About a year ago, I posted a brief discussion of security strength through diversification, using the U.S. Air Force's fixation on fifth generation aircraft as an illustration. A great counter-example is the U.S. Navy and what Wired.com refers to as the Navy's Stealth Plan B.
For those who are unaware, the Navy hasn't so much diversified its fleet of aircraft. Instead, the Navy has achieved some economies of scale through a pretty intelligent approach. When the venerable F-14 Tomcat was retired in 2006, it was replaced by the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. Meanwhile, the Navy is replacing its EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare fleet (itself a derivative of the A-6 Intruder) with the E/A-18G Growler. The Super Hornet and the Growler are derived from the F/A-18(A/B/C/D) Hornet. This has allowed the Navy to manage some of the risks of maintaining multiple supply and production lines, resulting in economies of scale. The Navy has accepted some parallel risk by placing most of its aviation eggs in one basket, so to speak.
Obviously, these concepts are applied on a very large scale, but the concept can be applied on smaller scales as well.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Considering Iranian-American Relations
The best places to start are a 2009 BBC documentary series entitled "Iran and the West" (parts 1, 2, and 3), and a 2013 New Yorker article entitled The Shadow Commander. In the latter article, author Dexter Filkins focuses his narrative on Major General Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps' Quds Force - the Iranian corollary to the CIA's Special Activities Division. If you ignore everything else, you ought to invest some time in those four items. Beyond these resources, what follows are some topical sections on various aspects of Western-Iranian relations since 1979.
The Iran-Iraq War
Mark Bowden's Guests of the Ayatollah provides some of the best discussion of the Iran Hostage Crisis and the early stages of the Iran-Iraq War that I've ever read. Before I go into detail, here's a brief, oversimplified synopsis of the Iran-Iraq War and its aftermath.
Though little-known to Americans, post-Revolution American-Iranian relations deteriorated further as a result of the The Tanker War, notable elements of which were Operation Earnest Will, Operation Prime Chance, Operation Eager Glacier, Operation Nimble Archer, and Operation Praying Mantis. The last of these was a direct response to the Iranian mine strike on USS Samuel B. Roberts. Relations were further complicated by the accidental American shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655 by USS Vincennes.
Support to Insurgent and Terrorist Groups
Beyond its prominent role operating Hezbollah in Lebanon and elsewhere, and supporting other groups such as Hamas, Iran's role in and relating to Afghanistan and Iraq have been complex. As noted by Dexter Filkins in the article linked above, Iran nearly went to war with Afghanistan prior to 9/11, and Iranian and Western forces cooperated in Afghanistan against the Taliban in 2001 and early 2002.
However, after relations deteriorated once more, the Iranians subsequently appear to have provided some support to both the Taliban and al Qaeda. This has apparently involved providing al Qaeda with logistical assistance and safe havens, and possibly supplying weapons to the Taliban.
The Iran/al Qaeda relationship has been tenuous, and has backfired upon both Iran and al Qaeda at times. The article about Qassem Suleimani notes that initial cooperation with al Qaeda in Iraq eventually collapsed, fueling the Sunni/Shiite sectarian war that took place over the course of several years. Iran supplied specialized weapons to Shiite insurgents...
... and simultaneously kept several members of Osama bin laden's family in Iran.
There are a couple of other articles about Iran and afghanistan that are worth reading:
Iran and the Gulf
I could probably write a book on recent relations between Iran and its relations with the various neighbors. Having already skirted around the situation vis a vis Iraq, here are a few articles discussing recent interaction, mostly adversarial, between Iran and Bahrain, the only Shiite-majority GCC member...
... Qatar and the United Arab Emirates...
... Kuwait...
... Oman (whose relations with Iran remain the closest of the Gulf nations due to a variety of factors specific to Oman)...
... and Saudi Arabia.
The West is frequently criticized for its close relations with the GCC's authoritarian regimes. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, relations between the West and the GCC states solidified due to the mutually adversarial relationships between Iran and both parties. (This was later strengthened by distrust of Iraq, but that's another topic for another day.) People tend to focus on Iran's nuclear program with respect to its actual potential destructive capacity and range. While these concerns are legitimate, Iran's tendency to eschew direct confrontation in favor of more covert, irregular methods demonstrates that the underlying concern should be how a potential Iranian nuclear capability might be used to advance Iranian political objectives in the region. One major concern is that an Iranian nuclear capability would compel the Saudis, and potentially the Egyptians and the Turks, to pursue their own nuclear programs in order to deter Iran's influence. (I'm working on an upcoming post that will focus specifically on this issue.)
American Relationships with Dissident Groups
While in no way claiming any moral equivalence between Iranian support for terrorist groups, and American support for the following groups, it's worth noting that Iranian distrust of the West typically takes Western support for such dissident groups into account. (There's a sort of chicken/egg dichotomy that's worth noting on that one.) There have been suggestions of covert Western support to the Balochi insurgent group known as Jundallah, formerly led by the late Abdolmalek Rigi...
... and Western states have openly worked with the Mojehedin e Khalq (People's Mujahideen of Iran), a leftist group that worked with Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War and subsequently took asylum in Iraq at Camp Ashraf until relatively recently.
There's obviously a lot of information to go through, and it could easily take a person days or even weeks to try and read or process it all. These items are barely scratching the surface of these issues. The relationship is complicated, it's always been complicated, and it will remain complicated. People like things to be wrapped up neatly and tidily - we're conditioned by books, movies, and television to expect that. In truth, Western States have strategic goals that compete directly with those of post-Revolutionary Iran. It's difficult for any expert to identify significant opportunities for compromise and cooperation, or to foresee a future in which those strategic goals will overlap. As such, and despite pronouncements and celebration of deals over Iran's nuclear program - and judging from the nightly rhetoric on Iran's Voice of Justice broadcasts - the underlying conflict between Iran and the West will continue into the foreseeable future.
Friday, November 22, 2013
The Post-Google Reader Blues
Every now and again, I hit news burnout. I hit the wall earlier this year and haven't been regularly reading the news for the last few months. While I was on my news hiatus, we as a society lost Google Reader. I've attempted on several occasions to get Feedly to work, and finally got it sorted out on Friday morning. I made a little effort to use Pulse on my Kindle Fire, but it's fairly tedious to use, so I haven't taken to it like I did to Google Reader.
As I was sorting Feedly out, I went to look at a blog I used to enjoy, Abu Muqawama. The author, Andrew Exum, took a leave of absence a little over a year ago, and left the blog to a couple of long-term guest authors. While reviewing my old feeds, I discovered not only that Exum has discontinued the blog, but that it's taken less than a month for the Center for a New American Security to straight up delete it, in its entirety. I'm actually rather upset, because there are several of Exum's posts that I would have copied and saved for my own purposes. There are also rumblings that the Ink Spots blog has gone defunct, though it's at least still present.
At any rate, something else that I've come up with, using my mad HTML editing skills, is my own local HTML file (built from the OPML file I exported from Google Reader) that organizes my feeds. It's much lower tech than Google Reader, Feedly, or Pulse, but it has the virtue of being a touch more reliable than free services (or blogs) that can disappear, even without any sort of notice.
Just in case you're curious what's currently in my feed, have a look:
You know what they say: knowledge is power.
As I was sorting Feedly out, I went to look at a blog I used to enjoy, Abu Muqawama. The author, Andrew Exum, took a leave of absence a little over a year ago, and left the blog to a couple of long-term guest authors. While reviewing my old feeds, I discovered not only that Exum has discontinued the blog, but that it's taken less than a month for the Center for a New American Security to straight up delete it, in its entirety. I'm actually rather upset, because there are several of Exum's posts that I would have copied and saved for my own purposes. There are also rumblings that the Ink Spots blog has gone defunct, though it's at least still present.
At any rate, something else that I've come up with, using my mad HTML editing skills, is my own local HTML file (built from the OPML file I exported from Google Reader) that organizes my feeds. It's much lower tech than Google Reader, Feedly, or Pulse, but it has the virtue of being a touch more reliable than free services (or blogs) that can disappear, even without any sort of notice.
Just in case you're curious what's currently in my feed, have a look:
Site; RSS: CNN.com - WORLD Site; RSS: Guardian World News | Site; RSS: al Jazeera English Site; RSS: Arab Times Site; RSS: BBC News - Middle East Site; RSS: CNN.com - WORLD/Middle East Site; RSS: The Economist: Middle East and Africa Site; RSS: Kuwait Times Site; RSS: Memri Latest Reports Site; RSS: Muscat Daily Oman News Site; RSS: Oman Observer Site; RSS: Oman Tribune Site; RSS: Site Intelligence Group - Jihadist News Site; RSS: Times Of Oman |
Site; RSS: Abu Muqawama Site; RSS: CNN Security Clearance Site; RSS: CSIS: Event Feed Site; RSS: CSIS: Publication Feed Site; RSS: FAS Strategic Security Blog Site; RSS: Foreign Affairs Site; RSS: Foreign Policy Site; RSS: Guardian: Julian Borger's global security blog Site; RSS: Ink Spots Site; RSS: Kevin Hanrahan Site; RSS: Michael J. Totten's blog Site; RSS: Michael Totten Site; RSS: Michael Yon - Online Magazine Site; RSS: Science of Global Security & Armed Conflict Site; RSS: Small Wars Journal Site; RSS: Spacewar.com Site; RSS: The Long War Journal (Site-Wide) Site; RSS: Wired.com Danger Room Site; RSS: Wired.com Threat Level Site; RSS: Understanding War Site; RSS: War Is Boring |
Site; RSS: BBC Global News Site; RSS: BBC Kermode and Mayo's Film Reviews Site; RSS: BBC Newshour Site; RSS: BBC Xtra Arabic Site; RSS: The Faroe Islands Podcast Site; RSS: Fit for Duty Site; RSS: The Heritage Foundation - Past Events Site; RSS: The History Chicks Site; RSS: KSL Nightside Project Site; RSS: The Michael Medved Show Site; RSS: NASACast Audio Site; RSS: Orkney Talking Newspaper Site; RSS: Prime Minister's Questions Site; RSS: The Sporkful Site; RSS: War Studies' Podcast |
Site; RSS: Ctrl+Alt+Del Site; RSS: Cyanide and Happiness Site; RSS: Filibuster Cartoons Site; RSS: Pearls Before Swine Site; RSS: Penny Arcade Site; RSS: Real Life Comics Site; RSS: Romantically Apocalyptic Site; RSS: Terminal Lance Site; RSS: Wondermark Site; RSS: xkcd.com |
Site; RSS: Uploads from Callum McKain Site; RSS: Uploads from chimpaction Site; RSS: Uploads from Defence Images Site; RSS: Uploads from Official U.S. Navy Imagery Site; RSS: Uploads from the Oregon Military Department Site; RSS: Uploads from Orkneyjar Site; RSS: Uploads from The Central Intelligence Agency Site; RSS: Uploads from The United States Army Site; RSS: Uploads from United States Marine Corps |
Site; RSS: Musings from a Stonehead |
You know what they say: knowledge is power.
Sunday, November 3, 2013
More Thoughts on Middle Eastern Borders
A few days ago, I posted my thoughts about this excellent article, which discusses the issue of Middle Eastern borders. As I've been doing some research to follow on from my dissertation, I remembered a recent graphic I'd seen in another article, and looked it up to share: "How 5 Countries Could Become 14"; the article is titled "Imagining a Remapped Middle East". The second article is sort of ridiculous for a number of reasons.
There's sort of a prevailing view, generally attributed to President Woodrow Wilson, that the solution to international conflicts is often to carve terrain up into independent states handed off primarily to independent ethnic groups. This is often pejoratively called "Balkanization", inspired by the fragmentation of the former Yugoslavia into a sort of adversarial neighborhood of smaller, independent states. As a United States Senator, Vice President Biden even advocated for a "soft partition" - de facto independence - for Iraq's three major population groups. That original article points out some of the big problems with that concept, one of which is stated as follows:
"At best, creating more countries would have just meant more borders to fight over, while fewer large countries would have turned regular wars into civil ones."To be fair, the New York Times article/graphic is attempting to report on what the author thinks might happen in the foreseeable future, rather than advocating for it. Even so, author Robin Wright (who's associated with the United States Institute of Peace and the Wilson Center - what did I say earlier about President Wilson's philosophy?) doesn't appear to have quite the grasp of history or politics that Nick Danforth (author of the first article) does. While I'd be tempted to give her the benefit of the doubt by presuming that she wasn't involved in the actual composition of the graphic, she unfortunately uses the phrases "Sunnistan" and "Shiitestan", which suggests that the graphic's use of the terms "Wahhabistan" and "Alawitestan" were also inspired by the author. Beyond the obvious problems with this idea that Nick Danforth discussed in that first article, the use of the "-stan" suffix. There's a reason why the only region in the quasi-Arab world whose name ends in "-stan" is "Kurdistan": because "-stan" is Indo-Persian, not Arabic, hence the countries of "Greater Persia" (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, et. al.) carrying that suffix. The fact that Ms. Wright uses this term betrays an ignorance of the region about which she's writing.
The whole thing reminds me of a challenge I had while working in the Middle East. In mid-February 2011, a marginalized portion of Kuwait's population began holding sporadic demonstrations in several locations in and around Kuwait City, and I was responsible for briefing my organization's leaders on these protests. This required me to educate them on the fact that there was, in fact, a difference between a "bidun/بدون", meaning "without nationality" - these were the folks who were protesting - and a "bedouin/بَدَوِي", meaning "nomad/wanderer". I found that despite having only recently arrived in the reason, I was very nearly the only person in the entire organization - some of these folks having been there for years who knew that there was a distinction.
The fact that more than a decade after 9/11, more than two decades after the Gulf War, more than three decades after the Islamic Revolution, the majority of military leaders and commentators on international affairs remain this clueless about fairly basic aspects of Middle Eastern affairs is pretty upsetting. It's unfortunate that an article this misinformed was actually published in the New York Times, which is meant to be America's journal of record.
Perhaps even more disconcerting is that this Wilsonian concept of partition and Balkanization is still considered a viable solution to international challenges. It's one of the reasons why I'm so skeptical about the prospect of Scotland becoming an independent state, as I've discussed elsewhere. This isn't to say that unification and integration are panaceas for those same challenges, but where integration is possible, it has tended to produce better results than the alternative. Some examples of this have been the Korean Peninsula, Yemen, and South Sudan, where fragmentation has produced adverse results; and Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Germany, where unification has produced positive results. (I personally think that there's a case to be made for taking pieces of Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan to make an independent Balochistan and an independent Pashtunistan, but that's another discussion entirely.) Whenever possible, even when it's challenging, national and international risks tend to be better managed by working in concert than by working independently.
Monday, October 28, 2013
Google Searching and Privacy Online
A few years ago, I attended a lecture by Jeremy Duffy, The Geek Professor. The specific seminar I attended discussed the sheer volume of information that one can find online, and then went into some of the specifics of how one goes about searching for that data. Most interesting to me was some of the guidance on targeted searching that Duffy replicates in his guide on How To Hunt Someone Like A Dog On the Internet. It's definitely worth a read, and it's fairly brief. So, why am I posting this? Several reasons:
1) Jeremy Duffy does a great seminar, and I'm pleased to advertise for him.*
2) This guide gives some fantastic tips for how to use Google and other search engines more efficiently. The quoted search and site search techniques, particularly when combined, have made my searching much more effective since I began using them after attending Duffy's lecture.
3) The guide shows how much of your own personal information (or, if you're in the security industry, other information about your facility or operation) is available online; and it shows just how easy it is to find.
This should concern you; but, even more than that, it should give you the information necessary to empower you. Duffy has another online guide entitled CTRL-Z – How to Reclaim Your Privacy From the Internet, available either as a seminar, or from a few additional guides that are linked on the page. Go have a look.
* Special thanks to my friend and associate, Sam-Wise, who helped to jog my memory about Duffy's website. I still have my notes from that lecture - somewhere - but it's not available, so Sam-Wise's help was excellent.
1) Jeremy Duffy does a great seminar, and I'm pleased to advertise for him.*
2) This guide gives some fantastic tips for how to use Google and other search engines more efficiently. The quoted search and site search techniques, particularly when combined, have made my searching much more effective since I began using them after attending Duffy's lecture.
3) The guide shows how much of your own personal information (or, if you're in the security industry, other information about your facility or operation) is available online; and it shows just how easy it is to find.
This should concern you; but, even more than that, it should give you the information necessary to empower you. Duffy has another online guide entitled CTRL-Z – How to Reclaim Your Privacy From the Internet, available either as a seminar, or from a few additional guides that are linked on the page. Go have a look.
* Special thanks to my friend and associate, Sam-Wise, who helped to jog my memory about Duffy's website. I still have my notes from that lecture - somewhere - but it's not available, so Sam-Wise's help was excellent.
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Thoughts on Middle Eastern Borders
People frequently try to blame the Middle East's problems on the West, usually based on historical ignorance. The best example is probably the debate over Israel and Palestine. A historically accurate (though extremely partisan) discussion of the history of the topic can be found here. Those unfamiliar with the history of the conflict frequently claim that Israel was created by Western states out of guilt for what happened in the Holocaust; in actuality, Jewish migration into the region began much earlier, and land was (by and large) purchased outright while the disputed areas of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank (in addition to present-day Jordan) were still a component of the Ottoman Empire.
Another region whose history is often misrepresented is the Persian Gulf region. Folk who are unfamiliar with the region's history criticize Western nations for their presence in the Gulf. Writing about the Dhofar Rebellion, South African author S. Monick notes:
In this second Omani war Britain had relinquished all power in the Middle East. Its surrender to Marxist insurgent forces in Aden in 1967, and consequent evacuation from South Arabia in the same year, had finally signalled Britain's' total abdication of power in the Arabian Peninsula; a decision confirmed by its departure from Bahrain in 1971, thus completing her total withdrawal from east of Suez. This abdication of power was further manifested in the cessation of Britain's treaty obligations with the Trucial Oman States, and the replacement of this political entity with the United Arab Emirates (formed in 1971). Hence, in this second campaign Great Britain was an intruder, so to speak, in the affairs of the Persian Gulf to an extent not apparent in the war of 1957-1959, when her intervention could be justified in terms of her military and political presence in neighbouring South Arabia (i.e. in terms of her interest in maintaining stability within a region in which she had a powerful vested interest).
Even now, as America is attempting to "pivot to the Asia-Pacific region", the United Kingdom is considering a "return to East of Suez" to address critical strategic needs. Meanwhile, the Gulf States have repeatedly invited their external allies to work with them in order to advance mutual strategic goals. (One example of this is the allegation, unsubstantiated though it may be, that the Qatari Emir offered to "pay in full" for America's military presence in Qatar. That's just one example. And the Gulf States are far from being puppets of Western influence: Saudi Arabia and Qatar have provided funding and weapons to unsavory elements in the Syrian civil war, Bahrain's has been extremely robust in its suppression of political protest, and Oman continually refuses to take a hard line against Iran. Without taking a side on any of these ongoing and contentious issues, the point is that many such accusations are made in ignorance. These accusations tend to rely upon ignorance and oversimplification; in the case of the claims about arbitrary borders noted in the article I noted above, they ignore other prevailing factors in favor of a simple glance at the map.
So, what does this have to do with risk management? It's actually pretty simple: foreign policy is risk management on a global scale. Western involvement in the Middle East has tended to occur at the invitation of the sitting governments (noteworthy examples being Jebel Akhdar War, and Operations Vantage, Storm, Earnest Will, Prime Chance, Nimble Archer, Praying Mantis, Desert Shield and Desert Storm, among others, and with honorable mention to the Arab Revolt and Operation El Dorado Canyon). Major world powers share strategic interests with Middle Eastern powers, in addition to other interests. They manage those risks through both political, military, and economic means, using whatever resources and leverage they can bring to bear. It's easy to blame seemingly arbitrary borders for all of this; in reality, there are a variety of far more complex factors that come into play, and both Western and Middle Eastern nations accept additional risks at their own peril, as evidenced by recent and current events.
Oversimplification is easy, and Western audiences are accustomed to neat, tidy, coherent stories. Reality is nearly always far more complex, and far less climactic than we expect. And just like our own history, the history of the Middle East continues to unfold - frequently irrespective of any Western influence.
Friday, October 11, 2013
Working on Honesty Traces
I've had to be somewhat field expedient, though. For example, the instructions call for the use of Garmin's MapSource software. At the time I started playing around with my Garmin eTrex Vista H, I could not for the life of me find the MapSource software, so I defaulted to an open source program called EasyGPS. The slide deck also calls for the user to utilize FalconView, which is software that was developed in partnership with the Georgia Tech Research Institute and the Department of Defense; however, there are two versions of the software, and the slide deck demonstrates the restricted DoD version that's not available to the public. So, I'll eventually attempt to learn how to do honesty traces that are nearly the same as those demonstrated in that slide deck; but using EasyGPS and Wikimapia, and with a bit of my own HTML/XML editing for the .gpx files created from the GPS data, I'm also trying to figure out an alternate method.
Using six tracks that I took in Kirkwall over the course of the last week, I made a preliminary honesty trace. You can see a number of "choke points" (or else, points where my path crossed multiple times), which is the entire point of the exercise. It still needs some work to get it all figured out; as you can see, there's a massive red line that runs straight through St. Magnus Cathedral that's quite obviously not part of my route, and that's something that I need to figure out how to reconcile (I'm already close). The end goal is to not only teach myself how to do it, but to create a work instruction so that others can follow my lead in a manner that's more "open source" and, hopefully, a bit simpler than the original instructions from the Marines.
Monday, October 7, 2013
Brief Thoughts About LinkedIn
I started an account on LinkedIn a few months ago. I saw this article a few weeks ago, and found it quite interesting. My network continues to grow, and I think there's great value to reestablishing contact with other professionals with whom I've worked in the past. At the same time, it feels rather insular. If I end up finding a job through LinkedIn within the next few months, I may change my tune, but a lot of the things the article notes still hit close to home.
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Improving Security in Public Places
Despite having been mostly engrossed in my recent close protection course, I couldn't help but hear about the Westgate mall attack in Kenya. As Kenyan and international authorities attempt to ascertain what went wrong, and how members of al Shabab were able to take over the mall, the RAND Corporation has two items which are worth your attention: an article that they first published in July of this year about the possibility of a Mumbai-style attack in the United States, and a 2006 technical report about the risk of terrorism at America's shopping centers. Both are worth your attention.
The challenge with security at malls and other public places with respect to terrorism is one of managing risks and balancing costs and benefits. In the case of the Westgate mall in Nairobi, or the 2012 Aurora theater shooting, or the Newtown school shooting, or the Washington Navy Yard shooting, the question isn't so much "Can we provide adequate security to ensure that this won't happen?" Rather, the issue raises several questions:
I worked for a now-defunct organizations that was, for all intents and purposes, a think tank. As such, information security was a big concern for that organization's risk management folks. At the same time, the staff needed to be able to share information with one another, and with partner organizations, so the type of aggressive security measures that might eliminate those risks weren't really an option - even if they were implemented, the risk management folks might run the risk of the staff finding ways to circumvent security measures that were preventing them from accomplishing organizational requirements. That became a constant balancing act for the folks involved in managing the risks of unauthorized disclosure of one sort of information or another.
Later, I worked for a now-defunct organization that performed vehicle maintenance. This organization didn't suffer from such overwhelming information security risks, but there was a much higher danger from terrorist attacks. Had the facility been completely locked down, it would have prevented the workforce from doing their jobs; as such, the risk management folks had to balance security needs with operational needs. Security measures that undermine operational performance are likely to lose risk management professionals the support of both the organizational leadership, and the workforce. As such, risk management is similar to counterinsurgency, in that it requires the tacit approval and cooperation of the "populace" in order to succeed.
In the case of public areas like malls, or parks, or shopping centers, one must question whether the areas in question are resourced to provide overwhelming security; but they must also ask whether that overwhelming security is commensurate with the actual threats in question, and the risks of those threats taking place. Despite occasional horrific events in public places in America and elsewhere, these events are so rare that potential dramatic upgrades in security often fail that cost/benefit analysis I mentioned earlier, both with respect to expenditure and opportunity/operational costs.
Of course, there are plenty of ways to improve security at individual facilities or venues, and many of these will be common across multiple locations. Experienced security practitioners can help organizational leaders to evaluate their threats, evaluate their risks, and put appropriate measures in place to mitigate those risks within appropriate costing boundaries.
The challenge with security at malls and other public places with respect to terrorism is one of managing risks and balancing costs and benefits. In the case of the Westgate mall in Nairobi, or the 2012 Aurora theater shooting, or the Newtown school shooting, or the Washington Navy Yard shooting, the question isn't so much "Can we provide adequate security to ensure that this won't happen?" Rather, the issue raises several questions:
1) What would adequate security cost?People like to look at the financial costs of these measures, because that's easy to quantify. What's more difficult to quantify, and often overlooked, are some of what I'll call the "opportunity costs", or perhaps "operational costs". As with a number of other factors, security requirements must always be balanced with an organization's ability to perform its purpose. Here are a couple of examples.
2) Is that cost commensurate with the likelihood of the threat?
3) If not, how much risk are we willing to assume?
4) Based upon that level of risk, what measures are we willing to put in place?
I worked for a now-defunct organizations that was, for all intents and purposes, a think tank. As such, information security was a big concern for that organization's risk management folks. At the same time, the staff needed to be able to share information with one another, and with partner organizations, so the type of aggressive security measures that might eliminate those risks weren't really an option - even if they were implemented, the risk management folks might run the risk of the staff finding ways to circumvent security measures that were preventing them from accomplishing organizational requirements. That became a constant balancing act for the folks involved in managing the risks of unauthorized disclosure of one sort of information or another.
Later, I worked for a now-defunct organization that performed vehicle maintenance. This organization didn't suffer from such overwhelming information security risks, but there was a much higher danger from terrorist attacks. Had the facility been completely locked down, it would have prevented the workforce from doing their jobs; as such, the risk management folks had to balance security needs with operational needs. Security measures that undermine operational performance are likely to lose risk management professionals the support of both the organizational leadership, and the workforce. As such, risk management is similar to counterinsurgency, in that it requires the tacit approval and cooperation of the "populace" in order to succeed.
In the case of public areas like malls, or parks, or shopping centers, one must question whether the areas in question are resourced to provide overwhelming security; but they must also ask whether that overwhelming security is commensurate with the actual threats in question, and the risks of those threats taking place. Despite occasional horrific events in public places in America and elsewhere, these events are so rare that potential dramatic upgrades in security often fail that cost/benefit analysis I mentioned earlier, both with respect to expenditure and opportunity/operational costs.
Of course, there are plenty of ways to improve security at individual facilities or venues, and many of these will be common across multiple locations. Experienced security practitioners can help organizational leaders to evaluate their threats, evaluate their risks, and put appropriate measures in place to mitigate those risks within appropriate costing boundaries.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Navy Yard Shooting - Taking a Step Back
When horrible events like yesterday's shootings at the Washington Navy Yard take place, I'm often asked for my opinion. Over the years, I've unfortunately had many occasions to develop a keen skepticism about these things. I remember the horrible events in Norway in 2011, after which pundits were quick to point the finger at al Qaeda; as I heard about the attack while driving back to housing (I was working in the Middle East at the time), I consciously thought to myself that the pundits ought to wait for the facts to come out. I had a sneaking suspicion that Norway wasn't an al Qaeda operation, and my beliefs were borne out while many commentators had to recant. The same challenges apply to the Washington Navy Yard shootings, as this op-ed notes.
Incidents such as these gain meaning only when they can be studied in detail, in order that the facts can inform improvements in security posture. Endless bloviating by ill-informed media commentators often complicates those efforts, as even expert commentators are often unfamiliar with the specific details of a given case. (I remember several law student friends making similar complaints about the coverage of the George Zimmerman verdict a few months ago, which included commentary by "experts" who admitted to being unfamiliar with the details of the case, or whom practiced completely different types of law in completely different states - in other words, their commentary did nothing to inform the viewer about the case, it merely filled air time. Now, consider how many more attorneys there are than bona fide security and/or terrorism experts.) The victims, their families, and you the viewers deserve better than sweeping generalizations, rumor, and hearsay in the wake of such tragic events.
Incidents such as these gain meaning only when they can be studied in detail, in order that the facts can inform improvements in security posture. Endless bloviating by ill-informed media commentators often complicates those efforts, as even expert commentators are often unfamiliar with the specific details of a given case. (I remember several law student friends making similar complaints about the coverage of the George Zimmerman verdict a few months ago, which included commentary by "experts" who admitted to being unfamiliar with the details of the case, or whom practiced completely different types of law in completely different states - in other words, their commentary did nothing to inform the viewer about the case, it merely filled air time. Now, consider how many more attorneys there are than bona fide security and/or terrorism experts.) The victims, their families, and you the viewers deserve better than sweeping generalizations, rumor, and hearsay in the wake of such tragic events.
Monday, September 16, 2013
Surviving Active Shooter Events
I apologize for the sporadic posting of late. Followers of the Operation Highlander blog will know that I've had a few bits and pieces to take care of.
As I write this, I'm currently undertaking a security-related course about which I'll speak in more detail later. Today, I've been watching the active shooter event at the Washington Navy Yard unfold by way of Ranger Up's Facebook feed. I wanted to post the following video, which circulated after the horrific events in Newtown a few months ago. The video is well made and simple, and the information is solid.
Godspeed to the sheep dogs who are currently working to secure the Washington Navy Yard.
As I write this, I'm currently undertaking a security-related course about which I'll speak in more detail later. Today, I've been watching the active shooter event at the Washington Navy Yard unfold by way of Ranger Up's Facebook feed. I wanted to post the following video, which circulated after the horrific events in Newtown a few months ago. The video is well made and simple, and the information is solid.
Godspeed to the sheep dogs who are currently working to secure the Washington Navy Yard.
Saturday, August 24, 2013
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Thinking Through Surveillance Capabilities
I posted something similar to this on Facebook last night:
Be that as it may, as a security professional, I understand the need for programs and technical capabilities to try to keep people safe. There are certainly questions about scope, accountability, a citizen's right to and expectation of privacy, and mission creep. One of the benefits of the Western system is that we're able to actually ask these questions, and hold elected officials responsible when bounds are overstepped. I certainly don't think that this makes Edward Snowden a "hero" or a "whistleblower" - I think he's a traitor, and I hope that he faces justice sooner rather than later. Nor do I take much issue with legislation such as the PATRIOT Act. These programs are necessary, both from a public safety standpoint and from an overall risk management - as opposed to risk avoidance or acceptance - standpoint. What's important is that American voters continually ask these questions of their legislators and discuss the economic, political, and social ramifications of these programs in order to ensure that they serve their necessary function without being abused.
Here's a thought to keep you up at night. Everyone's been really upset about the whole Edward Snowden thing, and rightfully so; but think about this for a moment. CCTV/surveillance cameras are everywhere - moreso in the United Kingdom than the United States, but the United States is starting to expand CCTV coverage as well. Think back to the last time you uploaded a bunch of pictures to Facebook. Do you remember how Facebook knew EXACTLY who most of your friends were from facial recognition software? In fact, I recently uploaded a picture of myself and someone whom I had never uploaded a picture of, whom I'd only been friends with for a matter of days, and Facebook tagged her automatically, it didn't even ask me. Let's continue down this particular rabbit hole...One of my buddies claimed that a simple head tilt of fifteen degrees is enough to throw off the facial recognition software, but I'm skeptical. Another buddy posted this link, which I found to be enlightening; I've read 1984, but not Brave New World. Based upon the comic, I tend to think that aspects of both visions were prescient. (The concept is also reminiscent of several scenes in the 2002 film Minority Report.)
Now, think about how the only difference between a picture and a video is that a video is a lot of pictures displayed in sequence
Now, consider that the only limitation on applying Facebook-style facial recognition software to those videos is computing power.
Now, consider how much more accurate and powerful the software that governments use must be than what Facebook's using.
Now, remember that earlier point about how many CCTV/security cameras you walk past on a daily basis.
Now, ask yourself how similar the voice recognition capabilities must be.
I thought this through in a matter of about sixty seconds while walking from the bus to my room, and as I continue thinking, it really does feel like the days of Big Brother are upon us. Now, consider how glad you are that it was the accountable democratic model that won the Cold War, and not the authoritarian system that the democratic states were fighting.
Be that as it may, as a security professional, I understand the need for programs and technical capabilities to try to keep people safe. There are certainly questions about scope, accountability, a citizen's right to and expectation of privacy, and mission creep. One of the benefits of the Western system is that we're able to actually ask these questions, and hold elected officials responsible when bounds are overstepped. I certainly don't think that this makes Edward Snowden a "hero" or a "whistleblower" - I think he's a traitor, and I hope that he faces justice sooner rather than later. Nor do I take much issue with legislation such as the PATRIOT Act. These programs are necessary, both from a public safety standpoint and from an overall risk management - as opposed to risk avoidance or acceptance - standpoint. What's important is that American voters continually ask these questions of their legislators and discuss the economic, political, and social ramifications of these programs in order to ensure that they serve their necessary function without being abused.
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Liberal Arts Education Meets Risk Management Follow-Up
A few days ago, I published this post about liberal arts education. Just to follow up, here are a couple of articles I'd been holding in reserve: Worst College Majors for Your Career, and Ranger Up CEO Nick Palmisciano's 11 Get Into College Tips. That second one was a follow-up to Palmisciano's excellent video series on How to Get a Job. You know what they say: knowledge is power.
Friday, July 19, 2013
Rethinking Locks
Every day, we put a lot of trust in locks and keys. Have a look at some of these videos, and then reconsider that trust accordingly.
I picked my very first lock back in May - a fairly simple lock for a desk cabinet drawer. I picked it so that my classmates and I could use it, as the key had long since been lost. When researching how to go about trying it - for me, all it took was a straightened paper clip - I watched a few clips, and was both fascinated and shocked by how simple these mechanisms that we place so much trust in actually are. This, folks, is why a simple lock isn't enough to truly safeguard your family, possessions, or workplace.
I picked my very first lock back in May - a fairly simple lock for a desk cabinet drawer. I picked it so that my classmates and I could use it, as the key had long since been lost. When researching how to go about trying it - for me, all it took was a straightened paper clip - I watched a few clips, and was both fascinated and shocked by how simple these mechanisms that we place so much trust in actually are. This, folks, is why a simple lock isn't enough to truly safeguard your family, possessions, or workplace.
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Personal Security Online and In Person Follow-Up
Following up on this post, there are a few related stories: Love Is a Battlefield: How the Taliban are using sex to fight America, She’s Just Not That Into You: Air Force Warns of Online ‘Sextortion’, and Here’s a Reminder Not To Tell Your Foreign Lover U.S. Nuke Secrets. If you're in a position of sensitivity, either in national security or otherwise, and someone is really interested in you and really interested in the nitty, gritty details of what you do, then it may very well be too good to be true.
Saturday, July 13, 2013
Thoughts on Edward Snowden: Part 1
Owing to my background, a lot of people have asked me for my take on Edward Snowden. The story continues to develop, and there's a whole lot of bluster and nonsense to clear away from the actual facts. Without using indelicate language, I'll concisely say that I don't see Edward Snowden as a whistleblower; rather, I think that this is a rather clear-cut case of treason. I hope very much that Snowden is eventually apprehended and made to face justice.
The unfolding story raises a variety of questions, most of which are either being glazed over by the media, misrepresented by people who don't understand the issues, or ignored entirely. I want to go over a few of those issues and try to cut through the garbage.
* * *
First, let's look at vetting.
Part of the challenge in a case like Snowden's is the question of whether he was fit for the position into which he was hired. Accusations of poor vetting were leveled against the government agencies in question, and against Booz Allen Hamilton (the defense contractor that hired Snowden). The accusation that's often reiterated is that Snowden wasn't properly vetted.
Let's look at a different case for a moment. One of the issues that coalition forces in Afghanistan have run into over the last few years is the challenge of proper vetting. One story that I keyed in on months ago, and had been meaning to discuss prior to the Snowden affair, was the case of a particular "green-on-blue" attack in Afghanistan. In December, a policewoman who killed an American advisor in Afghanistan was later revealed to be an Iranian national who had illegally obtained Afghan identity papers. (source, source) Vetting in a place like Afghanistan is very difficult, which is one of the reasons why nepotism plays such an active role in such societies. Without the kind of national infrastructure we in the West take for granted, the measure of one's trustworthiness is how well connected they are to those in authority. In the West, we put our institutional memory on paper or commit it to electrons; in a place like Afghanistan, institutional memory - to include one's crimes - rests in the memory of the elders.
But why is vetting important in the first place? The answer, friends, is risk. People and organizations want to eliminate risk; but in reality, risk is inevitable, hence the need to manage it. In the case of vetting, an individual or organization is trying to determine whether a candidate is a suitable security risk. This takes a variety of forms dependent upon the role in which a candidate will be serving, but the underlying purpose is always the same: to determine whether a candidate is a minimal enough security risk to warrant investing trust into them.
So, what about Edward Snowden? Without being privy to the specifics of the case, one can conjecture that Edward Snowden - regardless of his motives - must have passed a variety of vetting procedures by both BAH and the government to get to the position that he held. It wasn't in the government's interest to hire someone who would use his access to leak information, nor was it in BAH's interest to put forth a candidate who would leak information. BAH, but moreso the government customer who conducts the actual background investigations, would have been looking at a pool of candidates who met the requirements for the work itself, one category of which would have been the security requirements.
Another question, once again tied back into BAH, was described by the BBC as the "rise of the low-level contractor with high-level access". The confusion on behalf of the BBC is understandable, as the Brits tend to throw civil servants at the same tasks at which America throws contractors. Contractors have gotten a bum rap over the last few years because of their ubiquity in Afghanistan and Iraq. In reality, contractors provide things like subject matter expertise and operational flexibility that you don't get from uniformed or civil service personnel. Uniforms, civil servants, and contractors all come with pros and cons. One of the pros of contractors both stateside and overseas is that they fill manpower gaps left by a combination of permanent force reductions following the 1990's "Peace Dividend", and operational tempo increases since 9/11. It's also worth noting that most contractors - including Snowden himself - boast military service of one sort or another.
In Snowden's case, it's possible that there was a lack of due diligence in one aspect or another of his vetting. In all honesty, though, one has to consider whether or not the major "warning signs" that I've heard bandied about - such as the fact that Snowden wasn't a high school graduate, or that he'd washed out of the Army - would have, or even should have, been red flags. Snowden has allegedly exaggerated his biography and credentials, but the bottom line is that if he had turned his life around since high school, it's likely that an objective investigation would have cleared him.
None of that absolves Snowden of his apparent crimes. The point I'm trying to get across is that in order to accomplish any task, an individual or organization must assume some degree of risk. The American government employs hundreds of thousands, even millions, of personnel in roles relating to national security. The fact that so few among that number - people like Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning - actively choose to betray those secrets, means that in actuality, America does a pretty good job of managing these risks.
* * *
At least, from a personnel security standpoint, they do a pretty good job. The advent of personal computing has introduced new risks to information security that were unheard of even ten years ago, and exacerbated existing ones. Despite countermeasures and efforts at mitigation, information systems are built for disseminating data, which makes them a big risk factor for both unauthorized dissemination (leaks) and malicious theft of data (hacking).
This raises a number of questions, and I'll address them in my concluding post.
The unfolding story raises a variety of questions, most of which are either being glazed over by the media, misrepresented by people who don't understand the issues, or ignored entirely. I want to go over a few of those issues and try to cut through the garbage.
First, let's look at vetting.
Part of the challenge in a case like Snowden's is the question of whether he was fit for the position into which he was hired. Accusations of poor vetting were leveled against the government agencies in question, and against Booz Allen Hamilton (the defense contractor that hired Snowden). The accusation that's often reiterated is that Snowden wasn't properly vetted.
Let's look at a different case for a moment. One of the issues that coalition forces in Afghanistan have run into over the last few years is the challenge of proper vetting. One story that I keyed in on months ago, and had been meaning to discuss prior to the Snowden affair, was the case of a particular "green-on-blue" attack in Afghanistan. In December, a policewoman who killed an American advisor in Afghanistan was later revealed to be an Iranian national who had illegally obtained Afghan identity papers. (source, source) Vetting in a place like Afghanistan is very difficult, which is one of the reasons why nepotism plays such an active role in such societies. Without the kind of national infrastructure we in the West take for granted, the measure of one's trustworthiness is how well connected they are to those in authority. In the West, we put our institutional memory on paper or commit it to electrons; in a place like Afghanistan, institutional memory - to include one's crimes - rests in the memory of the elders.
But why is vetting important in the first place? The answer, friends, is risk. People and organizations want to eliminate risk; but in reality, risk is inevitable, hence the need to manage it. In the case of vetting, an individual or organization is trying to determine whether a candidate is a suitable security risk. This takes a variety of forms dependent upon the role in which a candidate will be serving, but the underlying purpose is always the same: to determine whether a candidate is a minimal enough security risk to warrant investing trust into them.
So, what about Edward Snowden? Without being privy to the specifics of the case, one can conjecture that Edward Snowden - regardless of his motives - must have passed a variety of vetting procedures by both BAH and the government to get to the position that he held. It wasn't in the government's interest to hire someone who would use his access to leak information, nor was it in BAH's interest to put forth a candidate who would leak information. BAH, but moreso the government customer who conducts the actual background investigations, would have been looking at a pool of candidates who met the requirements for the work itself, one category of which would have been the security requirements.
Another question, once again tied back into BAH, was described by the BBC as the "rise of the low-level contractor with high-level access". The confusion on behalf of the BBC is understandable, as the Brits tend to throw civil servants at the same tasks at which America throws contractors. Contractors have gotten a bum rap over the last few years because of their ubiquity in Afghanistan and Iraq. In reality, contractors provide things like subject matter expertise and operational flexibility that you don't get from uniformed or civil service personnel. Uniforms, civil servants, and contractors all come with pros and cons. One of the pros of contractors both stateside and overseas is that they fill manpower gaps left by a combination of permanent force reductions following the 1990's "Peace Dividend", and operational tempo increases since 9/11. It's also worth noting that most contractors - including Snowden himself - boast military service of one sort or another.
In Snowden's case, it's possible that there was a lack of due diligence in one aspect or another of his vetting. In all honesty, though, one has to consider whether or not the major "warning signs" that I've heard bandied about - such as the fact that Snowden wasn't a high school graduate, or that he'd washed out of the Army - would have, or even should have, been red flags. Snowden has allegedly exaggerated his biography and credentials, but the bottom line is that if he had turned his life around since high school, it's likely that an objective investigation would have cleared him.
None of that absolves Snowden of his apparent crimes. The point I'm trying to get across is that in order to accomplish any task, an individual or organization must assume some degree of risk. The American government employs hundreds of thousands, even millions, of personnel in roles relating to national security. The fact that so few among that number - people like Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning - actively choose to betray those secrets, means that in actuality, America does a pretty good job of managing these risks.
At least, from a personnel security standpoint, they do a pretty good job. The advent of personal computing has introduced new risks to information security that were unheard of even ten years ago, and exacerbated existing ones. Despite countermeasures and efforts at mitigation, information systems are built for disseminating data, which makes them a big risk factor for both unauthorized dissemination (leaks) and malicious theft of data (hacking).
This raises a number of questions, and I'll address them in my concluding post.
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Travel Safely Follow-Up
A few months ago, I published this post on travel safety. At the time, I apparently hadn't seen this story about a woman in the late stages of her pregnancy who disappeared while on a trip to Central and South Asia, including Pakistan and Afghanistan. At the risk of trivializing an obviously tragic situation, it seems obvious that women in advanced stages of pregnancy shouldn't be travelling in dangerous areas like Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Failing at Digital Redundancy
The Department of Defense refers to network security as "Information Assurance" (IA) - the idea being that appropriate network security implementation will result in assured access to the information and networks needed by America's warfighters. Information Assurance protocols are governed by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), with additional influence from U.S. Cyber Command and the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) Computer Security Resource Center (CSRC). DoD and NIST guidance informs similar standards in private industry, and vice versa.
Network security is built on the "CIA Triad": Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. Generally speaking, Availability constitutes the ability to access data easily. Confidentiality involves restricting access to only the intended audience. Integrity requires that the data being accessed is free from external tampering. In a secure system, availability is typically sacrificed for the benefit of Integrity and Confidentiality; in less secure systems, Availability is optimized at the cost of Confidentiality and Integrity.
With all of that in mind, I found this item at Failblog both amusing and extremely topical. This touches on all three legs of the CIA Triad. Depending on where the laptop in question was stolen from, the individual in question may have been emphasizing Availability at the cost of Confidentiality and Integrity. It also betrays a lack of appropriate backups on the part of the laptop's owner - a risk mitigation measure emphasized by DoD and NIST IA doctrine - to ensure that a catastrophic failure (or, in his case, a theft) doesn't result in a total loss of data Integrity and/or Availability.
If your data's important to you, back it up. In the case of this particular PhD candidate, the data was extremely important, and I can't imagine that the whole thing turned out well for him. As one of my former colleagues was fond of noting, if you can't maintain positive physical control of your assets at all times, then your system is not secure.
Network security is built on the "CIA Triad": Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. Generally speaking, Availability constitutes the ability to access data easily. Confidentiality involves restricting access to only the intended audience. Integrity requires that the data being accessed is free from external tampering. In a secure system, availability is typically sacrificed for the benefit of Integrity and Confidentiality; in less secure systems, Availability is optimized at the cost of Confidentiality and Integrity.
With all of that in mind, I found this item at Failblog both amusing and extremely topical. This touches on all three legs of the CIA Triad. Depending on where the laptop in question was stolen from, the individual in question may have been emphasizing Availability at the cost of Confidentiality and Integrity. It also betrays a lack of appropriate backups on the part of the laptop's owner - a risk mitigation measure emphasized by DoD and NIST IA doctrine - to ensure that a catastrophic failure (or, in his case, a theft) doesn't result in a total loss of data Integrity and/or Availability.
If your data's important to you, back it up. In the case of this particular PhD candidate, the data was extremely important, and I can't imagine that the whole thing turned out well for him. As one of my former colleagues was fond of noting, if you can't maintain positive physical control of your assets at all times, then your system is not secure.
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Just for Fun: The Sporkful on War Zone Eating
This post is just for fun. Sometimes, I enjoy listening to The Sporkful podcast, which is about food. It's kind of an inside joke, as my perpetual boss once bought me a titanium spork, which replaced an MRE spoon I'd been using to eat lunch at work since I'd gotten there. (It may have actually been the second MRE spoon - those things are great, but they're not indestructible.) Anyway, a couple of months ago, The Sporkful did a pretty entertaining podcast on "War Zone Eating", and even though it's not directly related to risk management, I figured I'd share it in the "just for fun" category.
My own tenure overseas didn't involve a single MRE, much to my chagrin. However, an earlier era of my career involved a lot of MREs. My favorite tip for eating an MRE involves the packaging for most of your main courses. The packaging wants you to open it at the top, where there are two perforations. Resist that urge! Instead, turn the packaging ninety degrees, then take out your favorite blade - a KA-BAR will do the trick, but something smaller like a CRKT M4-02W is a lot better suited to the task - and cut along the long edge. This will make the "bowl" created by the opened foil pouch long and shallow, instead of deep and narrow. Guess which one is easier to get at with your MRE spoon? If you said "long and shallow", you're correct.
By the way, I can't recommend the titanium spork highly enough. It's unquestionably one of the best gifts I've ever received in my life. If you want to manage your risk of needing a great eating utensil under any circumstance, you can't go wrong with a titanium spork that fits into any day pack.
My own tenure overseas didn't involve a single MRE, much to my chagrin. However, an earlier era of my career involved a lot of MREs. My favorite tip for eating an MRE involves the packaging for most of your main courses. The packaging wants you to open it at the top, where there are two perforations. Resist that urge! Instead, turn the packaging ninety degrees, then take out your favorite blade - a KA-BAR will do the trick, but something smaller like a CRKT M4-02W is a lot better suited to the task - and cut along the long edge. This will make the "bowl" created by the opened foil pouch long and shallow, instead of deep and narrow. Guess which one is easier to get at with your MRE spoon? If you said "long and shallow", you're correct.
By the way, I can't recommend the titanium spork highly enough. It's unquestionably one of the best gifts I've ever received in my life. If you want to manage your risk of needing a great eating utensil under any circumstance, you can't go wrong with a titanium spork that fits into any day pack.
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Liberal Arts Education Meets Risk Management
First and foremost, please allow me to apologize for the dearth of posts over the last few months. Between coursework, exams, my dissertation, and a bit of travel, it's was a busy semester. I have several items I hope to post here over the next few weeks, with content gradually increasing as I complete my time in Scotland. In the mean time, this post is inspired by a good friend of mine whom I'll call Friar Dave, who posted an article on Facebook today: Humanities Committee Sounds an Alarm. I posted the following comment (with a couple of edits for blog posting) based solely on the headline and Friar Dave's brief comment:
In no way are humanities and social sciences "endangered". There is no risk of STEM education "diminishing a huge source of the nation's intellectual strength". In fact, humanities and social sciences are luxuries that many employment-minded students can ill afford. Accusations that social sciences are frequently frivolous, and sometimes fraudulent, are entirely accurate. We are in an era of persistent scarcity. In times of plenty, people can afford to enroll in the humanities. In times of scarcity, they can't afford to do so because, unlike STEM or other directly applicable fields of study, humanities provide less guarantee of subsequent employment. There's your cause, and there's your effect.
The article cites some statistics. For example, in 1954, Harvard had a 36 percent humanities enrollment rate, while in 2012 that was down to 20 percent. That makes me wonder how many people they had majoring in computer science in 1954. One in five people majoring in humanities at Harvard doesn't strike me as particularly alarming, and the fact that only 7.6 percent of bachelor's degrees were awarded in humanities in 2010 seems like correlation to me, not causation. Conversely, the article lists President Obama and Governor Romney, among others, as distinguished individuals who studied social sciences and/or humanities. President Obama and Governor Romney both went to Ivy League schools, which means that it really doesn't matter what they studied; both grew up in wealthy families (despite President Obama's campaign rhetoric, he went to an exclusive preparatory school, and the grandmother who raised him on behalf of his largely absent mother was vice president of a bank). Bill Gates is frequently cited as a successful college dropout - he dropped out of Harvard. One can't compare folks like these to your average university student.
As insinuated by the article's paragraph referencing the National Science Foundation, a great deal of work in the social sciences is nakedly partisan in nature, and even more of it is conducted for the sake of pure knowledge - this is to say, without any realistic expectation of practical applicability - and that's a problem. A great example of this, regardless of your take on any of these issues, is the controversy over the course of the last decade surrounding the employment of social scientists, particularly anthropologists, by the military's Human Terrain System (HTS). American anthropologists, either in universities or otherwise, are largely dependent upon government largesse of one sort or another. However, when the federal government sought out social scientists to assist with the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American Anthropological Association stonewalled, citing academic integrity concerns. (In fact, anthropology is a left-leaning community, and the AAA was legitimately criticized for using academic integrity as a justification for refusing to assist an administration and war effort that they had already opposed.) Those social scientists who elected to participate in the HTS have found themselves blackballed by the academic establishment. This raises the very legitimate question: if social science can't or won't be applied to solve national challenges, what justification is there to spend taxpayer dollars to underwrite the education and employment those social scientists?
The report's endorsement of the Common Core, and the article's discussion of research versus teaching, betrays the report's underlying purpose. Many of those folks on the Humanities Commission benefit from the equivalent of corporate welfare from the federal government, and they're worried that in an era of austerity, their corporate welfare will be reduced or eliminated because both politicians and constituents see humanities and social sciences as a non-productive investment that doesn't improve employability in the modern economy, or serve other national political purposes. The report is an effort to protect that corporate welfare, so that professors can keep pursuing both productive and frivolous research, funded at taxpayer expense, and commensurate with the "Common Core" concept (at my alma mater, it was called the baccalaureate core, but the concepts are essentially the same) that requires every university student to take something along the lines of half of their courses from departments that have nothing to do with their major. For example, as an undergraduate, one of my requirements for graduation was to take a course from a category in which all of the offerings were focused on denigrating caucasian males. In my own opinion, the course I took was a waste of more than thirty hours of my life that I'll never get back; but it justified keeping a professor employed, and allowed her to continue her entirely partisan and, in my opinion, socially divisive, research.
Note: For what it's worth, I ended up taking a mix of both invaluable and non-valuable courses to satisfy these requirements; by contrast, the British system involves very little study outside your chosen discipline. There are benefits and drawbacks to each approach, but on the balance, I think that some course diversity is a good thing. The question, then, is whether or not the current prevailing system in American education does a good job of providing students with a well-rounded education, or merely provides corporate welfare to the academic industrial complex. That's another discussion for another day.
So, what does all of this have to do with risk management? The connections are tenuous, but the issues raised demonstrate two major concepts: risk management itself, and cost/benefit analysis.
At the personal level, enrolling in higher education involves assuming risks, mainly financial, with the expectation of an eventual payoff in improved employability and earning potential. When one makes the decision to enroll, doing so in humanities and social sciences - otherwise referred to as the liberal arts - involves a greater amount of risk than, say, enrollment in a radiology program, or vocational training to become a plumber or an electrician. In contemporary American education, and coupled with the seemingly perpetual sluggishness of the global economy, the role of cost in general, and student loans in particular, also comes into play. People pursuing higher education have to ask themselves: if I'm going to commit to paying ABC for an XYZ credential, what is the risk of not finding a job in that degree field when I finish it? What is the risk of being in a worse financial situation at the end of the program than I was at the beginning of the program? In the case of liberal arts degree programs, there are few direct ties between those programs and post-graduation employment in the way that a degree in a STEM discipline, or accounting, or the medical field, or a variety of other programs ties into a specific post-graduation vocation.
Conversely, one can approach it from a cost/benefit analytical perspective. At the national level, policy-makers must consider the political benefits relative to the financial and opportunity costs of spending taxpayer funds on subsidies for particular academic programs. As I mentioned with the HTS, it seems that the federal government may be concerned - and rightly so - with the lack of benefit from subsidies for the liberal arts relative to their current cost, particularly at a time in which federal expenditures are under increased scrutiny from policy-makers due to increased disillusionment in the electorate over federal fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. At the personal level (as insinuated in that last paragraph), people must consider whether the benefit of a particular degree program will justify its cost - again, also considering the state of the economy and the extenuating financial circumstances brought on by the use of student loans.
One of the equalizing factors is the flexibility of a liberal arts degree. For example, a student graduating with a bachelor of science in accounting has a good chance of finding employment as an accountant due to the objective standard with which such a degree is awarded. By contrast, a student graduating with a bachelor of arts in history is less apt to find work in a job directly related to the study of history; however, the skills provided by such a degree are more adaptable to positions which don't involve specific vocational training. Because the liberal arts tend to be a more subjective field, there's a bit more room for flexibility when considering a history graduate's credentials and background.
So, let's say that you have a liberal arts degree, or intend to pursue one. How can you mitigate some of these risks? Being a liberal arts degree holder myself, I've consistently found that having what I call a "gimmick" has helped me immensely. In my case, it's my Arabic language skills and my military connection, which involve skills that are both scarce and in high demand. One of my best friends got a liberal arts degree and had a prior employment background in public safety, and quite easily found employment in law enforcement. Still other friends have been able to combine military experience with a liberal arts education and be accordingly successful. In the end, completing a degree of any kind demonstrates an ability to commit to finishing something, along with commensurate levels of maturity, intelligence, and aptitude. Since Western education has placed a sort of artificial ephasis on sending most high school graduates to bachelor's degree programs (often at the cost of viable and entirely appropriate vocational training programs), the already-contracting job market has been saturated with folks who meet these standards. The result is that liberal arts degree holders must take additional measures to make themselves stand out to recruiters and hiring managers.
Although these matters don't relate directly to security risk management, they speak to larger risk management concepts and cost/benefit analysis. This makes them valuable object lessons in some of the concepts that risk management specialists apply their skill sets to on a regular basis.
It's falling out of favor on campuses because it doesn't help people get jobs, and that's the point of "investing" thousands upon thousands of dollars in a bachelor's degree. We send too many people to universities already, and the ones who don't fail outright often drop to subjective and comparatively easy humanities majors when they can't hack a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) major, after which point they don't get any boost toward getting a job. There's also the little matter of the fact that we're in a continuing economic recession, and if someone's unemployed and decides to go back to school for a degree, they'll be less likely to enter a degree program like history, English, or philosophy that allows them to "find themselves" - they're going to take something more applicable to the job market in an effort to break the unemployment cycle.This post grew out of a list of points I was making in direct response to the article itself, so read the following section with that disclaimer in mind.
To give you an example from my own life, you're aware that I'm studying applied social sciences - military strategy - at the postgraduate level... with the realistic expectation that it will improve my ability to advance within the career field in which I've been working for several years now. I regularly interact with several anthropology MRes and PhD students who are quite open about the fact that they're pursuing degrees for which they will never find gainful or even productive employment. Why? Because we have a surplus of people studying the humanities, caused in large part by two factors: 1) sending too many people into university education, many of whom shouldn't be there in the first place; and 2) telling all of our children that they're winners who can and should do whatever they want, instead of giving them the cold, hard truth about how they'll need to fight themselves and compete against their peers in order to get ahead in this world.
In no way are humanities and social sciences "endangered". There is no risk of STEM education "diminishing a huge source of the nation's intellectual strength". In fact, humanities and social sciences are luxuries that many employment-minded students can ill afford. Accusations that social sciences are frequently frivolous, and sometimes fraudulent, are entirely accurate. We are in an era of persistent scarcity. In times of plenty, people can afford to enroll in the humanities. In times of scarcity, they can't afford to do so because, unlike STEM or other directly applicable fields of study, humanities provide less guarantee of subsequent employment. There's your cause, and there's your effect.
The article cites some statistics. For example, in 1954, Harvard had a 36 percent humanities enrollment rate, while in 2012 that was down to 20 percent. That makes me wonder how many people they had majoring in computer science in 1954. One in five people majoring in humanities at Harvard doesn't strike me as particularly alarming, and the fact that only 7.6 percent of bachelor's degrees were awarded in humanities in 2010 seems like correlation to me, not causation. Conversely, the article lists President Obama and Governor Romney, among others, as distinguished individuals who studied social sciences and/or humanities. President Obama and Governor Romney both went to Ivy League schools, which means that it really doesn't matter what they studied; both grew up in wealthy families (despite President Obama's campaign rhetoric, he went to an exclusive preparatory school, and the grandmother who raised him on behalf of his largely absent mother was vice president of a bank). Bill Gates is frequently cited as a successful college dropout - he dropped out of Harvard. One can't compare folks like these to your average university student.
As insinuated by the article's paragraph referencing the National Science Foundation, a great deal of work in the social sciences is nakedly partisan in nature, and even more of it is conducted for the sake of pure knowledge - this is to say, without any realistic expectation of practical applicability - and that's a problem. A great example of this, regardless of your take on any of these issues, is the controversy over the course of the last decade surrounding the employment of social scientists, particularly anthropologists, by the military's Human Terrain System (HTS). American anthropologists, either in universities or otherwise, are largely dependent upon government largesse of one sort or another. However, when the federal government sought out social scientists to assist with the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American Anthropological Association stonewalled, citing academic integrity concerns. (In fact, anthropology is a left-leaning community, and the AAA was legitimately criticized for using academic integrity as a justification for refusing to assist an administration and war effort that they had already opposed.) Those social scientists who elected to participate in the HTS have found themselves blackballed by the academic establishment. This raises the very legitimate question: if social science can't or won't be applied to solve national challenges, what justification is there to spend taxpayer dollars to underwrite the education and employment those social scientists?
The report's endorsement of the Common Core, and the article's discussion of research versus teaching, betrays the report's underlying purpose. Many of those folks on the Humanities Commission benefit from the equivalent of corporate welfare from the federal government, and they're worried that in an era of austerity, their corporate welfare will be reduced or eliminated because both politicians and constituents see humanities and social sciences as a non-productive investment that doesn't improve employability in the modern economy, or serve other national political purposes. The report is an effort to protect that corporate welfare, so that professors can keep pursuing both productive and frivolous research, funded at taxpayer expense, and commensurate with the "Common Core" concept (at my alma mater, it was called the baccalaureate core, but the concepts are essentially the same) that requires every university student to take something along the lines of half of their courses from departments that have nothing to do with their major. For example, as an undergraduate, one of my requirements for graduation was to take a course from a category in which all of the offerings were focused on denigrating caucasian males. In my own opinion, the course I took was a waste of more than thirty hours of my life that I'll never get back; but it justified keeping a professor employed, and allowed her to continue her entirely partisan and, in my opinion, socially divisive, research.
Note: For what it's worth, I ended up taking a mix of both invaluable and non-valuable courses to satisfy these requirements; by contrast, the British system involves very little study outside your chosen discipline. There are benefits and drawbacks to each approach, but on the balance, I think that some course diversity is a good thing. The question, then, is whether or not the current prevailing system in American education does a good job of providing students with a well-rounded education, or merely provides corporate welfare to the academic industrial complex. That's another discussion for another day.
So, what does all of this have to do with risk management? The connections are tenuous, but the issues raised demonstrate two major concepts: risk management itself, and cost/benefit analysis.
At the personal level, enrolling in higher education involves assuming risks, mainly financial, with the expectation of an eventual payoff in improved employability and earning potential. When one makes the decision to enroll, doing so in humanities and social sciences - otherwise referred to as the liberal arts - involves a greater amount of risk than, say, enrollment in a radiology program, or vocational training to become a plumber or an electrician. In contemporary American education, and coupled with the seemingly perpetual sluggishness of the global economy, the role of cost in general, and student loans in particular, also comes into play. People pursuing higher education have to ask themselves: if I'm going to commit to paying ABC for an XYZ credential, what is the risk of not finding a job in that degree field when I finish it? What is the risk of being in a worse financial situation at the end of the program than I was at the beginning of the program? In the case of liberal arts degree programs, there are few direct ties between those programs and post-graduation employment in the way that a degree in a STEM discipline, or accounting, or the medical field, or a variety of other programs ties into a specific post-graduation vocation.
Conversely, one can approach it from a cost/benefit analytical perspective. At the national level, policy-makers must consider the political benefits relative to the financial and opportunity costs of spending taxpayer funds on subsidies for particular academic programs. As I mentioned with the HTS, it seems that the federal government may be concerned - and rightly so - with the lack of benefit from subsidies for the liberal arts relative to their current cost, particularly at a time in which federal expenditures are under increased scrutiny from policy-makers due to increased disillusionment in the electorate over federal fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. At the personal level (as insinuated in that last paragraph), people must consider whether the benefit of a particular degree program will justify its cost - again, also considering the state of the economy and the extenuating financial circumstances brought on by the use of student loans.
One of the equalizing factors is the flexibility of a liberal arts degree. For example, a student graduating with a bachelor of science in accounting has a good chance of finding employment as an accountant due to the objective standard with which such a degree is awarded. By contrast, a student graduating with a bachelor of arts in history is less apt to find work in a job directly related to the study of history; however, the skills provided by such a degree are more adaptable to positions which don't involve specific vocational training. Because the liberal arts tend to be a more subjective field, there's a bit more room for flexibility when considering a history graduate's credentials and background.
So, let's say that you have a liberal arts degree, or intend to pursue one. How can you mitigate some of these risks? Being a liberal arts degree holder myself, I've consistently found that having what I call a "gimmick" has helped me immensely. In my case, it's my Arabic language skills and my military connection, which involve skills that are both scarce and in high demand. One of my best friends got a liberal arts degree and had a prior employment background in public safety, and quite easily found employment in law enforcement. Still other friends have been able to combine military experience with a liberal arts education and be accordingly successful. In the end, completing a degree of any kind demonstrates an ability to commit to finishing something, along with commensurate levels of maturity, intelligence, and aptitude. Since Western education has placed a sort of artificial ephasis on sending most high school graduates to bachelor's degree programs (often at the cost of viable and entirely appropriate vocational training programs), the already-contracting job market has been saturated with folks who meet these standards. The result is that liberal arts degree holders must take additional measures to make themselves stand out to recruiters and hiring managers.
Although these matters don't relate directly to security risk management, they speak to larger risk management concepts and cost/benefit analysis. This makes them valuable object lessons in some of the concepts that risk management specialists apply their skill sets to on a regular basis.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
A Couple of Quick Items
A friend shared this item, 5 Things to Never Keep in Your Wallet, with me the other day. It's worth a look, and I agree with each item, though I'm not sure how many folks actually keep a spare house key in their wallet.
The other item is a fun and revealing follow-up to my recent posts about geospatial risk management (1, 2). As you watch, keep in mind that these items were much easier to find using readily available overhead imagery than they were for folks on the ground. The only one of these I knew before watching the video was the grounded ship off the coast of Sudan, which I found on Wikimapia a few years ago. If I could find that, you can only imagine what an adversary could find out about you with just a little background information and access to open source GEOINT resources.
The other item is a fun and revealing follow-up to my recent posts about geospatial risk management (1, 2). As you watch, keep in mind that these items were much easier to find using readily available overhead imagery than they were for folks on the ground. The only one of these I knew before watching the video was the grounded ship off the coast of Sudan, which I found on Wikimapia a few years ago. If I could find that, you can only imagine what an adversary could find out about you with just a little background information and access to open source GEOINT resources.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Egypt, F-16s, and American Strategy
States manage their international risks by way of economics, diplomacy, and armed force. Sometimes, two or even all three can get intertwined.
Why do I say this? Well, I've seen recent events causing a lot of consternation among some of my more politically aware friends on Facebook. This consternation stems from an apparent contradiction on the part of the Obama Administration. On the one hand, the Obama Administration is making a concerted effort to enact sweeping gun restrictions in the wake of the horrific school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. On the other hand, the Administration is providing the Muslim Brotherhood with cutting edge weapons, including F-16 fighter aircraft and M1 Abrams main battle tanks. The consternation is understandable, but the situation requires some context.
I'm personally critical of the Obama Administration's gun control efforts. As a subject matter expert in physical security and anti-terrorism, I can say with some confidence that it's entirely counterintuitive and demonstrably inaccurate that disarming law-abiding citizens makes nations safer. It also seems obvious that such efforts are directly contrary to the Constitution, the will of the Founders, and the essence of American politics, all of which have rendered political violence virtually absent from the history of the Republic. However, that's another matter. What's important to understand in this situation is the reason why the Muslim Brotherhood is getting these sophisticated weapon systems.
First, we should dispense with the notion that the Obama Administration is sending weapons to the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, the Obama Administration is providing weapons to the Egyptian military. Given that the Muslim Brotherhood holds power in Egypt, this would seem like a contradiction; in point of fact, however, following the Free Officers Coup of 1952, the Egyptian military has existed as an entity unto itself. Since 1952, Egypt has been ruled by in turn by Gamal Abdel Nasser, then Anwar Sadat, and finally Hosni Mubarak, the latter of whom was deposed in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution in conjunction with the Arab Spring. All were actually military officers who wore the title of "president" despite ruling as de facto military autocrats. There have been some fundamental changes to the structure and legal character of the Egyptian government since the 2011 revolution, but the revolution - in essence - replaced the disgraced Mubarak with a Muslim Brotherhood figurehead, while leaving the military domination of the country battered but mostly intact. This has emboldened the Muslim Brotherhood, but as the protests over President Mohammed Morsi's attempts to grant himself sweeping powers, and the current ongoing protests throughout Egypt demonstrate, the Brothers' hold on power in Egypt is tenuous at best. At least for the time being, the Egyptian military remain Egypt's potential kingmakers.
Formerly allied with the Soviet Union, the Egyptian military has maintained close relations with the United States since the late 1970's. This results in part from the Camp David Accords, which settled the longstanding dispute between Egypt and Israel that followed the various Arab-Israeli wars, and especially the 1967 Six Days War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. These relations are important because, although military in nature, they serve American interests by allowing American equipment and training to influence not only the Egyptian military itself, but also the military regime. In the grand scheme, the latter may be more important, but both are important nonetheless.
One other key element informs the relationship between the Egyptian Army and the American military, and that's the concept of "military aid". The terms of the Camp David Accords required the United States to provide both Egypt and Israel with military funding, and for both nations to spend those funds on arms imports from the United States. This situation is critical, because it means that the Obama Administration is required by law to provide things like F-16 fighter aircraft and M1 Abrams main battle tanks to both Egypt and Israel - it's not something the President is doing in a bubble because of some ad hoc support for the Muslim Brotherhood.
This, of course, raises a number of questions and criticisms. For various reasons ranging from anti-Semitism, to disapproval of Israeli security policies, to the impression that Israel may not even need the aid in question, many in the States have suggested for years that America stop sending military aid to Israel. Similar criticisms, though less frequent or vocal, have been directed at Egypt's aid package; in fact, journalist Michael J. Totten has suggested that Egypt's aid money be given to Libya instead. The situation is complex, and in the wake of the Arab Spring, it may well be that a treaty signed in 1978 no longer reflects the national interests of America, Israel, Egypt, or all three. A reevaluation of the Accords may very well be in order, though the evaluators would have to tread lightly to avoid inflaming an already tense situation between the three countries. And, indeed, one could also question the manner with which President Obama has utilized the potential influence of the relationship between the United States and the Egyptian military.
There are no easy answers, but context is important. The Obama Administration, like any administration, is due plenty of criticism for its various policies. However, those in the commentariat should be careful, and above all precise, should they elect to criticize the President and his subordinates for continuing a policy that was upheld by five prior administrations. In fact, with President Obama's stated goal of sweeping regulations on firearms ownership and his national defense policies, one might even conjecture that President Obama would discontinue military aid to Egypt if he thought he could do so. Regardless, for all of the criticism leveled at President Obama for allegedly violating American laws, it seems hypocritical to level accusations at him for upholding one.
Why do I say this? Well, I've seen recent events causing a lot of consternation among some of my more politically aware friends on Facebook. This consternation stems from an apparent contradiction on the part of the Obama Administration. On the one hand, the Obama Administration is making a concerted effort to enact sweeping gun restrictions in the wake of the horrific school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. On the other hand, the Administration is providing the Muslim Brotherhood with cutting edge weapons, including F-16 fighter aircraft and M1 Abrams main battle tanks. The consternation is understandable, but the situation requires some context.
I'm personally critical of the Obama Administration's gun control efforts. As a subject matter expert in physical security and anti-terrorism, I can say with some confidence that it's entirely counterintuitive and demonstrably inaccurate that disarming law-abiding citizens makes nations safer. It also seems obvious that such efforts are directly contrary to the Constitution, the will of the Founders, and the essence of American politics, all of which have rendered political violence virtually absent from the history of the Republic. However, that's another matter. What's important to understand in this situation is the reason why the Muslim Brotherhood is getting these sophisticated weapon systems.
First, we should dispense with the notion that the Obama Administration is sending weapons to the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, the Obama Administration is providing weapons to the Egyptian military. Given that the Muslim Brotherhood holds power in Egypt, this would seem like a contradiction; in point of fact, however, following the Free Officers Coup of 1952, the Egyptian military has existed as an entity unto itself. Since 1952, Egypt has been ruled by in turn by Gamal Abdel Nasser, then Anwar Sadat, and finally Hosni Mubarak, the latter of whom was deposed in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution in conjunction with the Arab Spring. All were actually military officers who wore the title of "president" despite ruling as de facto military autocrats. There have been some fundamental changes to the structure and legal character of the Egyptian government since the 2011 revolution, but the revolution - in essence - replaced the disgraced Mubarak with a Muslim Brotherhood figurehead, while leaving the military domination of the country battered but mostly intact. This has emboldened the Muslim Brotherhood, but as the protests over President Mohammed Morsi's attempts to grant himself sweeping powers, and the current ongoing protests throughout Egypt demonstrate, the Brothers' hold on power in Egypt is tenuous at best. At least for the time being, the Egyptian military remain Egypt's potential kingmakers.
Formerly allied with the Soviet Union, the Egyptian military has maintained close relations with the United States since the late 1970's. This results in part from the Camp David Accords, which settled the longstanding dispute between Egypt and Israel that followed the various Arab-Israeli wars, and especially the 1967 Six Days War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. These relations are important because, although military in nature, they serve American interests by allowing American equipment and training to influence not only the Egyptian military itself, but also the military regime. In the grand scheme, the latter may be more important, but both are important nonetheless.
One other key element informs the relationship between the Egyptian Army and the American military, and that's the concept of "military aid". The terms of the Camp David Accords required the United States to provide both Egypt and Israel with military funding, and for both nations to spend those funds on arms imports from the United States. This situation is critical, because it means that the Obama Administration is required by law to provide things like F-16 fighter aircraft and M1 Abrams main battle tanks to both Egypt and Israel - it's not something the President is doing in a bubble because of some ad hoc support for the Muslim Brotherhood.
This, of course, raises a number of questions and criticisms. For various reasons ranging from anti-Semitism, to disapproval of Israeli security policies, to the impression that Israel may not even need the aid in question, many in the States have suggested for years that America stop sending military aid to Israel. Similar criticisms, though less frequent or vocal, have been directed at Egypt's aid package; in fact, journalist Michael J. Totten has suggested that Egypt's aid money be given to Libya instead. The situation is complex, and in the wake of the Arab Spring, it may well be that a treaty signed in 1978 no longer reflects the national interests of America, Israel, Egypt, or all three. A reevaluation of the Accords may very well be in order, though the evaluators would have to tread lightly to avoid inflaming an already tense situation between the three countries. And, indeed, one could also question the manner with which President Obama has utilized the potential influence of the relationship between the United States and the Egyptian military.
There are no easy answers, but context is important. The Obama Administration, like any administration, is due plenty of criticism for its various policies. However, those in the commentariat should be careful, and above all precise, should they elect to criticize the President and his subordinates for continuing a policy that was upheld by five prior administrations. In fact, with President Obama's stated goal of sweeping regulations on firearms ownership and his national defense policies, one might even conjecture that President Obama would discontinue military aid to Egypt if he thought he could do so. Regardless, for all of the criticism leveled at President Obama for allegedly violating American laws, it seems hypocritical to level accusations at him for upholding one.
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