Sounds like a case for Unconditional Surrender Man!

Tamils in this country have been camping out on Parliament Hill for the last few weeks, and the political angles on this just get more and more acute. There is nearly zero chance that our current government will change its’ policy toward the LTTE, but India and the UN are making noises now. Canada has no pull in that part of the world, so I leave it to your imagination the reaction of any Sri Lankan government officials to us telling them how to run things.

I get annoyed when we try to tell other countries (that aren’t attacking us or our allies) how to run their affairs. I may be some Westphalian dinosaur, but I wouldn’t stand for China (for example) telling us how to treat Quebec. If things are so bad that you think you need to intervene, e.g. massacres, ethnic cleansing, etc., send in the army. If you won’t put your money where your mouth is, shut up.

As already mentioned, the Canadian Government is staying out of it, which is the only appropriate action. What I’d like to do here is simply put the political manoeuvring in context with the military situation.

War is messy; things get broken and people get killed. The (many, anyway) Tamils were happy as clams when their side was sticking it to the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, and they’d carved out an autonomous zone in the north. Now the underdogs are getting their asses handed to them and Tamilland (or whatever) is being rolled up and pulled back by the government.

Napoleon said something to the effect that in war the Moral is to the Physical as is 3 to 1. This is the same man who used the levee en masse to create the “Grande Armée” so I hold more with the old saw “Quantity has a Quality all its’ own” for him. In modern conflicts, Information Operations (IOs) are designed to work the morale angle, and the UN is helping the Tamils as much as it can in this regard.

The UN is claiming 6500 dead and 13000+ civilians killed by the Sri Lankan armed forces, but then refuses to say from whence came these figures. It’s not quite “Highway of Death” in scope, but this has no proof and is quite possibly arbitrary. The great thing about making up numbers is that you can make up whatever ones you want to.

What does have the ring of authenticity to it however, is what the ubiquitous “rights groups” are claiming:

International rights groups have accused the government of shelling densely populated civilian areas in the war zone and accused the rebels of holding the civilians as human shields. Both sides deny the accusations.

Asymmetric warfare pretty much guarantees that both of these things will happen. The weaker side will use any advantage it can get, and the stronger side will try to kill the opposition wherever they hide. Again, the Laws of Armed Conflict (LoAC) have no problem with attacking a military target, wherever it may be as long as reasonable force is used. There is a lot of grey in the idea of what’s “proportional”, and the media really doesn’t like any sort of area weapon like artillery or bombing in a civilian area.

Here is the disjoint between the military and political imperatives. Politically the omelette has to be made, but rare is the (democratic) government that can take the media/political heat that will result from all the eggs that need to be broken by the military to that end.

I have no doubt that the Sri Lankan field commanders are not trying to kill civilians, and will avoid it where possible. I am equally certain that the LTTE are willing to incur some friendly deaths to make the security forces look bad. This is used to get the media, certain organizations, etc. on your side and/or applying pressure to the other side. The LTTE are on the ropes, and after all the fighting, bombing and bloodshed in Sri Lanka since this started, the government has a chance to knock the military threat on the head.

The time for political considerations to take the forefront is after your military objectives have been met. There is no ethnic cleansing, genocide, massacres (at least not big or official ones; these fights can be nasty), it’s just a fight to the finish. The fighting will stop the day that the LTTE surrender, not when they need a breather to recover. At least that’s the direction things are going, and it’s the way I’d do it.

Yo ho, it's a Pirate's death for you.

There have been a lot of electrons forcibly arranged over this topic, but I've noticed a discrepancy between the media's hand-wringing and the comments of the (apparently) general public commenting on it.

I don't think I go out on too long a limb when I say that most people don't care what happens to pirates. I saw some analogies to attempted home invasion, and armed persons bent on committing illegal acts are subject to potentially violent interdiction under the laws of any country.

It is therefore a bit disquieting ('tho not surprising) to see all these clowns worrying about what the pirates will do in retaliation for three of them being killed while holding a sailor hostage at gunpoint. Do we not punish criminals because we're afraid of what their compatriots will do? Sure there's a bit of that on a local basis in a lot of places. In a lot of northern Canadian towns I've heard anecdotally that the minimal RCMP detachments have a live-and-let-live arrangement with the local organized crime figures within certain recognized behavioral boundaries, but this is certainly NOT policy.

People have police and military so that they can be protected from various threats. The idea that we are afraid to deal with a problem to prevent it from getting worse does not appeal to taxpayers, or, in this case, sailors and the companies that own the ships. Bending over and taking it doesn't make thugs go away, they just send their friends to get some too.

.50 cal HMGs (Browning M2 or DShK) are neither rare nor particularly expensive (ranging from big plasma TV to used motorcycle in real-world money terms) and one of those fore and aft on any ship and you can sort out any pirates you're going to encounter in the Gulf of Aden. I'm sure there are legal implications to the possession of these weapons, but if you shoot up a bunch of armed pirates on the high seas you are better tried by 12 than carried by 6. I'm not sure, but I think it being the high seas and all you can defend yourself as you see fit. If anyone knows for sure one way or the other, fill me in.

"Shoot on Sight" would do the job nicely, but in absence of arming the merchant ships, what are the options? Convoying is apparently out, as time is money and the devil-take-the-hindmost attitude of peacetime Just-in-Time delivery seems to spike it right out of the gate. I've read some stuff that advocates taking out the pirates' shore bases, but those too lilly-livered to shoot them in flagrante delicto will scarcely countenance preemptive strikes on fishermen.

That's not an irrelevant problem, but it's not mine to solve even if people actually listened to me. There may well be some escalation, and a good test of how "overstretched" the US military is will come if another US-flagged ship gets taken, especially if people are killed. A precedent has been (haltingly and painfully slowly) set, so things will be interesting to watch from a distance.

One last thing occurs to me on this; there is definitely a market here for military contractors (old term: mercenaries). If carrying your own weapons on a merchant ship is too problematic, hiring reputable professionals is likely cheaper and more certain than the insurance you'll need as this gets worse. Enterprising types could set up in some country along the route, and hook up in international waters bringing aboard any required weapons (heavy or otherwise), debarking at the other end, or switching to other ships headed back the same way.

Free enterprise isn't dead; the response to the pirates' version could be market-driven too. A few more swashes may have to be buckled before this scurvy crew decides to desist, it's just a question of who will be willing to do what's necessary.

Meltdown Shakedown

The following seems pretty straightforward:

Arctic sea ice is melting so fast most of it could be gone in 30 years.

So far so good, I guess, but notice the fudging "most" and "could". Already not bearing up well to even casual examination. It gets worse.

"Due to the recent loss of sea ice, the 2005-2008 autumn central Arctic surface air temperatures were greater than 5 C above" what would be expected, the new study reports.

That amount of temperature increase had been expected by the year 2070.

A jump of 5C is a MASSIVE increase in average temperature, and would have been noted before now. That's the sort of temperatures from the Holocene that had trees well above our current tree line although there is now reason to doubt that this high-latitude warming was uniform across the globe. Anyway, I digress.

They expect the area covered by summer sea ice to decline from about 7.2 million square kilometres normally to 1.6 million square kilometres within 30 years.

Last year's summer minimum was 4.6 million square kilometres in September, second lowest only to 2007 which had a minimum of 4.2 million square kilometres, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The Center said Arctic sea ice reached its winter maximum for this year at 15 million square kilometres on Feb. 28. That was 720,000 square kilometres below the 1979-2000 average making it the fifth lowest on record. The six lowest maximums since 1979 have all occurred in the last six years.

"They expect"; who cares what these guys "expect", can you give me evidence for it? The bit below that was the attempt, but what does this actually tell us? Last summer suggests things are getting colder again, but a curve doesn't plot from one point. Also, if the six lowest maximums have come in the last six years, but last year's was the fifth lowest, what does that suggest to you?

I'd have to see the numbers, but this sounds to me like things are chilling again, and that is borne out by what has actually happened world-wide in the last year or so. The lack of raw data in a news post are hardly surprising, but red herrings like "The finding adds to concern about climate change caused by human activities such as burning fossil fuels" show that people have an agenda and that mere facts are not going to stand in the way.