An open letter to Bill Gates

Dear Mr. Gates:

You recently sat for an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at an event sponsored by the New York Times.  In it you made some remarks about taxing the rich, especially yourself.  I have seen enough of the clip to know that you did not intend your remarks to be taken completely seriously.  But I seriously invite you to address how wealthy people like yourself and large corporations like Microsoft should be taxed.

The thrust of the commentary on your remarks is that you are feuding with Elizabeth Warren and her "wealth tax" proposal.  Supposedly you are shocked and appalled by what she is proposing.  I think that is far from the truth.  You are a thoughtful and public spirited person.  You are known for taking a deep dive into what interests you.

Senator Warren is running for President.  As such, she needs to construct her proposals with an eye to how they will be perceived by voters and the press.  This is not necessarily bad.  I do not know if, absent these considerations, she would or would not be proposing something different.  But her current circumstances prohibit even the possibility of doing that.  You don't operate under that constraint.  You are much more free to say what you mean and mean what you say.

And, based on your words and actions, I think you and the Senator are actually in close agreement as to the overall goals and objectives a tax system should support.  You (and your close friend and fellow mega-billionaire Warren Buffet) have frequently stated publicly that the wealthy should be taxed more heavily than they currently are, for instance.

And your past remarks on increasing taxes have usually been in the context of tax rates on current income.  But that is not at all the same thing as a "wealth tax" that goes after your assets.  So one might think that when it comes to assets, your agenda and that of the Senator might diverge.  But you have repeatedly and forcefully advocated for the "giving pledge".  Subscribers promise to donate half their net worth to charity upon their death.  That takes a far bigger bite out of a person's wealth than what the Senator is proposing.

Now there is a difference.  You have contributed a substantial portion of your wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  But you and your wife control how and on what the Foundation spends the money.  If you were to instead give the same amount of money to the government you would not control how it was spent.

Your foundation appears to be well run and has an excellent track record when it comes to spending money efficiently and effectively.  And this track record applies both to the amount of money that goes to performing the actual work but also to what work the Foundation funds.  You look for situations where the Foundation can be effective and can advance important goals.

But the same is not always true when it comes to the "charity" vehicles other wealthy people employ.  In many cases their "charitable operation" is just a tax dodge or a public relations effort designed to burnish the reputation of the sponsor.

A classic example of this is the Donald J. Trump Foundation.  Mr. Trump was recently forced to permanently shut his Foundation down, admit guilt to a long and shocking list of illegal behavior, and pay a $2 million fine.  This is perhaps the most egregious example of this sort of thing.  But less egregious examples of "charitable organizations" that perform little or no charitable or educational activities are two a penny.

A frequently advanced argument is that giant rewards must be available in order to simulate risky innovative activity which, we are told, eventually will greatly benefit society as a whole.  But the life history of you and many others does not support this.  Every case is a little different.  But your case serves to illustrate this and it is one I am familiar with.

You were raised in an upper middle class family that valued hard work and encouraged excellence and competition.  Although your home situation was more than comfortable it was definitely not "lifestyles of the rich and famous".

Your parents were, however, able to afford to send you to a private high school and then on to Harvard, one of the most expensive schools in the country.  There, the level of financial support they provided, was not sufficient to enable you to keep up with the smart set.  But it was sufficient to fund your frequent participation in poker games.

And, of course, you dropped out of Harvard and moved to New Mexico where your lifestyle was more "starving student" than it was "jet set".  But your low rent existence was not a problem you felt needed fixing.  You were completely focused on the goal of making Microsoft a success.  Nothing else was important.  And this singular focus on making Microsoft a success continued for many years afterwards.

But it was not until years later when Microsoft's association with IBM began paying off to an extent that no doubt surprised even you, that your financial situation improved substantially.  During the period leading up to Microsoft's super-success you worked extremely hard, probably harder than you have worked at any time since.

But during this long period your expectation was not that Microsoft would eventually become the most valuable company in the world.  Oh, you always hoped and expected that eventually Microsoft would become a success.  But the degree of financial success you envisioned for Microsoft was several orders of magnitude smaller than what actually transpired.  Yet that much more modest goal was enough to motivate you to go "all in" for a long time.

As soon as Microsoft hit it big you could have substantially changed your lifestyle.  But you didn't.  Oh, you bought a very expensive car and some other toys.  You eventually built a $50 million house.  But the sum total of all of these expenditures represented only a small portion of your income at the time.

And for several years after you hit it big you maintained a remarkably ordinary lifestyle.  You were seen standing in line to watch a movie in a regular movie theater, just like everybody else, on several occasions during this period.

You did eventually go inside the bubble.  But was not a choice you made because you found it appealing.  Instead it was a direct response to a credible kidnaping threat involving one of your children.  Given your net worth at the time, going inside the bubble was the appropriate response of a loving father concerned for the safety of his family.

And to this day you make a concerted effort to get outside the bubble.  You can't do it in the first world due to security concerns, if for no other reason.  But you can and do get out of the bubble during your frequent sojourns into the third world.

I think you enjoy the interactions you are able to have with regular people in poor countries.  There the rules of engagement are different.  These people don't really know who you are.  They know you are some kind of foreigner.  But for them you fall into the "stranger from a couple of villages over" category.  They know how to deal with that category of people.  And it does not require them to completely change their behavior.

I many places you fall into the category of people who are so famous and powerful that people you meet have inevitably developed preconceived notions about you.  Such preconceived notions inevitably color an interaction.  They feel they can't behave as they normally would.

So you can have normal conversations about normal things with the people you encounter when you are far off the beaten path in a way that is often no longer possible in the "civilized world".  Being poor doesn't make people dumb or uninteresting.  So these people have something to say that is worth hearing and I bet you routinely learn from them.

My point is that it was not necessary to dangle the real possibility that if you worked hard, took some risks, and were lucky, you would end up the richest man in the world.  The reward of success was, no doubt, part of what motivated you to do what you did.  But the possibility of a much more modest reward would have been more than sufficient to elicit your best effort.  And you are very aware that, while you have gained much, you have also had to leave behind some things you value.

You mentioned in the Sorkin interview that you have paid $10 billion in taxes.  That's a lot of money.  And, by one account your net worth is a little more than $100 billion.  Accepting that figure for the sake of argument, that means you have paid out about 10% of your net worth in taxes.

But consider a person earning $50,000 per year, or perhaps a family earning $100,000 per year.  (These figures are at or above "median" income for American families.)  They likely pay more than 10% of their earnings in taxes, a point your friend Mr. Buffet often makes.  So your tax rate is actually on the low side.

But that's not the whole story.  The income figures I just cited were "gross" income figures.  They represented every dollar these people earned.  But in your case, we are talking about "net", what's left of gross income after all expenses are paid.

For an average person, having a net income of 10% would be considered quite good.  So they are paying more than 100% of their net income in taxes.  One of the things that distinguishes the rich from the poor is that for rich people the percentage of their income that ends up as net income is fairly high (often well over 10%).  For poor people the amount of net income they end up with varies from a small percentage (likely less than 10%) to none at all.

Now consider a large corporation like Microsoft.  Microsoft employs a wide range of tactics to reduce its tax burden.  And they are quite successful.  A significant number of the Fortune 100 corporations pay no Federal Income tax at all.  Many other Fortune 100 companies pay only a small percentage of their reported profit in Income Taxes.  The combined Income Tax paid by the Fortune 100 is a very small percentage of their combined profit.

Now I freely admit that Microsoft and other companies pay large amounts of other taxes.  But then so do ordinary people.  We both live in Washington State which has a high Sales tax.  Our state also has Business and Occupation taxes that apply to corporations, property taxes that apply to both corporations and citizens, and a variety of other taxes.  The Federal government also engages in many forms of taxation.  It doesn't limit itself to just the Income Tax.

But again, these other taxes apply to both average people and rich people.  And these other taxes tend to burden the poor more than the rich.  But you already know all this.  And if you don't, you have access to very smart and skilled people who do.  You also have access to smart and skilled people who know all about corporate taxes, an area I suspect you have generally had little interest in, in all their myriad forms.

So you agree with Presidential candidate Warren that taxes on rich people should be increased.  Based on your giving pledge and your Foundation I would say you also agree that wealth should be taxed.  I don't know what your thinking is on what is right and wrong on the Corporate tax front.  But I suspect you think they too should pay more.  So I am just going to assume you think that way.  If you don't, go along with me anyhow, at least for the sake of argument.  And I am absolutely positive you think the way corporations are taxed could be improved, a lot.

So I hope I have convinced you that your thinking and Ms. Warren's thinking is not all that different, at least at the conceptual level.  But, as they say, "God is in the details".  And when it comes to the details, I would be surprised if you didn't have some major disagreements with her proposals.  After all, that was the thrust of the remarks you made that I started this letter off with.  And it is in those very details that your skills and access to resources positions you to make a real contribution.

I invite you to propose changes to how personal income and wealth should be taxed.  I invite you to propose changes to how corporations should be taxed.

You know a lot about these subjects but likely not enough.  But in the past you have characterized yourself as having a "high bandwidth".  By this you meant that you had the capability to quickly absorb large quantities of complex technical information and to be able to organize it so that you can make sense of it and act intelligently on it.  Taxation is noting if not a large and complex subject.

Right now you probably don't know enough about it.  I think you still have that high bandwidth capability.  You also have access to the very best experts in these areas.  Should you choose to do so, I think you can become a skilled expert in this subject area in a relatively short period of time.  Once you have done so I sincerely want to know what you recommend.

To be fair to the Senator I would suggest you put together proposals that would raise roughly the same amounts candidate Warren proposes to raise.   That would allow an "apples to apples" comparison to what Ms. Warren has proposed.  But you will most likely find that you disagree with the revenue goals she has proposed.  This is a contentious area and reasonable people can honestly come to substantially different conclusions.

I would like to see your recommendations (and the thinking that underlies them) as to what revenue goals you think are most appropriate.  Revenue goals that differ significantly from hers lead naturally to different tax proposals.  But there should be a lot of commonality.  So putting  out two sets of proposals, one that matches the Warren's revenue goals, and one that matches yours should not require much additional effort.

These issues are contentious.  As a result most of what is said about them is heavily influenced by the position a particular commentator occupies on the political spectrum.  As a result most people have little or no access to nonpartisan, fact based information.  But you have been very successful in staying out of the partisan fray.  Theoretically, you belong in the %$#@* billionaire pigeon hole.  But that does you a disservice.

This is something you can do perhaps better than anybody else.  Most people don't have the expertise and lack the means to acquire it.  Many of those who do have the expertise have been captured by partisans of one flavor or another.

On the other hand, it takes a considerable amount of political skill to operate in the areas the Gates Foundation operates in.  But you have managed to position yourself and the Foundation in such a way that you can and do work with everybody.  That skill allows you to make a real contribution, a contribution that requires avoiding being seen as the pawn of one group or another.

When coupled with the abilities you possess and the resources you have access to it is easy to see that you are unique in your ability to perform this very valuable service.  I think I have made a compelling argument for why it is important that the service be performed.  You are able.  The only question is: are you willing?

So out of a sense of patriotism and in a belief that you can actually do some good here, I invite and request you to undertake this project.  You will have my deepest and most profound thanks if you do.

Respectfully,

Malicious phone calls - November 2019 update

The last time I reported on this subject there was a different man in the White House.  On April 27, 2015 I put up the following post:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2015/04/mallicious-phone-calls-good-news.html.  The subject, then and now, was malicious phone calls.  And the title of that post included the phrase "good news".  I would like to report that things have gotten even better since then.  Unfortunately, honesty forbids me from saying that.  To review:

Malicious phone calls consist of spam calls, robo-calls, requests that you answer a survey, unwanted solicitations on behalf of a political candidate or issue, etc.  I got, and unfortunately still get, a lot of them.  It became particularly annoying when I retired.  Most, but far from all, of these kinds of calls come in during the day.  Retirement meant that I was now home so I could be annoyed by all of them, not just a few of them.

At the time I didn't have caller ID.  It used to be an expensive additional feature.  Now it is ubiquitous and usually included "at no additional charge".  Eventually I caved and got it.  Initially I paid a small fortune for it.  But then I changed to a service that included it for free.  Caller ID helped but many calls still got through.

For those I tried all the tactics "experts" recommend.  I didn't answer them.  Or I answered but tried to keep the telemarketer on the line for as long as possible.  Or I hung up immediately.  Or I pressed "1" (or whatever number they specified) to be deleted from their list.  Finally, I tried hurling the most horrible obscenities I could think of at the telemarketer.  None of it worked.

And, across the several thousand malicious calls I have by now received, I never once forked over a single cent to any of them.  You'd think they would mark me down as a lost cause and stop harassing me but they never did.

As I reported in my 2015 post, I eventually signed up for a "blocker" service called "NoMoRobo".   At the time, it was the only service available but it has since been joined by many others.

NoMoRobo is what's called a "black list" service.  They maintain a list of "bad guy" phone numbers.  If one of them calls me they take the call over and answer on my behalf.  This required me to train myself to not answer until the phone had rung at least twice.  That is annoying but a side effect was that it allowed me to keep track of how many blocked calls I was getting.

Unfortunately, scammers and other bad operators have figured out how to at least partially get around black lists and the other tactics the blocker services use.  But, compliments of the Trump Administration, a new white knight has appeared in the form of Ajit Pai, the current FCC Chairman. To hear Pai tell it, he has taken several effective steps to actually fix the problem.  So what's he done?

In 2017 the FCC put in a rule change.  It made it legal for telephone companies to put technology in place that would block calls from "invalid, unallocated, and unused" phone numbers from going through.  The FCC, at least according to a press release they issued, has also made "significant progress toward caller ID authentication".

They did this "through adoption and implementation of STIR/SHAKEN standards by networks [telephone companies]".  They have also "proposed or imposed monetary forfeitures totaling $245,923,500".  In August of this year the FCC also announced new rules to let the FCC crack down on bogus calls and texts originating from overseas.

Sounds impressive, right?  It would be if any of this had resulted in actual progress.  The monetary forfeitures, for instance, would be impressive if that represented actual money actually collected.  But I suspect that "proposed" is the important word here.

The same press release indicated that the FCC had initiated 140 enforcement actions.  But there are far more than 140 bad actors out there.  And how many of these actions have resulted in operations actually being permanently shut down?  I suspect the number is far less than 140.

The STIR/SHAKEN (truly an awesome acronym) technology sounds like a good idea.  Back in the day, figuring out where a phone call came from ("originated") was technologically easy but often practically hard.

Telephone calls were then handled by dedicated custom equipment.  And the "network" was a simple affair.  The current standard for telephone numbers was put in place in the '60s.  Each ten digit "phone number" consisted of a three digit area code, a three digit exchange, and a four digit phone number.

Each exchange consisted of a separate and unique set of equipment.  The last "hop" of a phone call was always from your phone to your exchange.  Exchanges were connected by "trunk" lines.  If a call originated from a number in your area code then your exchange hopped the call over a trunk line directly to the exchange that owned the phone on the other end (or handled it internally, if the call originated from within your exchange).

If the call originated "out of area" then it was hopped over a trunk line to the "long distance" exchange for your area code.  It in turn hopped the call over a trunk line to the exchange handling the originating phone's area code.  From there the call was hopped over a trunk line to the right exchange machine, and finally from there to the originator's phone.  Lucky for us, all this happened almost instantaneously.

Back in the day it took minutes to trace all this out, if you wanted to know where a call originated from.  But, also starting in the '60s, specialized computers called ESSs were put in place in exchanges.  Eventually, all exchanges had one.  That permitted caller ID and the phone number of the originator's phone became instantly available.  And that solved the problem for a while.

Then VoIP made its appearance.  The ESS computerized telephone switches enabled phone signals to be converted from "Analog" (wavy lines) to "Digital" (bits and bytes).  It wasn't many years before all long distance calls used the digital option for the part of the call that covered long distances.

And, if we have access to the call in digital form, why not ship the bits and bytes across the Internet.  VoIP stands for Voice (analog) over Internet Protocol (digital).  Soon it became much cheaper to ship bits and bytes long distances over the Internet than it was to ship them the same long distances over dedicated digital telephone circuits.

The problem is that VoIP is all smoke and mirrors.  If you fake things up well enough it looks just like the real thing.  And faking up the caller ID information to look any way you want it to look quickly became ridiculously easy to do.  You can now do it with a standard smart phone.  And it was definitely to the advantage of the bad guys to fake, which is commonly referred to as "spoof", caller ID information.

But the FCC is now all over this sort of thing like a wet blanket, right?  If only.  I got over twenty blocked calls yesterday and the count for today is rapidly approaching double digits.  And I still see the same bad behavior I have been seeing for years.

The telephone companies are now blocking "invalid, unallocated, and unused" phone numbers, right?  Wrong!  The "number" part of a caller ID is always supposed to be exactly ten digits long.  (When you dial a number the system will often fill the area code in for you.  Phone numbers are always exactly 10 digits long, even if it sometimes doesn't look that way.)

But I have gotten at least one call recently where the "number" part of the caller ID was short by a few digits.  (At the time NoMoRobo didn't have an entry for that number in their black list so I was able to see all the caller ID details.)

There are no valid area codes that start with zero.  If there were then dialing "0" to be connected to the operator wouldn't work right.  Is the "0" a request to be connected to the operator or a request for an area code starting with "0"?  The only way to eliminate ambiguity is to make sure that no valid area codes start with "0".  The same logic applies to exchanges.  None of them can have a number that starts with "0" either.  So the "invalid" part is missing in action.

I also get calls that NoMoRobo is letting through (until I report them and they update their list) where the "name" part is something like "CELLPHONE USER" or "NEW YORK  NY".  These are common defaults for cell phones.  Sometimes the user can change this.  Sometimes (common with pre-paid "burner" phones) the user can't.

But in all cases what these are is numbers assigned to accounts that used to be active aren't any more.  (And apparently it is possible to get lists of these "no longer in use" numbers, if you have the right connections.)  In other words they are "invalid" or "unused".  So that part isn't working either.

The STIR/SHAKEN standard is supposed to deal with VoIP and international call issues.  I am not going to go into the details.  They are complicated but, from what I have read, once it is implemented it should work.  But the fact that it is complicated means that it is hard to implement.  And "hard to implement" inevitably morphs into "slow to be implemented" in the real world.

And it must be implemented at every step along the way before it can work.  So my guess is that implementation has been "unaccountably delayed".  If the FCC pushes hard then it might be implemented extensively enough to do some good by, say, the end of 2020.  If the FCC doesn't push then God knows when it will get implemented.

And that leaves enforcement actions / penalties.  The FCC has routinely announced "successful" enforcement actions periodically going back more than a decade.  I have seen no indication that there has been enough successes in this area to make a noticeable difference.

One piece of good news is that they finally increased the penalties to the point where they are big enough, if assessed and collected, to represent real pain.  The old penalties were so small that they didn't even rise to the level of "business expense" let alone being painful enough to justify a change in behavior.

If anything, the situation since 2015 has gotten worse rather than better.  The tools necessary to bypass attempts to block malicious phone calls have gotten better and cheaper.  This has had the perverse effect of making the decision phone companies made a long time ago turn from a good idea, from a business point of view, to a bad one.

Back in the day they decided to come down on the side of protecting the bad actors, the purveyors of malicious phone calls.  Their calculus was that they would collect more money from the bad actors than they would lose as a result of the abuse their regular customers would suffer.  And for a long time they were right.

But what they have done has driven young people away from voice (spammy) and to text (not so much).  And that has reduced the market for voice services drastically.  And that has hurt their bottom line.  It just took a long time for this trend to become apparent.  Now, there is little they can do to reverse this trend.  Implementing STIR/SHAKEN might help.  Then again. it might not.

I'm an old fart so I prefer voice to text.  As such, I would love to be in a situation where it would be appropriate to heap praise on Mr. Pai and his FCC.  But I can't.  To date, he has been long on press releases and short (as in non-existent) on effective action.  When his efforts show actual results I'll let you know.

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?