Don’ t Upset The Barista

Interesting sticker on this guy’s smartphone this morning:

“Guns and Coffee”

And the Starbucks mermaid in the center is packing two pistols in her hands, instead of the usual fishy fins. 

Now the good thing about this particular guy was that he was also wearing a lapel pin from a prominent law enforcement agency here in Washington, D.C., so that was comforting. 

I’ve heard about the economic trade-off (“opportunity costs”) between “Guns and Butter,” meaning how much we choose to budget for defense vs. civilian goods/social entitlements.

But this is novel–“Guns and Coffee”–I guess you can have your coffee and your 2nd Amendment rights as well. 

What happens if you haven’t had your coffee yet, does the little mermaid shoot first and ask questions later? 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Budget Cuts Conundrum

So I’m hearing two opposing themes about the proposed federal budget cuts:

1) It’s horrible because we are cutting into the bone and this is going to really hurt a lot of important government programs.

2) It’s great because we have been spending money that we don’t really have, and we need to finally reign it in. 

Let’s face it, we’ll never get such drastic cuts across the civilian government unless this country goes into severe crisis mode–which never happens until it’s too late and something terrible has happened. 

If we even got half the cuts being proposed–which most people don’t seem to believe will even happen–that would be significant and painful itself. 

The truth of the matter is that we are facing enormous danger on both the national security and financial fronts!

– Militarily–Russia, China, Iran, North Korea pose huge threats including those involving weapons of mass destruction. 

– Financially–We have a serious national debt to the tune of $20 trillion, an annual trade deficit of half a trillion dollars, and social security and medicare trust funds that are going bankrupt. 

If we let these threats run their course, we will eventually have a crisis that will be truly nationally catastrophic. 

So what’s it gonna be–guns or butter–or national bankruptcy. 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Ever Feel This Way?

I took this photo of an advertisement for the “I’m With Stupid” Minions movie released on February 2. 

 

Sadly, I think this sums up how I am feeling about current world affairs rapidly devolving into chaos, with little to nothing happening to bring it back from the brink:

 

– Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine forcibly take over the besieged city of Debaltseve in Ukraine, after the ceasefire that was agreed to last week.

– China builds four new fortress artificial islands in the South China Sea projecting it’s military might in disputed waters.

– Iran threatens gas embargo on U.S., suicide missions on U.S. Navy, missile attack on Israel, and nuclear enrichment expansion, while negotiating for lifting sanctions.

– Syrian fighting leaves over 250,000 dead and includes their “systematically” using chemical weapons. 

– ISIS burns another 45 people alive in Iraq, beheads 21 Coptic Christians abducted from Egypt, and commits mass “brutal and abnormal sex” on female captives.

– Boko Haram attack leaves another 2,000 dead in Nigeria (the world’s 4th largest democracy) with “bodies scattered everywhere.”

– Radical Islamists conduct terrors attacks in Europe in both France (Charlie Hebdo Magazine and a Jewish grocery store) and Copenhagen (a free speech event and a Synagogue).

– Dangerous terrorists apprehended and put away in Guantanamo detention facility are then released with about 28% (or more) returning to their chosen terror professions.

Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal points to this sorry state of affairs and our retrenchment in world affairs, as a serious misalignment between the age-old guns and butter debate.

Maybe time for some smart people to get in on things. 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Restraint or Recklessness?

Like many of you, as I watch the events unfold with the Russian military invasion of Ukraine, I am amazed at the “restraint” being shown by the West.

But I can’t help asking myself why a military invasion by the Great Bear into a sovereign nation that is leaning toward democracy is being met with restraint.

Sitting in Starbucks, I overheard one young women saying to an older gentlemen that she did not understand the reaction of the President in saying there would be “consequences” and that no one took that seriously as there was no specificity, almost as if their where no real consequences to even threaten Russia with.

So why all the word-mincing, dancing around the subject, and restraint by the West in light of this very dangerous escalation in eastern Europe:

1) Surprise – Was the West completely taken by surprise by Russia’s military intervention? Didn’t something similar happen with Georgia in 2008–less than 6 years ago? Did we not foresee the possibility of Russia lashing out against Ukraine to protect its interests when Ukraine turned back toward European integration and away from the embrace of Russia that it had made only weeks earlier? After Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and with all our “Big Data,” intelligence, and military planning–how did we miss this (again!)?

2) Duped – Were we duped by the misinformation from Russia saying that the 150,000 troops they called on a “training exercise” was planned months ago and it just happened to coincide with the toppling of Ukraine’s President? Also, were we fooled when the “mysterious” soldiers showed up without national markings and Russia said they weren’t their military–uh, where did they come from–did they float down from the heavens?

3) Apathetic – Are we just apathetic to Ukraine’s plight? Are they just a poor country of little strategic value to us? Are we so war weary from Iraq and Afghanistan that we just want to place our heads in the sand like ostriches even when democracy and freedom is threatened in a European nation of some 45 million people?

4) Fear – Are we afraid of the military might of the nuclear-armed Russian Federation? Is America, the European Union, NATO, the United Nations all not willing to stand up and hold Russia accountable even if that means a military confrontation? Not that anyone wants World War III, but if we don’t stand up and defend against wanton aggression, how can any country or anyone be safe going forward?

5) Optionless – Are we just out of options? Russia got the upper hand on this one and they are logistically right there on the border and in the country of Ukraine now and what can we do? Despite the U.S. assertion that it can project military power anywhere around the world and a defense budget bigger than the 10 next largest combined–how can we be out of options? Are we out of options because we tacitly understand that one wrong miscalculation and we could end up with WMD on our homeland doorstep?

6) Butter Over Guns – Have we retrenched from world affairs, downsized our military, and emphasized domestic issues over international ones? Have we forgotten the risk that comes from a world without a superpower that helps to maintain stability and peace? Are we just under so much financial duress with a growing mountain of national debt, a economic recovery still struggling, and the lowest employment participation in over 30 years that we can’t even entertain spending more treasure to fight again?

7) Leadership – Who is managing the crisis? We’ve seen our President speak, various other government officials from the U.S. and European Union, the Secretary General of the U.N., the Secretary General of NATO, and more? Who is in charge–setting the tone–deciding the strategy? Who has point so that we and Russia know who to listen to and what is just background noise?

What is so scary about this whole thing is how quickly things can escalate and seriously get out of control in this world, and this despite all the alliances, planning, and spending–at the end of the day, it looks like we are floundering and are in chaos, while Russia is advancing on multiples fronts in Ukraine and elsewhere with supporting dangerous regimes in Syria, Iran, North Korea and more.

Whether we should or shouldn’t get involved militarily, what is shocking is: 1) the very notion that there wouldn’t be any good military options, and 2) that the consequences are not being spelled out with speed and clarity.

In the streets, at the cafe, on the television, I am seeing and hearing people in shock at what is happening and what we are and are not doing about it.

Even if we get Russia to stop advancing (yes, based on what happened with Georgia, I doubt they will actually pull back out), the question is what happens the next time there is a conflict based on how we’ve managed this one?

I do want to mention one other thing, which is while I feel empathy for the plight of the Ukrainians seeking freedom from Russia now, I also must remember the events of Babi Yar where, between 1941-1944, 900,000 Jews were murdered in the Soviet Union by Nazi genocide and their Ukrainian collaborators. This is history, but no so long ago.

All opinions my own.

(Source Photo: here with attribution to Utenriksdept)

A Race To The Future

This last week, we learned of the new defense policy that shifts the U.S. from a full two war capability to a “win-spoil” plan, where we have the ability to fight one war, but still disrupt the military aspirations of another adversary elsewhere.

While we would all like to have unconstrained capabilities for both “guns and butter”, budget realities do not permit limitless spending on anything or anytime.

The Wall Street Journal (7-8 January 2012) had an interesting editorial that cautioned against reduced military spending and latched on specifically to focusing too much on the Asia-Pacific region and somehow neglecting other danger spots around the globe.

Basically, the author says it is dangerous for us to put all our proverbial eggs in one basket. As he writes, this single-focus approach or “strategic monism” is predicated on our ability to accurately predict where the trouble spots will be and what defensive and offensive capabilities we will need to counter them.

In contrast, the author promotes an approach that is more multifaceted and based on “strategic pluralism,” where we prepare ourselves for any number of different threat scenarios, with a broad array of capabilities to handle whatever may come.

What is compelling about this argument is that generally we are not very good at forecasting the future, and the author points out that “the U.S. has suffered a significant surprise once a decade since 1940” including Pearl Harbor (1941), North Korea’s invasion of the South (1950), the Soviet testing of the Hydrogen bomb (1953), the Soviet resupply of Egypt in the Yom Kippur War (1973), the Iranian Shah’s fall from power (1979), the Soviet Union collapse (1991), and the terrorist attacks of 9-11 (2001).

Similarly, Fortune Magazine (16 January 2012) calls out “the dangers inherent in…long-term forecasting” and points how almost comically “the 1899 U.S. patent chief declares that anything that can be invented has been.”

The Fortune article goes on to say that a number of the experts interviewed for their Guide To The Future issue stated that “cyberterrorism, resource shortages, and political instability around the world are all inevitable.”

In short, the potential for any number of catastrophes is no more relevant now in the 21st century, than at any other time in history, despite all our technological advances and maybe because of it.

In fact, Bloomberg Businessweek (19-25 December 2012) actually rates on a scale of low to high various threats, many of which are a direct result of our technology advancement and the possibility that we are not able to control these. From low to high risk–there is climate change, synthetic biology, nuclear apocalypse, nanotechnology weaponry, the unknown, and machine super intelligence.  Note, the second highest risk is “unknown risks,” since they consider “the biggest threat may yet be unknown.”

So while risks abound and we acknowledge that we cannot predict them all or forecast their probability or impact accurately, we need to be very well prepared for all eventualities.

But unfortunately, being prepared, maintaining lots of options, and overall strategic pluralism does not come cheaply.

In fact, when faced with weapons of mass destruction, threats to our homeland, and human rights abuses is there any amount of money that is really enough to prepare, protect, and defend?

There is no choice but to take the threats–both known and unknown seriously–and to devote substantial resources across all platforms to countering these. We cannot afford to be caught off-guard or prepared to fight the wrong fight.

Our adversaries and potential adversaries are not standing still–in fact, they are gaining momentum, so how much can we afford to recoil?

We are caught between the sins of the past in terms of a sizable and threatening national deficit and an unpredictable future with no shortage of dangers.

While everyone has their pet projects, we’ve got to stop fighting each other (I believe they call this pork barrel politics) and start pulling for the greater good or else we all risk ending up on the spit ourselves.

There is no option but to press firmly on the accelerator of scientific and technological advancement and break the deficit bounds that are strangling us and leap far ahead of those who would do us harm.

(All opinions my own)

(Source Photo: here)