrains the IC's ability to act independently.  Being in the US IC just isn't as much fun as it used to be.  And, if you are working there to do good, it's even worse.

So they completely missed the greatest threat out there to their (and our) way of life.  That failure makes whatever IC shortcoming that 9/11 may possibly have brought to light shrink to insignificance.  And the "unfair" treatment they received at the hands of the Bush Administration was nothing compared to what Trump has dished out and continues to dish out on a nearly daily basis.  Irony of ironies.

Bizarro World

It is a common refrain these days that liberals and conservatives live in different worlds.  These two segments of our population often have "polar opposite" views about what is true.  Both sides say about the other "for them up is down, black is white, and true is false".  I want to talk about a specific instance where this scenario is what's playing out.  Liberals and conservatives now see key events in Ukraine so differently that there is almost no commonality.

One way to characterize this situation is to make reference to "Bizarro World".  Most people get the reference even though it dates back to before a lot of us (but not me) were born.  You see, Bizarro World is a comic book invention.  More specifically, it comes from the fantasy world Superman occupies in what we now call "the DC Universe".

The "DC" stands for Detective Comics, an early comic book line from a company with a boring name.  Times change and Detective Comics got short handed to DC and the company decided to rename itself.  Today, most people are familiar with the DC "universe" and the Marvel "universe", for instance.  Dedicated fans can lay out the parameters of one of these fantasy worlds in obsessive detail.  But even the most casual observer knows that Superman and Batman anchor the DC universe.  And it is to the elaborate fantasy world DC built around Superman in the '60s to which we owe the invention of Bizarro World.

Turning out an issue a month in a dozen or so lines of comics is exhausting.  You quickly burn through all the variations on idea after idea after idea.  The desperation born out of this crushing reality spawned Bizarro World.  The code that governs this world is "us do opposite of all Earthly things.  Us hate beauty!  Us love ugliness!  Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World".  In a word, change up to down, black to white, true to false, etc., and see if you can come up with a fun story to put into a comic book.

The DC writers had great success with this.  They created an anti-Earth that was cube shaped instead of spherical.  They populated it with an anti-Superman, and so on.  It was a success in that it spawned a whole bunch of stories that could be used to fill up a whole bunch of pages of comic book after comic book.  And it was very popular with readers.

As a result of this sustained popularity "Bizarro" and "Bizarro World" became concepts that became a regular part of popular culture.  People who would not be caught dead within a mile of a comic book or a comic book store knew what the terms meant.

And that's where we stand with some fundamental assumptions about Ukraine now.  Both sides now see the other side as pushing a Bizarro World narrative on the subject.  But before I go into that I want to explore the question:  is a Bizarro World even possible?  Sure, it works in a comic book.  There the author can hide any problems and dodge around any inconsistencies.  The readers suspend disbelief and go along with it if the story and the situation are fun.  But what about the real world?

Let's start with a real world example that was explored fictionally about a hundred and fifty years ago, the "Looking-Glass" world.  In 1871 Lewis Carol published a sequel to his wildly popular "Alice in Wonderland" called "Alice through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There".   The launching point for the story was the observation that if you look through a mirror, the less pretentions word we now use instead of "Looking-Glass", then we see a Bizarro world.  Behind the Looking-Glass what is on the right in the real world becomes on the left and vice versa.

Lewis started with that idea, posited that Alice could somehow enter this world by stepping through the Looking-Glass, and went on from there.  The world residing on the other side of the Looking-Glass looks pretty much like the real world.  But that world often contains doors.  What is beyond the door we see in the in the Looking-Glass World?  Carol posited that a quite bizarre world might be found there, just beyond what we could see from the real world.  And that's what most of the book concerns itself with.  And it does so in a very delightful manner.

Confining ourselves, for the moment, to what we can observe of the Looking-Glass world from the real world, we can make some observations about the rules that govern that specific Bizarro World.  Not everything is different.  In the part we can see, left and right are switched but up stays up, down stays down, and near and far stay near and far.  In other words, there is only the one change.

That's true, at least, of the parts of the Looking-Glass World that we can observe.  In theory it is possible that the parts that extend beyond the parts we can observe can have many additional differences.  We can't see there and, unlike Alice, we can't go there, so we have no way of finding out.  Carol's ability to invent many entertaining additional differences and place them in that terra incognita is what makes the book fun.

But the Looking-Glass World is fictitious.  Are there Bizarro Worlds that actually exist?  The answer turns out to be yes!  Imagine a short video of two pucks caroming off of each other on an air hockey table.  The red puck comes in from the left.  The white puck comes in from the right.  They collide in the middle and each recoils back the way it came.  Imagine watching this video.  Now ask yourself this:  is the video being run forwards or backwards?

It turns out you can't tell.  That's because the basic physics on display is "time invariant".  The laws work the same whether time runs forward from the past to the future or runs backward from the future to the past.

This is known in physics as the "time's arrow" problem.  Which way does time's arrow point and can we prove it?  And in most situations with most of the law of physics, the answer is no.  You can't tell which direction time flows in.  The laws of physics are exactly the same regardless of which way time's arrow points.

So we have a Bizarro World situation.  With respect to time's arrow we can't tell whether we are in the "real" world where time's arrow points from the past to the future, or the Bizarro World where time's arrow points from the future to the past.  But it turns out that there is a solution to this particular problem.

Imagine you have a big glass jar and two equal sized bags of jelly beans.  One bag is full of red jelly beans and the other bag is full of black ones.  Now pour first the red then the black bag into the jar.  At this point you will have a layer of red beans on the bottom and a layer of black ones on top of it.  Now stir the jar up.  Soon all the beans will be mixed together.

If you make a video of all this it will be obvious which way the video is running when you later play it back.  If layers of red and black beans merge into a mix the video is being run forward.  If a mix of beans resolves itself into a layer of red and a layer of black, the video is being run backwards.  What's going on here is something called entropy.

Entropy is a measure of chaos.  In general, as time passes in a forward direction the universe moves from a state of low entropy (everything is ordered) to a state of higher entropy (everything is chaotic).  The jar with two layers of beans is more ordered.  The jar with everything stirred together is more chaotic.

Now science has a whole scheme for measuring order and chaos and for calculating the amount of entropy a system contains.  But the details are complicated so I am going to skip over them.  I will note, however, that once the beans are mixed up you can keep stirring the jar as long as you want.  The beans are not going to settle out into layers no matter how long you continue to stir.

Returning to our air hockey table.  If we widen our shot and shoot video for longer we will eventually be able to figure out which way the tape is running.  If the pucks start out going quickly and, after bouncing around for a while, slow down and eventually stop then the tape is running forward.

If the pucks start out not moving but then start moving and then go faster and faster as the tape plays then it is running backwards.  Air hockey tables are low friction devices.  But they still have some friction.  And friction is an entropy increasing phenomenon.  So entropy measurements tell us which way time's arrow points.

Similarly, we have all kinds of particles and anti-particles.  If we replace particles with anti-particles and watch what happens it turns out the same thing happens as would happen if they were particles.  The laws of physics work the same for particles and anti-particles.  We can't tell a set of particles interacting among themselves from a set of anti-particles interacting among themselves.  So which is real and which is Bizarro?

As far is physicists can tell, there's no way to tell.  What they can say is that what we think of as the "real" universe is 99+% made of particles and contains only small trace amounts of anti-particles.  If a particle meets its anti-particle they both get changed into a nothing but lot of energy.  So if you have an "electron" and you want to know whether its a particle (electron) or an anti-particle (positron), try to hit it with something you know for sure is an electron.  If they avoid each other the "electron" actually is an electron.  If both particles get replaced by a flash of energy then it was a positron.

But deciding that what, for the most part, makes up the mater in our universe is particles and not anti-particles is a convenient but arbitrary decision.  Scientific observations tell us that it's almost all the same class of stuff.  Physics does not tell us which class of stuff it is.  If everything switched to the other class we wouldn't notice anything different.  We chose to call the situation we are familiar with the "real" version and a hypothetical situation where everything got switched the Bizarro version.  But there is no factual basis for this choice, only convenience.

Here is what at first appears to be a similar situation.  Benjamin Franklin figured out that electricity came in two opposite flavors.  Like particles and anti-particles, opposites attract and annihilate each other.  Each kind on its own is repelled by more of that same kind.  With nothing to go on, Franklin picked one kind at random and decided it was "positive" electricity and, therefore, the other kind was "negative" electricity.  But, now that we know more, we know that Franklin got it wrong.

In many circumstances electricity acts like a fluid.  And in most cases that fluid is composed of electrons, negatively charged particles.  So it is natural to think of electricity as flowing from positive to negative.  But in almost all cases, what is actually flowing, is flowing from negative to positive.

With electricity there is a way to tell which is the normal direction of flow and which is the Bizarro direction.  And Franklin chose the Bizarro one.  Engineers and scientists have long since figured all this out.  Sometimes it makes a difference and they make the appropriate adjustment.  Sometimes it doesn't and they just get on with it.

I wanted to run through a number of actual examples of "real world" versus "Bizarro World" in order to highlight something that is true of all Bizarro Worlds that can actually exist.  In each case going back to the Looking-Glass one, there is a specific rule as to how you do the "reverse" necessary to switch from "real" to "Bizarro".  But, what is even more important, sometime you can tell which is the real world that actually exists and which is the Bizarro one that is only make believe.

In the Looking-Glass World you switch left with right but leave everything else the same.  In "time's arrow" case, most of the time you can't tell which direction time is flowing.  But you can if you observe a system's entropy.  Pretty much everything else stays the same.

In the particle - anti-particle case, all the quantum attributes of the "particle" have to be flipped so that a particle anti-particle collision results in everything being converted to pure energy.  That means that for any attribute like spin, that can't be converted to energy, the particle and anti-particle must have exactly opposite amounts of that attribute.  Both particles can have a positive amont of mass because mass can be converted to energy.

If we look at the Bizarro World of the comic books we quickly see that those worlds are not actually possible.  Suspension of disbelief is necessary.  For instance, it turns out that gravity on Bizarro World works pretty much they way it does in the real world.  And that means that a cubical planet the same size as Earth is not possible.  But it still make for a fun story.  With that as background, let's move on to Ukraine.

Here's a quick history of Ukraine.  For a long time Ukraine was one of the "republics" that made up the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR.  When it came to U. N. seats, they were each an independent country.  But Russia ran the whole show so, for the most part, they were a single country.

Then the USSR fell part into it s constituent pieces in about 1990.  At that point Ukraine became an independent country in actuality, and not just when it was convenient for the Russians to pretend it was.  But, as part of its history, Ukraine inherited a bunch of nuclear power reactors, four of which were located at Chernobyl.  One of them blew up and made a big mess.  The others are still running.

Ukraine also inherited a bunch of nuclear bombs.  In a complicated dance orchestrated with the help of Russia and the US, these were disposed of and Ukraine became a non-nuclear power.  For a few years Ukraine was able to operate relatively autonomously.  It was the Ukrainians who, on their own, decided that they wanted to denuclearize.

But about ten years ago Putin decided he wanted more influence on (and control of) how things worked there.  So he managed to get his puppets installed into all the top Ukrainian government positions.  The government was extremely corrupt because it was to Putin's advantage that it be corrupt.

Starting in 2013 the Ukrainians revolted and eventually managed to toss the Putin toadies out.  But this left a fragile country behind.  And initially only the top of the government changed.  That left a corrupt, incompetent, and inefficient bureaucracy still in chare of day to day operations.  The Ukrainian populous wanted the corruption cleaned up but this was hard to do due to its pervasiveness.  But efforts were begun immediately.

And almost immediately the Russians staged a military operation that changed control of a peninsula called Crimea from Ukrainian authority to Russian authority.  The Russians invested only a modest amount of effort in pretending that this was anything other than a simple power grab.  But nobody was well positioned to do much about it.  Sanctions were imposed but that was it.

Shortly after that, the Russians also invaded two eastern province of Ukraine.  Again, only a modest effort was made to disguise the fact that this was a straight forward power grab by the Russians.  Again, nobody was in a position to do much about it except ramp the sanctions up a couple of notches.  Putin would very much like all the sanctions lifted.

So, starting in 2014 and continuing ever since, Ukraine has been involved in a war with Russia.  It is very much a "hot" war.  People in uniforms with serious military hardware are shooting at each other.  The number of soldiers on each side is modest compared to some other wars.  But it is very much a big deal as far as the Ukrainians are concerned.

At the same time Ukraine has been trying to get their act together and root out corruption.  A key figure in this latter campaign has been Viktor Shokin.  His job was to root out corruption and prosecute it.  But instead he was wildly ineffective.  He was seen as protecting key figures involved in corruption rather than going after him.  He was finally booted out and replaced by someone who has been doing a much better job.

Ukraine has had two elections since 2013, a remarkable feat given what has been going on there.  Even more remarkably, both have been widely seen as fair.  The 2019 election put Volodymyr Zelensky into power.  He has a background in show business and promised to accelerate efforts to deal with corruption.  He got 73% of the vote.  One reason for his popularity was that he was seen as being outside the traditional power structure.  Voters believed his outsider status would make it easier to deal effectively with corruption.

So that's how Ukraine got to where it now is.  Meanwhile, in the US there was a consensus about Ukraine.  Both Democrats and Republicans agreed that the pre-2013 situation was bad.  Both Democrats and Republicans saluted the ouster of the Putin supported regime in 2014.  Both Democrats and Republicans agreed that Russian behavior in Ukraine must not be tolerated.

So various sanctions were imposed on Russia in an attempt to punish them.  These sanctions received bipartisan support.  Both parties saluted the ouster of Shokin.  Both parties have been broadly supportive of both military and economic aid to Ukraine.  For a long thime this consensus held.

But over the last couple of years that consensus has broken down.  What has changed is that Donald Trump is now President.  And Donald Trump is unabashedly pro-Russia in general and pro-Putin in particular.  He has worked assiduously to get the sanctions imposed on Russia as a results of their actions against Ukraine removed.  This has necessitated a rethinking of the whole Ukraine situation.

Here is the current official line from the Trump Administration:

1. Shokin was not doing an incompetent job and actually interfering with attempts to root out corruption.  Instead, he was an effective corruption fighter who has been smeared.  A part of the successful smear was perpetrated by then Vice President Joe Biden.  He was helped by his son, Hunter, who was working in Ukraine at the time.
2. The current government has been insufficiently aggressive at going after corruption and needs to be goaded into doing more by any means necessary.
3. In 2016 there was a group operating in Ukraine that successfully implemented a disinformation campaign.  They were the ones responsible for the hacking of DNC mail servers and other foreign election interference.  But they succeeded in fooling people into believing it was the Russians.  The Russians were totally innocent of any wrongdoing.
4. The Ukrainian government should quickly come to some kind of agreement with the Russians.  The agreement would cede territory that Russia has expropriated and end the war.  The agreement should not require the Russians to accept any blame or otherwise be stigmatized.
5. As a result of the previous item it makes complete sense to remove all of the sanctions placed on Russia, Russian government officials, and Putin associates.  The sanctions would no longer serve any useful purpose.

Most of this represents a clean break with previous Republican thinking on the subject.  Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers saluted the ouster of Shokin at the time.  Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers supported imposing all of the Ukraine-related sanctions currently in place against Russia.  Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have been supportive of Ukrainian efforts to root out corruption.  But that represents past GOP thinking and does not represent current GOP thinking in the Trump era.

It represents a Bizarro World when compared to either current Democratic thinking or past Republican thinking on the subject.  So who's living in a Bizarro World, Democrats or Republicans?  As my examples above showed, sometimes you can tell and sometimes you can't.  This is a case where you can tell which is real and which is Bizarro.

The way you do this is to carefully determine what is known and what is knowable.  And if we do that, the current Republican position quickly falls apart.  When it comes to corruption "follow the money" almost always works.

Paul Manafort (now in prison for various Federal offenses and likely to be convicted in State court for more) worked in Ukraine up to 2013.  He ended up making a lot of money supporting the old corrupt regime.  Anyone like Shokin, who was closely aligned with the old regime, should be viewed with suspicion.  Joe Biden was conspicuously living a modest lifestyle and still does.  And there is no evidence of any big stash of cash around.  Roughly the same thing seems to be true with respect to his son, Hunter.

Before Trump came into office there was a consensus that Shokin was a bad dude.  No evidence has surfaces since to indicate that was wrong.  Instead there is substantial evidence that the corruption situation has improved noticeably since then.  Is it as good as people would like?  No, but the current Ukrainian government is the first to admit that.

The DNC mail serves were hacked.  The DNC hired a company called Crowdstrike to figure out who did it.  They provided substantial evidence that it was the Russians.  The US intelligence community agreed.  As do others who have looked into this.

The Mueller Report provided substantial additional evidence of Russian efforts directed at the 2016 election.  No one has found any credible evidence of any Ukrainian based efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.  Instead this is a conspiracy theory found in the dark recesses of the Internet.  The originators of this theory are long on rhetoric and short on checkable evidence.

The Russian military has engaged in two different actions aimed at Ukraine.  The first one resulted in Russia taking complete control of Crimea.  The second action is still ongoing and the conflict area is currently characterized as an active war zone.  Russia has provided no credible justification for either action.  It is clear that Russia has grabbed territory from Ukraine by force because it could.  The Russians are the bad guys.

Since then they have taken no action that would justify the reduction of any sanctions.  Yet the Trump Administration has removed sanctions from one of Putin's pet Oligarchs.  The Trump Administration has provided no justification for this move.  They did it because they could.  (Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, have refused to override Trump vetoes that would have reversed this and other pro-Russian moves the Trump Administration has made.)

The Trump Administration has made many moves aimed at eliminating various Ukraine related sanctions on Russia, Putin, and his associates.  For the most part, it has been a bridge too far for congressional Republicans to go along with removing them.  So, most of them remain in place.

Let me finish by reviewing the real situation, the one espoused by Democrats:

1. Shokin was a bad guy who was enabling corruption rather than fighting it.  The Biden's were right to do what they could to help get him kicked out.  They did not benefit, financially or otherwise, from that action.
2. The current Ukrainian Administration has been trying to do what it can to reduce corruption.  They are being opposed by internal forces within Ukraine who benefit from the corruption.  They are also being vigorously opposed by Putin.  Rather than being helpful, the Trump administration is muddying the waters.  Under the guise of corruption reduction (a subject the Administration has shown no interest in in any other country) the Trump Administration has been actively hindering Ukrainian efforts to reduce corruption.
3. The Administration has done this by holding Shokin up as a hero when he is actually a villian.
4. The Administration has also done this by holding up aid because (a) the Europeans aren't contributing enough and/or (b) claiming the Ukrainian anti-corruption efforts are misdirected.  They should be aimed at the Biden family rather than where they are currently aimed.
5. The Administration also believes that a proper investigation would turn up the Ukrainian based plot to disrupt the 2106 US election.  But this has been competently investigated before and no credible evidence of a Ukrainian based plot has surfaced.  Believing in this plot also requires ignoring the vast amount of data pointing to Russia instead of Ukraine.  [The following additional text was added on 10/8/2019]  And the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report saying, in effect, that "the Russians did it".  The report was approved along bipartisan lines.  It was issued by the Republican majority and endorsed by the Democratic minority.  In a second report issued after this post was initially published they came to the identical conclusion.  This report was also issued in the same bipartisan manner.  The first report outlined the case for Russian meddling.  The second report focused on Russian efforts channeled through social media.  [End of added material]  
6. Even if you believe in the Ukrainian plot to disrupt the 2016 US election (which you should not) then the Russian invasion of Ukraine is still ongoing.  So there is still no reason to relax the sanctions.  They should instead be strengthened.

In summary, the Bizarro World created to justify Trump Administration actions with respect to Ukraine is even less credible than the Bizarro World comic book writers dreamed up in the '60s.  And they weren't looking for a scenario that anyone would believe was real.  All they wanted to do was to come up with a story that was a fun fantasy to indulge in.

But Trump and his Republican supporters are deadly serious.  They want their supporters to believe that what they have come up with is actually true.  (They also want their supporters to believe several other Bizarro Worlds are real.)  Unfortunately, unlike comic book readers of the '60s who knew it was all a fantasy, far too many of his supporters can no longer tell where fantasy ends and reality begins.

[Note:  Additional text was added on 10/9/2019 to item 5 of "the real situation" listed above.  No material was changed or deleted.]

Drone Wars

This post is about a paradigm shift in how wars are fought.  But first, what's a "paradigm shift"?

The term was popularized by Thomas Kuhn in a book he wrote called "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".  The book was published in 1962 and quickly became hugely influential.

His subject was Scientific Revolutions, major shifts in the way scientists think about a large and important subject.  His thesis was that in many cases there is a slow evolution in scientific thinking.  But every once in a while there is a major change that happens very quickly.  He called these latter events paradigm shifts.  And that was what he chose to focus on.

Kuhn started out as a physicist but his interests gradually changed into an exploration of how scientists know what they know.  He gradually became a social scientist.  And at the time social scientists in large numbers had come around to an idea called "cultural relativism".  This evolved out of anthropology but especially the work of Margaret Mead.

At the turn of the twentieth century social scientists believed in a "natural" and universal morality.  "Right and wrong" were universal and it was universally understood that certain things were inherently "right" and other things were inherently "wrong" from a moral point of view.  And the universal right and wrong closely followed what we would now call Victorian sensibilities.

But a couple of decades into the twentieth century Mead went out and studied what were then called "primitive societies".  And especially when it came to sex, their views on morality differed radically from Victorian thinkers.  Morality was relative and was heavily influenced by the norms of a particular culture.  And those norms differed widely from culture to culture.  And it wasn't just sex.  But I am going to leave it there in the interests of brevity.

Social scientists started doing "anthropological" studies of European cultures.  And they found that the way culture influenced morality in "advanced societies" was exactly the same as it was with the south sea islanders Mead had studied.  A lot of morality is indeed relative.  From there they leapt to the conclusion that all morality was relative.

And the social sciences suffer from a kind of envy of the so called "hard" sciences.  The two primary hard sciences are Chemistry and Physics.  In the hard sciences there is black and white when it comes to determining what is true and what is false.  Lots of people run lots of experiments and pretty much all of them come to the conclusion that "this is true" and "that is false".  Other sciences envied the ability of the hard sciences to definitively establish truth.  Social sciences endeavored to do the same but they kept falling short.

A specific social science experiment could come to a definitive result.  But then someone else would run the same experiment, or a similar one, and get a different result.  No one looks to Political Science, for instance, for the laws you need to follow to achieve a specific election result.  But a Civil Engineer can use physics to design a bridge.  And that bridge can be counted to hold up under a long life of heavy use.  Sociology, Anthropology, and other "soft" sciences, although not being as unreliable as Political Science, found they all had a "reliability" problem.

Eventually, they decided that the problem was not with their tools and analysis.  Instead there was a fundamental problem.  All "truth" is relative.  It inevitably has a cultural component.  There is no such thing as "absolute truth".  This solved the "softness" of the social sciences.  The "hard" science people were wrong.  There was no such thing as absolute truth.

This idea definitely made people in the social sciences feel good about themselves and their various fields.  They could now spin endless amounts of "analysis" in their technical journals.  Since "everything is relative" nobody could absolutely prove that the conclusions any specific article came to were wrong.  It became extremely easy to play the "publish or perish" game and win.  Everybody's a winner.

So how does all this relate to Kuhn and his book?  The book can be divided into two parts. In the first part he analyzes several situations in which scientific thinking undergoes a radical change over a short period of time.

He was able to find and analyze several of these "paradigm shifts".  And his analysis of and conclusions from these various situations were uncontroversial.  The people in the subject areas he covered agreed that what he had to say about these situations closely paralleled their understanding of what had happened.

The problem arose in the second part of the book.  Kuhn argued there that the old paradigm got some things right and other things wrong.  No problem so far.  But then he argued that the new paradigm got some things right and other things wrong.  What changed, he argued, were the mere details concerning what a specific paradigm got right and wrong.

All paradigms were the same in that they got some things right and other things wrong.  The paradigm shift, he argued, was driven by cultural changes within the scientific community rather than some inherent superiority that new paradigm possessed.  The paradigm shift did not make things better, just different.

Unlike the first part of the book, this was very controversial.  Kuhn did himself no good by failing to provide specifics.  If his thesis was correct then he should have easily been able to find things the old paradigm got right that the new paradigm now got wrong.  He provided nothing along these lines.  It wasn't necessary to do so, according to cultural relativism.  "It's just a given that truth is relative".

Hard science people like myself were incensed.  But social scientists liked this result.  And the general public, who read the book in large numbers, didn't understand what the fuss was all about.  The first (and larger) part of the book was fine so the second part must be okay too.  And social scientists muddied the waters by vociferously leaping to Kuhn's defense.

Eventually everybody moved on.  And slowly and grudgingly social scientists have retreated from universal cultural relativity.  Hard scientists continued to rack up results that proved to be robust when incorporated into everyday life.  Social scientists, with no check on even the most outlandish ideas, found their arguments sounding more and more esoteric and ridiculous.  This has resulted in a retreat.  The retreat is most notable in the "repeatability" backlash.

In the last few years several attempts have been made to repeat "foundational" studies in the social sciences.  And it turns out the results frequently come out substantially differently the second time around.  These results have caused more and more people to call for the repeating of more experiments.

Funding organizations have been reluctant in the past to underwrite the cost of redoing experiments where there is no evidence of fraud or incompetence.  But the reluctance has been diminishing as the very interesting results of attempting to repeat old "gold standard" experiments have come out.

And this, in turn, has resulted in a concerted effort to understand what is going on.  Why are so many of these experiments not repeatable?  And this has resulted in an effort to understand how to design and execute experiments that do result in repeatable results.

With that, let's get back on track.  Kuhn did establish the concept of a paradigm shift when it comes to the physical (hard) sciences.  And it turns out that the same idea applies to military strategy and tactics.  Let me give you a few examples.

An early example is the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.  In this battle "knights in shining armor" were handily dispatched in large numbers by English Yeomen wielding longbows.  It turned out that the English Longbow was powerful enough to drive an arrow completely through the armor of the day.  It took a while but this marked the beginning of the end of the armored knight's ability to dominate a battlefield.  Strategy and tactics had to adapt to the new paradigm.

Another example was the American Civil War.  In the decades leading up to the War the rifled musket was introduced and slowly became more and more widely available.  By the start of the War almost all of the soldiers on both sides were equipped with rifled muskets.  Only a few carried "smoothbore" muskets.

The rifling caused the musket ball to spin after it left the barrel of the gun.  That, in turn, caused it to fly straight for longer distances.  In the smoothbore era armies needed to get within about a hundred yards of each other before musketry became accurate enough to be dangerous.

With both types of musket the rate of fire was typically about a shot per minute.  That was slow enough that soldiers facing smoothbore muskets had enough time to charge a hundred yards across a field and get in among the enemy.  Some would be killed or wounded during the charge across the field, but not enough of them would be killed or wounded to blunt the force of the charge.

So a standard tactic for a long time was to line all your soldiers up.  You would then march them to within a hundred yards of the other army's soldiers, also lined up.  Then you would charge.  With a little luck, and hopefully superior numbers, your army had a better than average chance of carrying the day.

Rifled muskets, however, were accurate out to about three hundred yards.  If one army marched their soldiers up to about a hundred yards away the other army could cut them to pieces before they could even start to charge.  If one army charged from three hundred yards away then the soldiers in the other army could fire enough times before the two armies closed to decimate the charging army.  As a result the idea of lining up the two armies on an open field became a recipe of suicide.

Confederate General Lee was the first to figure all this out.  Instead of lining his soldiers up he placed them in cover, behind trees, behind a wall, in a trench or a "fox hole", and had them wait to be attacked across an open area by the northern army  From there his soldiers would pot away at the fully exposed northern soldiers while staying mostly under cover where they were hard to hit.  With their rifled muskets this tactic allowed them to cut apart northern armies that were much larger than they were while suffering few casualties.

It took several years for the northern generals to adapt.  That's why the north did so badly in the first couple of years of the War.  The one time Lee charged across a field instead of digging in and waiting to be attacked was at the Battle of Gettysburg. That battle was a big win for the north and a big loss for the south.

Most European powers sent "observers" to the Civil War.  But this was a war fought by "colonials", not real European soldiers.  But wait, there's more.  The famous "Charge of the Light Brigade" happened at the Battle of Balaclava in 1854.  This battle involved European soldiers on both sides.  The soldiers out in the open, the now famous Light Brigade, were mowed down almost to a man.

The European generals should have learned from either the Civil War or Balaclava, but they didn't.  At least not as quickly as they should have.  But they eventually figured it out and lines of soldiers in uniforms blasting away at each other eventually disappeared from the field of battle.

The Civil War was responsible for another innovation, the machine gun.  The "Gatling Gun" saw first use during that war.  But only a few of them were available so they did not play a significant role in the outcome.  The Gatling Gun is a big heavy unwieldy device.  It was quickly replaced by smaller, lighter, but equally deadly devices like the "Maxim Gun".  Maxim's design was quickly copied and other, even lighter and more compact designs soon followed.

Machine guns in a number of configurations were in wide use by the time World War I started.  Again the generals completely underestimated the ability of as few as one machine gun's ability to totally disrupt an infantry charge.  This didn't stop general after general on all sides from ordering up senseless charge after senseless charge.  The result was mass slaughter which went on for years even though it only took about six weeks for it to become apparent that an infantry charge, no matter how aggressively prosecuted, was doomed to failure.

What made it obvious that the old tactics didn't work any more was the emergence of something called "the western front" about six weeks after the start of the War.  Armies were lined up in close proximity to each other.  But now they were located in "trenches", a feature that Lee had quickly adopted in the opening weeks of the Civil War.

In spite of this the slaughter continued unabated as general after general said "this time an infantry charge will finally work".  What broke the stalemate and led to different tactics was the introduction of the "tank".  By working together, a combination of tanks and infantry could mount a successful charge even in the face of well placed machine guns.

There were many paradigm shifts in World War II.  I am only going to briefly mention one.  Before the start of the War, the "queen of the sea" was the Battleship.  This was a large, heavily armored vessel that sported six to nine very big guns.  The barrels of these guns ranged from 14 to 18 inches in diameter.

They could hurl a "shell" weighing a couple of tons accurately into a target, say another Battleship, that was located across many miles of ocean.  A Battleship fighting another Battleship was an even match.  But a Battleship fighting a smaller ship, say a "Cruiser", could successfully take it on and easily destroy it.

The problem was that you could sink a Battleship using bombs dropped from airplanes.  And the Battleship had no effective way of fending off the airplanes.  And the ideal airport for these airplanes was a large ship called an Aircraft Carrier.  The cost and complexity of the two ship types were comparable.  Both were fantastically expensive to build so a country could only afford to build a few.  And more of one type inevitably meant fewer of the other type.

Pearl Harbor effectively demonstrated the relative effectiveness of the two ship types.  The Japanese won the battle using all Aircraft Carriers and no Battleships in the battle.  The losing US forces consisted of all Battleships and no Aircraft Carriers.  None of the Japanese ships were sunk.  Many of the US ships were sunk.  In World War II the Aircraft Carrier grabbed the title of "queen of the sea" away from the Battleship.

And there is a paradigm shift that happened not long after that war that hasn't really garnered much notice.  World War II involved large armies operating in opposition to each other.  If we include their equivalent at sea and in the air then we can say that nothing else mattered to the outcome of the War.  Korea was roughly the same.

On one side you had the armies of North Korea eventually augmented by the armies of China.  On the other side you had the armies of South Korea augmented by the armies of the US and other UN allies.  But it was, for the most part, an army versus army affair.  It turns out that was the last time that happened.

Vietnam marked a fundamental change.  On one side you had a traditional army, mostly the US army but also the ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.  On the other side you had North Vietnam.  It had a traditional army.  But for the most part the fighting was done not by the NVA, the North Vietnamese Army, but instead by the Vietcong, a "guerilla" army.  The Vietcong was NOT organized like a then traditional army.  But it won in the end.

It engaged not in set piece large "army on army" battles, but instead in hit and run, wear them down, tactics.  This was not unlike the tactics that American forces used until late in the Revolutionary War.  The Vietcong would strike and then fade back into the Vietnamese civilian population.

The US could have won the war by engaging in a genocidal slaughter of the Vietnamese population.  If they killed all the civilians, a capability they certainly had, they would have left the Vietcong no place to hide.  At that point the military superiority of US forces could have made short work of the Vietcong.  They rightly chose not to do that and lost the war as a result.

And that set the pattern for most future military engagements.  On one side you often have a regular army constructed along roughly traditional lines.  On the other side you have a guerilla force that can engage in hit and run tactics then fade into the civilian population.  The best outcome from the "traditional army" side is a long drawn out stalemate.  At some point the civilian population may turn against the guerillas and rat them out.

But another common outcome is that the guerilla force eventually outlasts the regular army side.  They either win or the situations transitions to a negotiated power sharing arrangement.  I will note that in almost all circumstances, the guerilla army is able to continue fighting for long periods of time because it gets substantial outside support.

With that let me finally turn to the issue at hand.  And the issue is best understood in what I just argued was an obsolete configuration, that of regular army against regular army.  The event that triggered this post was the recent attack against Saudi oil facilities.

As I write this it is unclear who initiated the attack or who was behind it.  The attack involved what was originally reported to be something like nineteen separate strikes against two of Saudi Arabia's largest oil processing facilities.  As far as we know, there was no advanced warning.  There was certainly no effective defense.  There is even a small amount of confusion as to what type of weapon was used.  Initial reports characterized them as drones.  Later reports indicate that it might have been a mixture of drones and rockets.

What this attack indicates is the level of maturity of drones as weapons of war.  The closest parallel is with airplanes.  The Wright Brothers flew the first successful "heavier than air" machine.  (Balloons, dirigibles, zeppelins, etc., are all characterized as "lighter than air".)  About five years later, the Wright brothers made and flew a machine that was fully maneuverable.  (The original machine was only capable of flying in a straight line.)  About a decade after that first flight, World War I broke out.

At the start of the War airplanes appeared to have no military use.  But people quickly figured out that they could be used effectively for reconnaissance.  The addition of a camera resulted in a mature reconnaissance capability.  But how to arm them?

This was solved within a couple of years by mounting machine guns that were synchronized so they did not shoot the propeller away.  Larger four engine planes were quickly developed that could drop modest but significant amounts of bombs on a remote target.  By the end of the War the airplane had completed its transformation into a fully mature machine of war.  Everything afterwards, with the possible exception of the Aircraft Carrier, was just a refinement.

Drones have not progressed quite that quickly.  The first drone was the V-1 "Buzz Bomb" Nazi terror weapon.  It consisted of a jet engine mounted on an explosive filled conventional airframe.  Added to this was a primitive navigation system consisting of a gyrocompass and altimeter to keep it flying straight and level.  The V-1 was fueled with a precise amount of fuel.  The machine would fly until it ran out of fuel.  Then it would crash and blow up.

They were not very accurate so they had to be aimed at a large target like the city of London.  That might have been good enough except for a British program called "Double Cross".  It was also called the "twenty" program because two the "X"s in Double Cross add up to twenty in roman numerals.

The program's main objective was to capture every single spy the Nazis sent to England.  They actually succeeded.  Most of the spies were killed or imprisoned.  But the others were set up with "clandestine" radios so they could send messages back to Germany.  But all the radios were really run by the British.

And one of the things they did was send back bogus information about where the V-1 drones had crashed.  The Nazis thought they were pulverizing London.  In fact they were mostly blowing holes in fields outside London.  The Nazis never caught on to the deception.

So the Nazis pioneered drone technology but were unable to use it effectively.  But the advent of small, power stingy computers changed all that.  That, and GPS.  Jet engine design has improved substantially since the V-1.  But even the primitive jet in the V-1 was good enough.  Airframe design has advanced too since the V-1.  But the airframe of the V-1 was also good enough.  Explosives have progressed little since the V-1 so it goes without saying (but I'll say it anyhow) that the old explosives were good enough.

What has progressed is the ability to fly a small robot aircraft, and that's all a drone is, along a complex flight path and then cause it to hit a small target like a building.  It took a fairly long time for this capability to be developed.

The most important component was a small, light, powerful, computer that used very little power.  These were not really available until about 1990.  Now you can buy one for less than $25.  It has also helped that small light-weight cameras and other sensors are now both inexpensive and widely available.  The last piece of the puzzle was GPS.

The second generation of drones were the "cruise missiles", first developed by the US military, but soon after by others.  These were primitive by modern standards and wildly expensive.  For this "second generation" drone GPS was not available but an adequate but very hard to use alternative was found.  They weren't ready for combat use at the time of the Gulf War (1990-91) but were ready for the Iraq War (2003 and onward).  They were a significant component of the "Shock and Awe" opening to that war.

The modern story of drones has been a gradual evolution of early cruise missiles.  The first upgrade was to replace the old navigation system with GPS.  I am not going to go into the details but with the old system the path the drone had to fly was tightly constrained by the limitations of the navigation system.

GPS freed the drone to fly any path the operator wanted.  This meant it could be "programmed" to fly around defensive installations and the like.  This upgrade was not available for use in the Iraq War but rolled out shortly thereafter.  It has been a standard feature of drones ever since.

Since then, changes have been more evolutionary than revolutionary.  Originally, a "drone" was different than a "cruise missile".  Early drones were like early airplanes.  They were easy to adapt for reconnaissance duties.  And early drones were flown by hand.  The first couple of generations required a high degree of piloting skills to operate.  They also started out pretty small.  Cruise missiles, on the other hand, were "launch and forget" devices.  They were on their own to perform their missions.

But over time drones got bigger and more capable.  Once a certain size was reached it was possible to attach a bomb.  The first "bomb" was actually a Hellfire missile.  But that was because these early generation drones were very expensive.  By having it fire a Hellfire it was not necessary to sacrifice the primary vehicle (the drone) in order to blow something up.  And the top of the line military drones are still very expensive.  But the price and capability of entry level drones has come down rapidly.

We now think nothing of having a smart phone with a GPS receiver in it.  It is also capable of running a sophisticated "nav" application.  It is obvious from this that a light, power stingy, powerful, "nav" package is now both cheap and easy to come by.  And airframes have always been relatively cheap.  Engines, propeller or jet, have also gone way down in price.  Explosives have never been expensive nor required any great skill to employ.  The result is that drones have gotten cheaper and easier to design, build, and operate year by year.

Drones that can be "flown" by relatively low skill operators have now been available for years.  And this capability is no longer expensive.  Anyone can now buy a hobby quadcopter where the onboard computer supplies most of the skill necessary to keep it in the air.  Amazon has an assortment priced from $50 to $500.  From there it is not a big step to a drone that flies itself.

My point is that it is now possible for a mid-sized nation state to develop a pretty sophisticated drone for a manageable number of millions of dollars.  Once the design is set then very capable units should cost less than $100,000 each to manufacture.  In the military hardware business, that's dirt cheap.  A country like Iran could easily afford to manufacture tens or hundreds of them.

And that's what seems to have happened.  While it is unknown, at least to the general public, who made the devices that blew up the Saudi oil facilities, nor where exactly they were launched from, nor the path they flew, we do know that all this is within Iran's capability.

Iran has actually shown considerable skill in this area.  They have developed (or modified designs they got from elsewhere) a number of rockets and drones.  Several years ago a very sophisticated US drone was downed over Iran.  There was an argument at the time about whether it crashed due to mechanical problems or was shot down.  But, in either case the Iranians ended up with physical possession of it.  That means that at a minimum they could reverse engineer the airframe and power plant.

Then a few weeks ago they shot down a high flying US drone.  In this case there is no question.  They shot it down.  This means they currently have the capability to fly a rocket to an altitude of 70,000 feet and hit (or blow up) a relatively small device, the drone.  That's a substantial rocket capability.  They are known to also have much larger rockets.

Whether they can be used for the kind of precision mission the Saudi strike represents is unknown.  But they can certainly fly a large chunk of explosive to within the boundaries of a town or city.  There they can cause it to explode just like the V-1 did.  My point is that they have developed a substantial level of technological capability.

And the design, construction, and operation of drones no longer requires all that much technological capability.  And, most importantly, Iran is NOT a super-power.  It is not even a great power.  It is, at best, a power.  But that's all it now takes to be a major player in the business of using drones as weapons of war.  And there are a lot of countries that have capabilities roughly similar to Iran's.  This is no longer a game that is restricted to just the big boys.

And my larger question is:  does this represent a paradigm shift in the way war is waged?  I think it does.  Consider the tank.  Tanks are extremely expensive to develop and very expensive to manufacture.  The drone is a very good tank-killer.  It is much cheaper than a tank and the tank really doesn't mount an effective defense to a drone attack.

The last time tanks were used effectively was in the Iraq War, a war in which drones played no substantial role.  That War represented special circumstances for other reasons too.  Before active combat started the US and its allies completely destroyed the Iraqi capability to put anything into the air.  So, the Iraqis could use only ground based defensive measures.  The Iraqis had lots of tanks of their own so they stood a good chance anyway, right?  Wrong.

Before they even attacked, the US and its allies were very effective at finding where many Iraqi tanks were located.  This made them easy to destroy as soon as the offensive started.  The US also had an airplane called a Warthog that was a great tank-killer.  Warthogs killed a lot of Iraqi tanks but the Iraqis killed no Warthogs.

There were very few tank-on-tank battles in that war.  There has been substantially no tank-on-tank warfare since.  Tanks are now far easier to kill than they are to build and operate.  The US military knows this and has been trying to de-emphasize tanks.  But building tanks brings a lot of money into a congressional district so Congress keeps forcing them to build more.

The performance of Jet Fighters is limited by the amount of punishment a pilot's body can take.  It is relatively easy to build a high performance military jet that will kill anyone on board long before the plane itself suffers any damage.  Boeing has a contract to turn a standard Airforce fighter jet into an unmanned vehicle.  The Airforce doesn't like to talk about this project because the Airforce is run by pilots.  In their heart of hearts they know they are obsolete but admitting that would cause them to eventually lose their jobs.

Their is an argument going on now about giving an unmanned drone a mission and sending it on its way without a human in the loop.  Supposedly, this is caused by a concern that these devices will go rogue and start wiping out large numbers of the wrong people.  That's not a worry I share.  But unmanned autonomous vehicles of all kinds represent a massive paradigm shift.  This will threaten the position and power of a large group of currently very powerful people and institutions like the US Airforce.

World War I shows just how resistant people can be to this kind of change.  Literally millions of lives were lost after it was blindingly obvious to everyone from generals to buck privates that the old military tactics no longer worked.  I think the attack on the Saudi oil infrastructure is a clear example of how much things have changed.  But no one was killed and the Saudis say they can get everything back working within a couple of weeks.

I am not sure that I believe the Saudis.  But the Nazis threw large amounts of resources and creativity at recovering from bomb damage during World War II.  Time after time they were able to get facilities back online and producing within remarkably short periods of time.  Certainly the Saudis have the will and the resources to do the same when it comes to quickly getting their facilities back online.

But what if the Iraqis (or whoever) launch an attack that is ten times as large?  Whoever it was, I don't think the recent attack was all that difficult or expensive to mount.  So why shouldn't they mount another attack or a bigger attack or both?  And then another and then another.

The rules have changed.  The paradigm has shifted.  And a quick study of any of the military paradigm shifts I listed above will demonstrate that being on the wrong side of a paradigm shift is extremely costly in blood, treasure, and the national interest.

The US has been in the vanguard when it comes to developing, improving, and using drones.  That leads many Americans to believe we are on the right side of the paradigm shift.  But I don't think the US at any level has seriously considered the ramifications of the fact that counties like Iran can now play drones right back at us and our allies.

It is time to figure out how to operate effectively in this new regime.  I see no evidence that anyone in the US is trying to make the appropriate adjustments.  We continue to spend most of our military budget on things like tanks, solutions appropriate for the last war.  Or was it the war before that?

Demystifying Trump

I have been mystified by the Trump phenomenon for many years.  I was especially mystified by his successful run for the Presidency.  Since then, I have been mystified by the fact that his poll numbers have remained rock solid in the low 40's.  Every way I looked at it, it made no sense.  Then I had a breakthrough.

It was one of those "carom shot" things.  Something that was, for the most part, completely unrelated sparked an idea.  And the idea caused the clouds to part and it all finally made sense to me.  So my thanks to Ron Judd.  He writes for the local newspaper, The Seattle Times.

A month or so ago he wrote a piece for the paper on an, at best, peripheral subject.  The piece was called "Lunar Lunacy" and it was about conspiracy theories and why they are so persistent.  He covered many theories but spent most of his time on the one that posits that the Apollo moon landings were faked.

He confessed to complete bafflement about the zombie-like way that it and other similar conspiracy theories would not die.  He went on a some length about all the ways it had been discredited over the years.  Yet it nevertheless persists all the way down to today.

As I worked my way through the story I said to myself "wait -- I know what is going on".  Because his article caused  me to make a connection to a post from several years ago (I wrote it in 2014) called "Faith Based Conflict Resolution".  Here's the link:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/12/faith-based-conflict-resolution.html.  Please read it.  In it I provide quite a bit of in depth analysis supporting my thesis.  But I am going to summarize the principal finding here.

Modern religion ask their adherents to "have faith", not because of the facts, but in spite of them.  Science grew out of a growing belief that the old system was badly flawed.  The old system was an appeal to authority.  The path to truth had led people to the feet of the powerful.  Political, military, or religions leaders must know more or be able to understand better than the average person.  So find out what they think and go with that.

But authority figures get it wrong, at least some of the time.  Was there a way to achieve a better "batting average", to get it right more often, more completely, and with more confidence?  About four hundred years ago an alternative mechanism emerged that claimed to do just that.  It was what we now call science.  Since then it has racked up an impressive record of delivering on that early promise.

Science is fact based and analytical.  It accords extra weight to authorities in strict proportion to how closely they hew to the scientific method for finding and recognizing truth.  This was profoundly uncomfortable.  The old way had worked well for a very long time in a very wide number of situations.  It was the "natural way of doing things".

But science by every measure proved to just be better than the old way at finding reliable truth.  That should have been enough but it was not.  People still yearned to go back to the old way.  And this was particularly true in the field of religion.

Some of the biggest early triumphs of science had to do with showing that various religious beliefs were wrong.  The Catholic Church, the dominant religion in Europe at the time, had gotten heavily invested in what we now call cosmology.  I am not going to go into the whys of this.  But the Church decided as a matter of theology that the Earth was the center of the universe and that it was "fixed". It did not rotate.

Science convincingly showed that this was wrong.  After a few more tussles of this type religion, or at least Christian religion, adjusted.  They decided that the bible was not the literal truth.  Instead it was a metaphor.  That did not diminish its ability to be a font of reliable information about morality and how to lead a good life.  It just wasn't to be seen as the last word in these other areas.  That's the story they told.  If we look at mainline protestant churches in the US in the '60s, this is how they operated.

But many people found this profoundly unsettling.  It was just too indirect.  They yearned for "that old time religion".  And that led to a giant shift away from mainstream Protestantism toward a "fundamentalist" approach.

They went back to the idea that the bible represented literal truth.  And their approach to dealing with the contradictions science had uncovered was to put them to the side.  People needed to have faith in spite of these contradictions.  In their "faith life" they needed to completely ignore the factual basis on which science operated and hew strictly to their belief system.

I ended up digressing much longer than I initially intended but the historical and philosophical background is important.  For the purposes of our discussion the key take away is this demand to put aside facts and data and instead "go with your what your gut tells you the truth is".

Large numbers of people turned out to be willing to do this.  More, they happily did this.  And for these people a fact based argument is a complete waste of time.  It is not persuasive.  Once you have gotten into the habit of ignoring lots of facts, ignoring a few more is easy.

So if a conflict can not be resolved by resorting to facts, data, analysis, and logic, what's left?  What's left is power.  Who is the most powerful authority figure around and what does he (it's almost always a "he") have to say?

And that's why it was common in the middle ages to resort to war.  God is looking down on us, the argument went.  He would not be so cruel as to let the wrong side win the war.  So whichever side won the war must have had God on their side all along.  And whichever side God is on is, by definition, the right side  The end.

What's all this got to do with Donald Trump?  Everything.  I am a science type of guy.  I have repeatedly tried to apply the tools of science to understand why people support Trump.  It doesn't work.  What does work is to look at things the way they do and apply the kind of thinking they use.  When you do this, everything makes sense.  Let me show you.

Trump is not a religious person in spite of the support of the religious right that he has been able acquire and maintain.  And that turns out to not be important.  What is important is that he is definitely "faith based" in his way of thinking.

Many of his supporters are similar in that, whether they are or are not strongly religious, they do subscribe to a "faith based" approach to understanding the world around them.  And that leads them to seek out the person who displays the most leadership, who is the "alpha male", if you will.

Trump's successful Presidential campaign, and his leadership style since, boils down to "I am the alpha male".  He waged a campaign of intimidation against his fellow Republicans in the GOP primary.  The fact that he succeeded in spite of the fact that the "smart money" consistently predicted failure, just proves his bona fides.  The general election can be boiled down to a single image, that of Trump stalking Clinton in one of the debates.  That is a classic "alpha male" move.

To Trump's followers, leaders are special people.  They are different from the rest of us.  One way they distinguish themselves is by consistently getting away with things other people, even other politicians, can't get away with.  The more you get away with, the greater of a leader you must be.  With great leaders, the proper role for the rest of us is to get in line and follow.

Trump was repeatedly able to get away with lying, insulting his opponents, showing himself to be ignorant of all the minutia a "leading politician" is supposed to know, and many other things.  He repeatedly demonstrated his specialness by getting away with things lesser candidates couldn't.

This turns the way we should interpret a lot of the last three years inside out.  All the gaffs, blunders, illegality, stupidity, etc., that he and his close associates were able to get away with did not prove his unsuitability for the job.  Instead it demonstrated how high he stood above the pigmies he was surrounded by or was being compared to.  Instead of being unsuited to the job, he was super-suited to the job.

Remember, facts literally don't matter.  As long as he can convince his supporters that he is the alpha-est of alpha males then they will stick with him.  To them every new incident is just more proof that he deserves to continue to occupy the highest job in the land.  If you want to understand why his supporters stick with him, this is the reason.

Moving away from the specific and turning toward the more general, his supporters are not entirely wrong.  The most efficient and effective type of government is an authoritarian government headed by the perfect leader, what Confucius called roughly three thousand years ago, the "philosopher king".

"King" is a title denoting absolute authority.  The King leads and everybody else follows.  This results in everyone efficiently pulling in the same direction.  And this maximizes the performance of the country being led thusly.  But this system depends critically on the characteristics of the King.  If he truly is made of superior stuff them the country is efficiently led in the proper direction.   That's whaere the "Philosopher" part came in.

In modern parlance, the term "philosopher" has become associated the kind of person who is too smart for his own good, who spends all his time studying esoterica, and who is completely lacking in common sense. That is not at all what Confucius had in mind.  He meant something that is almost the complete opposite.

A Confucian "philosopher" is smart, experienced, educated, and grounded.  This lets him see the correct path ahead clearly and unerringly guide the rest of us lesser mortals down that path.  An authoritarian regime led by a Philosopher King, and administered by a large cadre of lesser but similarly inclined government officials is bound to achieve greatness.

The Chinese of Confucius' time did no better than the rest of us at elevating only philosopher kings to the position of Emperor.  But one place where the Chinese did succeed was in establishing and maintaining a cadre of bureaucrats in the "philosopher king" mold.  The system that produced these administrators persisted for a couple of millennia.  And it served China well.

A whole system was put into place to churn out the mid-level functionaries that kept the machinery of governance running smoothly.  As Emperors came and went, some of them good, some of them not so, the machinery of governance hummed along.

This was the actual secret behind the astounding success and longevity of China as a country.  It was only the persistent onslaught of various Europeans in the 1800s that packed a punch strong enough to destroy the Chinese bureaucracy and with it the ability of the Chinese to govern themselves well.

The resilience of the Chinese system in the face of insult from internal or external forces is proof of what in the best circumstances an authoritarian government is capable of.  At its best, it is unbeatable.  At far from its best, it is still very capable.  So it is not nuts for people to be willing to subscribe to the authoritarian model of governance over a democratic one.

But the authoritarian model has s giant weakness.  It is the leadership/succession problem.  So much depends on the quality of the person at the top.  How to you arrange thigs so that only Philosopher-class individuals ascend to the top spot?  No one has figured that out.  Not the Chinese.  There were a lot of piss poor Emperors in among the great ones.

Not Communist dictatorships or their close cousins, the publicly traded corporations.  Both say they use a "merit based" system of succession, but the facts often don't match the theory.  The process gets subverted routinely.  And certainly not Europeans with their blood line based succession rules.  But let's skip over how Trump got to be President and who should succeed him and focus on the here and now.

But first, it is important to point out that a "faith based" approach is the norm.  It is the "science based" approach that is the exception.  We consider the "science based" approach to be the norm only because of recent history.  What specific recent history?  Glad you asked.

The generals in World War I made a big mistake.  They underestimated the power of the machine gun to destroy a standard infantry charge.  This led to years of mass slaughter, slaughter that was on such a scale as to be beyond imagining.  Except, of course, for the obvious fact that it was actually happening.

In a fit of desperation the generals went to poison gas.  This just increased the amount of slaughter without changing anything.  Then there was the advent of the airplane and the tank.  One was not even a tool of war when the War started.  The other was literally invented in the middle of the War.  Machine guns, submarines, airplanes, and tanks all emphasized the critical importance of technology in war and in the newfound ability of war to perpetrate mass slaughter.

Then we had World War II, the "wizard war".  It demonstrated that the rate of slaughter could be raised to even higher levels.  Technology played an even more crucial part in this war and everybody knew it.  Anyone with an even passing interest in the period can list technological marvel after technological marvel that became closely associated with that War.

Then we rolled into the Cold War with hardly a break.  It is hard to get more "wizard" than intercontinental rockets and Hydrogen bombs, both likely controlled by computers.  And the casualty figures associated with even a small nuclear exchange, should the Cold War turn Hot, would have caused the losses of World War II to pale by comparison.

So the fear of losing present or future wars forced people to take the scientific approach to things.  The space race, the context for the moon landing hoax, was a way of saying at the time "our wizards are better than your wizards so we'll win the next war".  "Winning" would have resulted in horrific levels of death and destruction.  "Losing" would have been even worse.  And that forced people into a "whatever it takes" approach.  And "whatever it takes" meant science based thinking.

By the time Apollo program, the program that was a big hoax according to the "Lunar Lunacy" conspiracy theory in Judd's piece, spooled out in the late '60s and early '70s, this kind of thinking was already peaking.  As the Cold War ground on it seemed somehow less and less real.  This was coupled with the fact that a "science based" approach to war fighting in the nuclear era was so horrible to contemplate that people naturally recoiled from it.  And that opened the door to a reversion to the norm.

 The '70s were a time of flower power, pyramid power, "turn on, tune in, drop out", and other kinds of "alternative" ways of thinking.  All of them were a rejection of scientific thinking as part of a search for a different approach.  And at the time they were associated with the left.

Then the right came into ascendancy in '80 with the election of Reagan.  They quickly co-opted anti-science for themselves.  And they were much more successful at injecting it into mainstream society.  So the country as a whole continued to move away from science based thinking.

The Democrats, who started the change, never really completely abandoned it.  We now see this playing out in the "flower power"-esque candidacy of Marianne Williamson.  The fact that portions of the left are still comfortable with faith based thinking has had the effect of providing political cover for Republicans on the issue.

By the '90s the press had decided to join in.  They abandoned, for the most part, issues oriented political coverage and focused instead on "horse race".  "Horse race" tracks relative power, the alpha male-ishness, if you will, of the candidates.  This enabled politicians to move way from a need to have a familiarity with the issues of the day along with a competent strategy for dealing with them and toward more "warm and fuzzy".

It also led to character assassination and other dirty tricks as an important component of far too many campaigns.  In a fact-free environment, what you get when you turn away from science, this was much easier to pull off.  Why build yourself up, a hard thing to do, when you can tear your opponent down, a far easier thing to do.  These kinds of "negative" campaigns are facilitated by easy access to large piles of cash.  The ever increasing dominance of "faith based' thinking led us step by step to Trump.

So what now?  The argument that he is doing a poor job for his constituents is a weak one.  The great leader can't make everything great for everybody all the time.  Some groups will have to take a back seat to others in the short run.  It is only in the long run that benefit accrues to all, or at least most.  And sacrifices are sometimes necessary.  A rear guard in an army will sometimes be required to sacrifice themselves in order to protect the rest of the army.  It is "the long term greater good" that the leader must rightly focus on.

Thinking like that is why Trump supporters have stuck with him when clear eyed scientific types have predicted that it was past the time when his failures should have led them to behave otherwise.  Will they always stick with him if he continues to fail to provide for them?  No!  In the long run they will abandon him if he consistently disappoints them for long enough.  But how long is the long run?  And how much disappointment is too much?

It is important to remember that Trump is continuing to routinely display alpha male behavior.  Every time some attack on him falls short.  Every time he does something outrageous or unprecedented or frankly illegal, and gets away with it, is fresh proof that he is still the alpha male.  His supporters explain all this away as "just an alpha male being an alpha male".

There is a direct and quicker way to dislodge Trump, out "alpha male" him.  If someone can demonstrate that they deserve a higher position than Trump many of his supporters will quickly desert him in favor of whoever this new person is.  They are looking to follow "the leader", whoever this person turns out to be.

Clinton was not able to demonstrate the appropriate alpha male characteristics.  If she had publicly tried to do so, the press (and Republicans) would have jumped all over her for being "shrill" and "unladylike".

Of course, if she would have been able to get away with behaving like an alpha male in spite of this opposition then that would just have proved her fitness.  But she never believed she would be allowed to do so, so she didn't try.  And that left the field wide open for Trump.

I am old enough to remember when aggressive Democrats were easy to come by.  But at a certain point (the '80s) that kind of behavior led directly to losses at the polls.  So they stopped doing it and internalized the lesson.  As a result, aggressive Democrats have been hard to find for a long time.

The ascendancy of Trump may have changed that.  I believe it is possible to out alpha male Trump.  I am looking for a Democratic candidate that is willing to give it a shot.  Several of the current crop look up to the challenge to me.  Should they succeed Trump's support will evaporate quickly.  Or so I believe.  We'll see.