Global military dominance becoming unaffordable

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Midweek by BUNN NAGARA

Both ‘Britannia’ and the Western alliance are losing the means to perpetuate military-political hegemony worldwide.



BRITAIN was once a proud maritime power, with a foremost Royal Navy that policed a global empire on which “the sun never set.”

These days the British Navy has trouble trying to pin down a single Third World country with a tottering regime: Libya. This incompatibility between present Western capacities and current intentions is, however, greater than any disjuncture with past glories.

This week Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, Britain’s First Sea Lord, announced that the Royal Navy would not be able to sustain the current campaign against Libya for more than six months. He also noted that the decline is in both equipment inventory and, consequently, morale.

Britain’s Strategic Defence and Security Review last year had cut 10,000 jobs in the Navy and Royal Air Force, and consigned the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, the frigate HMS Cumberland and the once-iconic Harrier jets to the storeroom or junkyard.

As the Libya military campaign suddenly loomed, the Cumberland was diverted there to help in evacuating British nationals. Yet for Downing Street, Britain remains a leading military power with the world’s fourth-largest defence budget.



Evidently like much of Europe, Britain’s lack of appetite for global patrolling work is not totally in sync with US interventionist moves. The “pole positions” occupied by Britain and France over Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya helps to conceal the incongruity, but not for long.

When US Defence Secretary Robert Gates reportedly blasted unnamed Nato partners in Brussels last week for not contributing their share, he ridiculed some for running out of ammunition at critical times in laying siege to a country. The Royal Navy now needs to purchase more Cruise missiles from the US after firing some of them.

The US provides more than 75% of Nato’s budget, with Gates wondering aloud whether this major contribution and Nato itself could be sustained. All of this has come at a time of budget squeezes, after Osama bin Laden’s death and a Cold War which ended 20 years ago.

Washington has been lobbying its European partners in Nato to raise their military commitment, much of it in vain. It is not that the latter do not share US concerns about global instability, but rather they prefer political, diplomatic, economic and social solutions rather than inordinately military ones.

After Iraq, the US has waded into Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya while straining to get stuck into Syria. Its challenge is to get a sizeable number of allies to go along to a significant degree.

For much of the world outside Washington, a propensity for unilateral military intervention abroad links these various armed adventures. It is not a popular indulgence, not even when the spectre of international terrorism is invoked as the alternative to inaction.

If the continued role of global policeman today seems dated, it is even more surreal given emerging major powers such as those in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). These are all fast-growing major economies, besides Russia and China being permanent members of the UNSC with veto power.

This week both Moscow and Beijing boycotted a UNSC meeting called by the Western powers to discuss a proposed resolution against Syria. The other BRICS countries are also unhappy with the prospect of further war against another oil-rich Muslim country.

Even in Western circles there is strong reluctance to rely on more military power. Germany, Europe’s leading economy and a major Nato partner, is still unconvinced by the campaign against Libya.

But if the interests of the military-industrial complex are any guide, efforts will continue towards war. Officially there are six major US military bases in Afghanistan, but on the ground US and other foreign forces are stationed at some 400 bases in the country.

Although the Obama White House is supposed to comply with its pullout schedule in Afghanistan, secret talks with Kabul are continuing over the actual outcome. There are reports that US forces may well remain in Afghanistan for decades after the 2014 complete pullout date.

On the surface the issue is a resurgent Taliban and their terror connections, but strategically Afgha­nistan is critically located in Central Asia next door to China, Pakistan and Iran. So long as it remains in that position, which it will, the great powers will play their “games” while the locals will fight a war to resist them.

Afghanistan meanwhile is pressing for better terms in a draft agreement that would reflect its sense of sovereignty. Whether that would work is another question.

China, Russia Could Make U.S. Stealth Tech Obsolete

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By David Axe, Wired News


It’s been a pillar of the U.S. military’s approach to high-tech warfare for decades. And now, it could become obsolete in just a few years.

Stealth technology — which today gives U.S. jets the nearly unparalleled ability to slip past hostile radar — may soon be unable to keep American aircraft cloaked. That’s the potentially startling conclusion of a new report from Barry Watts, a former member of the Pentagon’s crystal-ball-gazing Office of Net Assessment and current analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.

“The advantages of stealth … may be eroded by advances in sensors and surface-to-air missile systems, especially for manned strike platforms operating inside defended airspace,” Watts cautions in his 43-page report The Maturing Revolution in Military Affairs (.pdf), published last week.

That could come as a big shock to the U.S. Air Force, which has bet its future on radar-dodging technology, to the tune of half-a-trillion dollars over the next 30 years. The Navy, on the other hand, might have reason to say, “I told you so.”

That is, if Watts’ prediction comes true — and that’s a big “if,” the analyst admits.

“In recent years there has been speculation that ongoing advances in radar detection and tracking will, in the near future, obviate the ability of all-aspect, low-observable aircraft such as the B-2, F-22 and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, aka JSF, to survive inside denied airspace,” Watts writes, referring to America’s stealth bombers and fighter jets.



Stealth-killing advances include VHF and UHF radars being developed by Russia and China, and a “passive-detection” system devised by Czech researchers. The latter “uses radar, television, cellular phone and other available signals of opportunity reflected off stealthy aircraft to find and track them,” Watts explains.

These new detection systems could reverse a 30-year trend that has seen the U.S. Air Force gain an increasing advantage over enemy defenses. That phenomenon began with the introduction of the F-117 stealth fighter in the late 1980s, followed by the addition of the stealthy B-2 (pictured) in the ’90s and, more recently, the F-22.

So far, the Air Force has only ever fielded a few hundred stealth aircraft, requiring it to constantly upgrade some nonstealthy fighters. But the flying branch plans to purchase more than 1,700 F-35s (at more than $100 million a pop) from Lockheed Martin in coming decades, plus up to 100 new stealth bombers. In that sense, the stealth era is only now truly dawning — just as effective counter-measures are nearly ready, Watts points out.

In that sense, the Air Force’s stealth gamble could turn into very, very long odds.

Comparatively, the Navy has played it safe. At the same time the Air Force was investing its research and development dollars in stealth, the Navy has taken a different approach to defeating enemy defenses. Where the Air Force plans to slip past radars, the Navy means to jam them with electronic noisemakers or destroy them with radar-seeking missiles. That’s why the only radar-killing planes in the Pentagon inventory belong to the Navy — and why, until the forthcoming F-35C, the Navy has never bought a stealth fighter.

Nowhere is that philosophical difference more apparent than in the Pentagon’s on-again, off-again effort to develop jet-powered killer drones. The Navy’s X-47 drone, built by Northrop, is minimally stealthy. Boeing’s Phantom Ray, intended mostly for Air Force programs, is arguably as stealthy as an F-35 in certain scenarios.

There’s still a chance the Air Force’s bet on stealth could pay off, Watts writes. That largely depends on two capabilities planned for the F-35.

First, there’s “the JSF’s sensor suite and computational power,” which Watts explains “can be easily upgraded over time due to the plane’s open avionics architecture, giv[ing] the F-35 an ability to adjust its flight path in real time in response to pop-up threats, something neither the F-117 nor the B-2 have been able to do.”

Second, the F-35’s radar, a so-called “electronically scanned array,” could in theory be used to jam an enemy radar or even slip malicious software code into its control system.

Neither of these capabilities is actually a form of stealth, per se. Rather, they would complement the F-35’s ability to absorb or deflect radar waves. Described uncharitably, the Air Force has had to add nonstealthy skills to its stealth fighters, just to help them survive.

Watts doesn’t address one other way the Air Force could preserve its stealth advantage: by speeding up the development of drone aircraft — which, by virtue of their smaller size, have the potential to be much stealthier than any manned aircraft.

It’s also worth noting that America’s biggest rivals don’t doubt the continuing relevance of stealthy planes. Russia and China have both unveiled new stealth-fighter prototypes in the last two years.

The way Watts describes it, the “end of stealth” is just one of the many big changes that could occur in near-future warfare — big emphasis on “could.” “The honest answer to the question about how fundamentally war’s conduct will change — and how soon — remains: It depends.”

Photo: B-2 stealth bomber (U.S. Air Force)
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America’s Entrepreneurial Innovation Needs Help

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Martin Zwilling Startup Professional's Musings

                                    Image via Wikipedia The innovation engine that powered the U.S. economy over the last century seems to be slowing down and dying, threatening not only local opportunities, but the economies all over the world. The $30 billion trade surplus in advanced technology products that America enjoyed just one decade ago has now become a $56 billion deficit.

More and more people, like Henry R. Nothhaft, in his new book “Great Again: Revitalizing America’s Entrepreneurial Leadership” are already calling these last ten years the “Lost Decade.” Nothhaft has put together a challenging but small list of things we have to do to revitalize our innovation leadership, and I’m supportive:

1. Liberate entrepreneurs from regulatory shackles. Startups in the U.S. face the highest combined federal and state tax rates in the world. At 39%, it’s more than 50% higher than the European Union countries average of 25.5%. Rates around the world are still going down, while U.S. rates have remained fixed for the last ten years. In addition, due to Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations, accounting costs have gone up an estimated four times for all businesses, and 2008-2009 represented the worst IPO market in forty years. We need a regulatory regime that nurtures startups, rather than penalizing them like giant corporations.  
2. Fix the patent office to keep up with the backlog. Since 1992, Congress has diverted nearly $1 billion in applicant-paid fees already earned by the USPTO to other uses (like the 2010 census), leaving the patent office unable to deal with the threefold increase in patent applications over the last 20 years. As of January 2011, there are a staggering 1.2 million applications awaiting approval, and more than half have never had an initial review, which really hurts startups. The average total fees for obtaining a patent are now way up to $38,000. In most cases, no patent means no financing, no new products, no new jobs, and no new industries for tomorrow.
3. Offer meaningful incentives to bring back high-tech manufacturing. In the last ten years alone, more than one-third of America’s largest factories have shut down. That’s 42,400 factories, including 15 semiconductor plants, and 12 million lost jobs. We now produce only 14% of the world’s supply of semiconductors, and even less of other things. Both China and Taiwan now provide a 5 year, zero-tax holiday, for semiconductor manufacturers, followed by 5 years at rates as low as 5%. Germany, Ireland, Israel, and most other non-Asian nations also provide major tax incentives, and huge R&D tax credits. We need to make a strong manufacturing base a national priority.
4. Ease immigration rules to turn brain drain to a brain gain. Studies show that foreign immigrants who enter on H-1B visas make a greater innovation and scientific contribution to the nation, by patenting at double the rate of native-born Americans, and publishing more highly-cited engineering articles. In fact, between 1995 and 2005, these same immigrants founded over 50 percent of the venture-backed technology companies in Silicon Valley, and are some of the key venture capitalists there as well. The evidence is that immigrants don’t take jobs, they create them by the millions.
5. More programs to support basic science and research. Over the past decade, there has been an exodus of scientific and technical expertise from the DoD (Dept of Defense) and academic community, with basic research dropping from a high of 26% in the 1960’s budget to only 12% of their budget today.

Government should learn from private industry and invest research funds just like a venture capitalist invests startup capital. It should invest in people and teams first of all, and let startup entrepreneurs take the fruits of that research and build from it a better tomorrow.

It’s time for us to get back to the basics of fostering innovation. I agree with Nothhaft that the answer is neither the “big government” of the radical left nor the “no government” of the radical right – it’s the “smart government” of the common-sense middle. Startups can be our silver bullet to kick-start our economy and innovation, so let’s give them some help, and be great again.

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