Wie kann es sein, dass die mächtigste Nation der Erde nicht schnellere Linderung der Katastrophe schafft? Wie kann es an Nahrungsmitteln, Trinkwasser, Medikamenten und Transportmittel fehlen?

New York Times Magazine: The Executioner's I.Q. Test

etwa angela merkel mich per fernsehansprache dazu auffordert, die cdu zu wählen: bedeutet das, dass ich in irgendeiner verbindung zur cdu stehe?

Manchmal genügt es, den maßgeblichen Politikern einfach nur zuzuhören; sie sagen schon, was sie warum vorhaben und wie sie ihre Vorhaben in die Tat umsetzen werden.

Deswegen empfehle ich die Lektüre folgender Rede Donald Rumsfelds vom 31.1.2002 über die neue Militärstrategie der USA. Die politischen Zwecke dieser Strategie werden in dieser Rede nicht angesprochen, aber man kann sich ja seine eigenen Gedanken dazu machen. Die Kursivierungen stammen von mir.

Secretary Rumsfeld Speaks on "21st Century" Transformation of the U.S. Armed Forces (Remarks as Prepared for Delivery) Remarks as prepared for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., Thursday, January 31, 2002

[...]

[...] a revolution in military affairs is about more than building new high-tech weapons–though that is certainly part of it. It is also about new ways of thinking… and new ways of fighting.

[...]

During the Cold War, we faced a fairly predictable set of threats. We knew a good deal about our adversary, we knew many of the capabilities they possessed, and we fashioned the strategies and capabilities we needed to deter them. And we were successful.

We built a nuclear arsenal, and established the strategic nuclear Triad. We entered the jet age with new, supersonic fighters. We built nuclear-powered subs and ships, and the first intercontinental-range bombers and missiles. We massed heavy forces in Europe, ready to repel a Soviet tank invasion over the North German plain, and adopted a strategy of containment—sending military aid and advisors to destabilize Soviet puppet regimes and support friendly nations threatened by Soviet expansion.

For almost half-a-century, that mix of strategy, forces and capabilities allowed us to keep the peace and defend freedom. But the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is gone—and with it the familiar security environment to which our nation had grown accustomed.

[...]

Our challenge in this new century is a difficult one—to prepare to defend our nation against the unknown, the uncertain, the unseen and the unexpected. That may seem, on the face of it, an impossible task. It is not. But to accomplish it, we must put aside comfortable ways of thinking and planning—take risks and try new things—so we can prepare our forces to deter and defeat adversaries that have not yet emerged to challenge us.

[...] we came to the conclusion that a new defense strategy was needed.

We decided to move away from the two Major Theater War (MTW) construct for sizing our forces—an approach that called for maintaining two massive occupation forces, capable of marching on and occupying the capitals of two aggressors at the same time and changing their regimes. This approach served us well in the immediate post-Cold War period, but it threatened to leave us over-prepared for two specific conflicts, and under-prepared for unexpected contingencies and 21st Century challenges.

To ensure we have the resources to prepare for the future, and to address the emerging challenges to homeland security, we needed a more realistic and balanced assessment of our near-term war fighting needs. Instead of maintaining two occupation forces, we will place greater emphasis on deterrence in four critical theaters, backed by the ability to swiftly defeat two aggressors at the same time, while preserving the option for one massive counter-offensive to occupy an aggressor’s capital and replace his regime. Since neither aggressor would know which the President would choose for regime change, the deterrent is undiminished. But by removing the requirement to maintain a second occupation force, as we did under the old strategy, we can free up resources for the future and the various lesser contingencies which face us.

To prepare for the future, we also decided to move away from the old "threat based" strategy that had dominated our country’s defense planning for nearly half-a-century, and adopt a new "capabilities based" approach—one that focuses less on who might threaten us, or where, and more on how we might be threatened—and what we need to do to deter and defend against such threats.

[...]

They know, for example, that as an open society, we are vulnerable to new forms of terrorism. They suspect that U.S. space assets and information networks, critical to our security and economy, are vulnerable. They see that our ability to project force into the distant corners of the world where they live depends, in some cases, on vulnerable foreign bases. They know we have no defense against ballistic missile attacks on our cities, our people, our forces and our friends—creating incentives for the development of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them.

Our job is to close off as many of those avenues of potential attack as possible. We need to prepare for new forms of terrorism, to be sure, but also attacks on U.S. space assets, cyber attacks on our information networks, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. At the same time, we must work to build up our own areas of advantage—such as our ability to project military power over long distances, precision-strike weapons, our space, intelligence, and under-sea warfare capabilities.

Before the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, we had decided that to keep the peace and defend freedom in the 21st Century, our defense strategy and force structure must be focused on achieving six key transformational goals:

• First, to protect the U.S. homeland and our bases overseas;
• Second, to project and sustain power in distant theaters;
• Third, to deny our enemies sanctuary—making sure they know no corner of the world is remote enough, no mountain high enough, no cave or bunker deep enough, no SUV fast enough, to protect them from our reach;
• Fourth, to protect our information networks from attack;
• Fifth, to use information technology to link up different kinds of U.S. forces so they can fight jointly; and
• Sixth, to maintain unhindered access to space—and protect our space capabilities from enemy attack.

[...]

Our goal is not simply to fight and win wars—it is to try to prevent them. To do so, we must find ways to influence the decision-making of potential adversaries—to deter them not only from using existing weapons against us, but to dissuade them from building dangerous new capabilities in the first place. Just as the existence of the U.S. Navy dissuades others from investing in competing navies—because it would cost a fortune and would not succeed in providing a margin of military advantage—we must develop new capabilities that, merely by our possessing them, will dissuade adversaries from competing.

For example, deployment of effective missile defenses may dissuade others from spending to obtain ballistic missiles when they cannot provide them what they want—the power to hold U.S. and allied cities hostage to nuclear blackmail. Hardening U.S. space systems, and building the capabilities to defend our space assets, could dissuade potential adversaries from developing small "killer satellites" to attack and cripple U.S. satellite networks. New earth-penetrating and themobaric weapons could make obsolete the deep underground facilities where terrorists hide and terrorist states conceal their WMD capabilities.

[...]

As we deployed forces and capabilities to defend U.S. territory after September 11th, we found that our new responsibilities in homeland defense exacerbated these shortages. As we plan for the future, we need to ensure that our Armed Forces have sufficient capabilities to meet homeland defense needs, as well as to conduct military operations and ensure force protection overseas. No U.S. President should be placed in the position where he must choose between protecting our citizens at home and protecting our interests and our forces overseas. We must be able to do both. The notion that we could transform while cutting the defense budget was seductive but false.

Of course, while transformation requires building new capabilities, and expanding our arsenals of existing ones, it also means reducing stocks of weapons that are no longer necessary for the defense of our nation. Just as we no longer need a massive heavy force designed to repel a Soviet tank invasion, we also no longer need the many thousands of offensive nuclear warheads we amassed during the Cold War to deter a Soviet nuclear attack.

During the Cold War, U.S. security depended on having a nuclear force large enough, and diverse enough, to survive and retaliate after a Soviet first strike. Today, our adversaries have changed—and so has the deterrence calculus. The terrorists who struck us on September 11th were clearly not deterred from doing so by the massive U.S. nuclear arsenal. In the 21st Century, we need to find new ways to deter new adversaries that will most assuredly arise.

That is why President Bush is taking a new approach to strategic deterrence—one that will combine deep reductions in offensive nuclear forces, with improved conventional capabilities and the development and deployment of missile defenses capable of protecting the U.S., our friends, allies and deployed forces from limited missile attack.

At the same time as we reduce the number of weapons in our nuclear arsenal, we must also re-fashion that arsenal, developing new conventional offensive and defensive systems more appropriate for deterring the potential adversaries we face. And we must ensure the safety and reliability of our nuclear arsenal. Any country that has nuclear weapons must be respectful of the lethality and power of those weapons, and see that they are safe and reliable.

Taken together, this New Triad of reduced offensive nuclear forces, advanced conventional capabilities, and a range of new defenses (ballistic missile defense, cruise missile defense, space defense, cyber defense)—supported by a revitalized defense infrastructure—are all part of a new approach to deterrence and defense.

But we cannot get from here to there without a new approach to balancing differing risks. In the past, the threat-based approach focused attention on near-term risks, crowding out investments in the critical areas of people, modernization and transformation. If we are to have a 21st Century military, we must balance all of these risks as we allocate defense dollars—so that as we prepare for the nearer-term threats, we do not cheat the future… or the people who risk their lives to secure it for us. We believe the new approach we have adopted will help to do so.

And we must transform not only our Armed Forces, but also the Defense Department that serves them—by encouraging a culture of creativity and intelligent risk taking. We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach to developing military capabilities—one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists; one that does not wait for threats to emerge and be "validated", but rather anticipates them before they emerge—and develops new capabilities to dissuade and deter those nascent threats.

We need to change not only the capabilities at our disposal, but also how we think about war. Imagine for a moment you could go back in time, and give a knight in King Arthur’s court an M-16. If he takes that weapon, gets back on his horse, and uses the stock to knock his opponent’s head, it’s not transformational. Transformation occurs when he gets behind a tree and starts shooting. All the high-tech weapons in the world won’t transform our Armed Forces, unless we also transform the way we think, train, exercise and fight.

Some believe that, with the U.S. in the midst of a difficult and dangerous war on terrorism, now is not the time to transform our Armed Forces. I believe the opposite is true. Now is precisely the time to make changes.

[...]

Every day, we are faced in this Department with urgent near-term requirements that create pressure to push the future off the table. But September 11th taught us that the future holds many unknown dangers—and that we fail to prepare for them at our peril. Our challenge is to make certain that, as time passes and the shock of what befell us that day wears off, we do not simply go back to doing things the way we did them before. The war on terrorism is a transformational event that cries out for us to rethink our activities… and put that new thinking into action.

[...]

Of course, as we transform, we must not make the mistake of assuming that our experience in Afghanistan presents us with a model for the next military campaign. Preparing to re-fight the last war is a mistake repeated throughout much of military history—and one we must and will avoid. But we can glean important lessons from recent experiences that apply to the future. Here are a few worth considering:

First, wars in the 21st Century will increasingly require all elements of national power—economic, diplomatic, financial, law enforcement, intelligence, as well as both overt and covert military operations. Clausewitz said "war is the continuation of politics by other means." In this new century, many of those means may not be military.

Second, the ability of forces to communicate and operate seamlessly on the battlefield will be critical to success. In Afghanistan, we saw "composite" teams of U.S. Special Forces on the ground, working with Navy, Air Force and Marine pilots in the sky, to identify targets, communicate targeting information and coordinate the timing of air strikes—with devastating consequences for the enemy. The lesson of this war is that effectiveness in combat will depend heavily on "jointness"—how well the different branches of our military can communicate and coordinate their efforts on the battlefield. And achieving jointness in wartime requires building it in peacetime. We must train like we fight—and fight like we train.

Third, our policy in this war of accepting help from any country, on a basis comfortable for them, and allowing them to characterize how they are helping, instead of doing it for them, is enabling us to maximize both their cooperation and our effectiveness against the enemy.

Fourth, wars can benefit from coalitions of the willing, to be sure—but they should not be fought by committee. The mission must determine the coalition, the coalition must not determine the mission, or the mission will be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.

Fifth, defending the U.S. requires prevention and sometimes pre-emption. It is not possible to defend against every threat, in every place, at every conceivable time. Defending against terrorism and other emerging 21st Century threats requires that we take the war to the enemy. The best, and in some cases, the only defense, is a good offense.

Sixth, rule nothing out—including ground forces. The enemy must understand that we will use every means at our disposal to defeat them, and that we are prepared to make whatever sacrifices are necessary to achieve victory.

Seventh, getting U.S. Special Forces on the ground early dramatically increased the effectiveness of the air campaign. In Afghanistan, precision-guided bombs from the sky did not achieve optimal effectiveness until we got boots and eyes on the ground to tell the bombers exactly where to aim.

[...]

There is much we can learn from this first war of the 21st Century. But we cannot, and must not make the mistake, of assuming that terrorism is the only threat. The next threat we face may indeed be against terrorists—but it could also be a cyber-war, a traditional, state-on-state war… or something entirely different.

That is why, even as we prosecute the war on terrorism, we must be preparing for the next war. We must transform our forces for new and unexpected challenges. We must be prepared for surprise—for little or no warning.

[...]

Via Anke Gröner, thx:

• Forbidden thoughts about 9/11 From gloating about getting off work to enjoying the "country road" ambience of lower Manhattan to hating on-the-make firemen: A spectrum of improper responses to the terror attacks.

• Forbidden thoughts about 9/11: The readers respond From "It was only white people" to hoping to get a 212 cell phone number to "I hope my father died," readers share their secret reactions to Sept. 11.

Hey, Saddam Hussein hat Aluminiumröhren gekauft.

It [i.e. anti-Americanism] can be misguided; the logical implication of the Western-liberal opposition to America's Afghan war is that it would be better if the Taliban were still in power. And it can be ugly; the post-Sept. 11 crowing of the serves-you-right brigade was certainly that.

However, during the past year....

Hundefutter für George W. Bush: DrugsNotDogFood ist eine Protestaktion gegen die medizinische Unterversorgung US-amerikanischer Alter.

Fuck that job. Ein Weblog über Jobausschreibungen.

Die Washington Post berichtet von einem Übersetzungs-PDA namens Phraselator für die US-Armee, der das nötige Vokabular für den Kriegsfall enthält:

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks placed new urgency in going from crude prototype to fully functioning PDA. That meant working through four prototypes to smooth out the audio system and its power source — it runs on rechargeable or AA batteries — and input a versatile library of phrases like “Hello, may I help you” and “Stop or I’ll shoot,” played in sound files of native speakers.