Good news about Hawaii's ballistic missile warning service

It works!

Watching the 1pm (Hawaii) press conference, the Governor and the Administrator for Emergency Management are going through the expected self-flagellation. The Administrator commented "Our process is to have no more false alarms from now" and that now two people will be required to send out an alert.

The interesting questions, which the journalists don't seem to be asking:

1. How many false alarms are acceptable - rather, what rate of false alarming is acceptable? Once in 30 years? Once in 10 years? Once a year?
2. What are the benefits from a false alarm - e.g. testing the alert channel, prompting people to think about their emergency plans - and what are the costs - e.g. mental health events, car accidents, heart attacks, premature consumption of expensive whisky
3. What actions taken to reduce the risk of false alarms increase the risk of a real alarm being delayed in sending?

Everything comes with a trade-off. The last question is probably the most important. If you only have 10 minutes from alert going out until missile impact (on the current plan), what happens if e.g. your requirement for two people to trigger the alert sending ends up causing a delay because one person isn't around? You just know it's going to happen:

"Hey Akamu, can you watch the console for the next few minutes, I just gotta go to ABC Stores to get some more chocolate macadamias?"
"Sure Alika, I don't want to call in Ula the backup guy if we don't really need to."

I'd like to see a public written postmortem about this incident. Redact names - replace them with roles e.g. "the coming-on-duty emergency alerts worker", "the going-off-duty emergency worker" - and explain:

• what went wrong,
• why it went wrong (following the 5 Whys technique),
• what actions are being taken to remediate the risk, and
• what do they aim to achieve in terms of the false alarm rate and the failure to alert probability?

Write it in a blameless fashion; assume good faith and basic competence by the people involved. If someone made a bad choice, or slipped and hit the wrong button, the problem isn't with the person - it's the process and technology that let them make that bad choice or press the button in a non-deliberate way.

One interesting question that was raised in the conference: why did some but not all of the sirens trigger? You'd want the process to be that both the sirens team and the alert message should monitor each others' output. If you're the siren operator and get the alert on your phone, the best strategy is to trigger the siren immediately to increase coverage of the alert. The impact of a false siren is much lower than impact of not playing the siren when a missile really is inbound because of the PACOM-to-sirens message channel failing. So maybe this was individual siren operator initiative - reward those folks, and make it standard procedure.

This is a great opportunity for the state government to demonstrate transparency and a commitment to making the systems objectively work better, rather than just playing to the press. Unfortunately, you just know that it's not going to happen like that.

Mendacity from Amy Nicholson

In Slate, L.A. Weekly movie critic Amy Nicholson takes aim at deceased sniper and Navy SEAL Chris Kyle:

Take American Sniper, one of the most mendacious movies of 2014. Clint Eastwood was caught in a trap: His subject, murdered Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, lied a lot. In his autobiography, he said he killed two carjackers in Texas, sniped looters during Hurricane Katrina, and punched Jesse Ventura in the face. None of that was true. So Eastwood was stuck. Should he repeat Kyle’s lies as truth? Expose him as a liar?

Ironically her article is titled "Clint Eastwood's American Sniper is one of the most mendacious movies of 2014", because she clearly hasn't read Kyle's autobiography. In his autobiography he does not discuss either of the first two situations she describes, at all. The third situation is described, but Jesse Ventura is not mentioned (Kyle calls the participant "Scruffy" and although some of Scruffy's background is consistent with Ventura's, it's not an obvious link). So Nicholson seems happy with at least one of two situations: 1. making claims about a book she hasn't read, or 2) making knowingly false claims about a book she has read.

It's slightly clearer when you read the New Yorker article which she links because they report third person recounting of the first two stories: people who claim to have heard Kyle talk about them. Kyle may or may not have told these stories, and they may or may not have been accurately recounted by the third parties. The Scruffy story was later confirmed by Kyle in a video interview to pertain to Ventura, and a court subsequently decided that Ventura had been libelled by it. It's a pretty misleading recounting by Nicholson though, whether or not the claim turns out to be substantially true - if you aspire to being an actual journalist, one would expect you to have a clear understanding of 1st vs 2nd vs 3rd party sources and make the distinction clear in your articles. Perhaps Ms. Nicolson has no such aspiration and is happy being a partisan hack.

Surrender monkeys don't eat balut

A fascinating shit-storm is brewing between the Philippine Army and the UN Disengagement Observer Force as a result of recent events in the Golan Heights:

The Philippine military said Monday that a U.N. peacekeeping commander in the Golan Heights should be investigated for allegedly asking Filipino troops to surrender to Syrian rebels who had attacked and surrounded their camp.
[...]
When the besieged Filipino troops sought his [Gen. Catapang's] advice after they were ordered to lay down their arms as part of an arrangement with the rebels to secure the Fijians' release, Catapang said he asked them to defy the order.

It seems that in order to facilitate negotiations for the release of 45 Fijian soldiers captured by the (al-Qaeda affiliated) Nusra Front rebels - such capture perhaps due to less-than-stellar planning by UNDOF - the UNDOF commander decided that yielding to the rebels' demands for the Filipino troops to give up their weapons would be just dandy. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

Gen. Catapang is Chief of Staff of the Philippine Armed Forces, so can't really rise any higher in the command structure, and isn't well-known enough to run for high government office, so he's got no real motive to puff up his role in this dispute. I'm inclined to believe the main thrust of his account. Since the army has been in near-continuous counter-insurgency campaigns, with the communist NPA in the central Philippines and the Islamic groups in the south and south west, they've accumulated quite a lot of experience with fanatic groups and have presumably absorbed the lesson that doing what your opponent tells you to seldom works out well.

It'll be interesting to see if the resolution of the dispute is made public:

Catapang said an investigation would allow the UNDOF commander to explain his side and the Philippine military to explain why it advised the Filipino peacekeepers to defy his order.

I doubt the second part will take very long. I'd start with "Because it was bloody stupid" and work up from there. Catapang, as a 4-star general, comfortably out-ranks UNDOF's 2-star leader and so there's no insubordination problem I can see. The first part would be educational though: just what did the UNDOF commander think would happen if the Filipino troops had laid down their arms as ordered? And what involvement did the UNDOF commander have in the Fijians being captured in the first place? The Philippine Army is withdrawing from the UNDOF mission in the Golan, presumably because they have no appetite for being put in the same position again when UNDOF decides that covering its backside is more important than the safety of the troops in its command.

It seems that si vis pacem, para bellum is still true: if you want to keep the peace, you have to be prepared to kick the ass.

Update: Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club is well worth reading on this topic:

In the past the UN apparatchiks have relied on the faithfulness of their subordinate commanders to take a bullet for the team. "Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die." But Tennyson had never been to the Philippines where the word for blindly following orders is tanga – or sap.

Ukraine and Clancy's prescience

At Christmas I read the newest (and final, given the author's passing) Tom Clancy novel Command Authority where hero and president Jack Ryan is battling to keep Russia from taking over Ukraine with military force, using agents provocateur in conjunction with the substantial number of Russian passport holders in east Ukraine as a pretext for involvement and invasion.

All is passing as Clancy has forseen:

Russia's large landing ship Nikolai Filchenkov has arrived near the Russia Black Sea Fleet's base at Sevastopol, which Russia has leased from Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The ship is reported to be carrying as many as 200 soldiers and has joined four additional ship carrying an unknown amount of Special Forces troops. Flot.com also reported over the weekend that personnel from the 45th Airborne Special Forces unit and additional divisions had been airlifted into Anapa, a city on Russia's Black Sea coastline. In addition, it is believed that Russia's Sevastopol base contains as many as 26,000 troops already, according to the German Institute for International And Security Affairs.

Clancy will never be remembered as a giant of literature, but you have to give the man his due in anticipating world events. Russia is no doubt terrified of Ukraine pivoting westwards, especially given the billions of dollars invested there:

Moody’s cited Putin as saying Ukrainian borrowers owed Russia about $28 billion, according to a report this month, before the $15 billion of bond purchases. Ratings agencies will "eventually" have to look at this exposure, Grafe said.

With fracking and Canadian oil exerting downwards pressure on fuel prices, one wonders where the Russian siloviki are going to find the money to maintain their lifestyles. For sure V. V. Putin can turn off the taps of Ukraine's gas supply, but that's only likely to make the citizens more angry at Russia.

I'd hope that rolling tanks across the border would be a step too cheeky even for Putin, but who knows what internal pressures are being exerted?

Time zones are hard

Having spent a painful fraction of my life fighting time zones, I loved this from The Diplomad:

As the party was winding down, I slid over to one of my Japanese contacts and kidded him about the date, "You have guts throwing this event December 7."
He seemed perplexed, "We decided to hold it today instead of tomorrow, because of American sensitivities about that day."
Now I became the perplexed one, "What's so sensitive for us about December 8?"
My Japanese friend looked at me as though I were the biggest ignoramus on the planet, "You know, Pearl Harbor attack day."

Anyone who thinks that times and dates are straight forward, either a) has never tried to work internationally or b) is in the military and works off Zulu Time where ever they are on the planet.

The lesson I took from this is that no matter how simple you may think a concept is ("what day is this?") you should realize that there's someone of consequence and rationality who has a different opinion from you.

Chemical horror

Today UK MPs rejected military action against the Syrian government despite the recent nerve agent attack killing hundreds of civilians. While I think that this was the right decision in the current circumstances, I've heard a lot of objections to military action along the lines of "civilians get killed in larger numbers by bombs, gunfire, napalm and starvation - what's so different about chemical weapons?" Playing Devil's Advocate, here's my answer.

Chemical warfare generally involves saturating a target area with a chemical agent for one of two reasons:

1. area denial; making it impossible or at least unattractive for opposing forces to occupy a strategically or tactically advantageous position; or
2. short-term offense; aiming to kill or debilitate concentrated opposing forces in an attractive location.

Modern chemical weapons such as the nerve agent sarin (one of the possible culprits in the recent attack, and one of the weapons likely used at Halabja) are devastatingly effective against any unprotected people in the immediate area; even gas masks aren't effective, since nerve agents can be absorbed through the skin. Full personal protective equipment is required to protect against a nerve agent attack. Modern armies can afford this for their troops - although the equipment makes them less effective and more susceptible to heat-induced illness - but there's no practical way to protect adequately a civilian population. Nerve agent attacks are therefore very much a 1-shot weapon from a military standpoint, advantageous if they can take opposing military forces by surprise, but with very little sustained effect if the forces are warned and well-equipped.

If an attacker has free use of chemical weapons, and little fear of reprisal, their best tactic is therefore to saturate target areas with nerve agents. As well as nailing any poorly-prepared opposition soldiers, this will force the properly-equipped military to button up in protective gear and be less efficient in communication, manoeuvre and combat. It's not a decisive win, but certainly an advantageous tactic. The side effect of this saturation, however, will be devastating to any civilian position both in the location and downwind. Lacking effective protective gear, casualties in any populated area will be horrendous - and completely irrelevant in military terms.

The international opprobrium in use of chemical weapons is therefore (unusually) for a good reason. It aims to make chemical weapon use, which is normally not a terribly efficient military method but disproportionately devastating in civilian casualties, a much higher cost for offensive forces than conventional weapons. The cost of conventional artillery and airstrikes is roughly proportional to the number of weapons used, and hence incentivises the attacker to target military forces as accurately as possible. Chemical weapons have no such incentive, and so there is a natural incentive to saturate the target area (maximising deterioration of effectiveness of the opposition) which has the side effect of civilian annihilation.

Back to the original question: why is killing a civilian with chemical weapons worse than killing them with a bullet? It's because unfettered chemical weapons use will devastate a civilian population in short order. We have forgotten this because the threat of nuclear retaliation has kept chemical weapon usage to relatively low volumes in the past 95 years. If we want to see many more thousands of chemical weapons deaths, we should treat chemical weapon usage like artillery usage.

What's the point of bombing Syria?

I'm getting increasingly concerned at the US, UK and French war drums being beaten in anticipation of bombing Syria to punish them for nerve-gassing civilians. Don't get me wrong, I think that the use of chemical weapons at all is deserving of severe punishment, and if we can identify the military unit responsible for killing hundreds if not thousands of civilians with nerve agents then it should be bombed so hard that "they'll have to pipe in the sunlight"; a good few 2000lb LGBs to break open their shelters, napalm or white phos to burn up the munitions, and a healthy sprinkling of cluster weapons to finish off anyone left standing. At the very least, it will cause other chemical weapons unit commanders to think very hard about whether using their munitions really is in their personal best interest.

However it seems that the Syrian government didn't know this attack was coming, and indeed were rather horrified when it did according to US communications intercepts:

...in the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defense exchanged panicked phone calls with leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people," the report said.

Now I don't know how much credence to give to this report, but it certainly fits well with observed behaviour; the US and UK now seem very confident that the Syrian government forces were responsible, yet there's no obvious gain - and much potential loss - for the Syrian government itself. Assad and company haven't survived this long by being pointlessly brutal. Even arch-tyrant Saddam Hussein of Iraq had method to his brutality: it was focused on keeping him in power, with him personally shooting senior ministers and officers if he even suspected a threat to him. Bashar al-Assad similarly is a survivor and not one to give Western forces a casus belli to open direct hostilities against him.

Bombing random airfields does nothing to deter the regime from using chemical weapons; quite the opposite. It certainly hurts their war effort, but it wasn't really triggered by government decisions in the first place. The Syrian government can certainly try to get more strict control of their weapons, but this action is punishing the government (however revolting) for actions outside their control. I'm not sure it really sends the right message. I'm also not convinced that the current opposition forces are necessarily the kind of people we want to back.

Update:
Matthew Inman at The Oatmeal pretty much nails my discomfort.

CYA is SOP at the MoD

Following Wednesday's brutal killing of a soldier, the MoD is keen to slam the stable door shut:

Defence sources said the order had been given that uniform should not be worn by those travelling alone, or on public transport as a "common sense precaution" immediately after the killing

Except - and correct me if I'm wrong here - the slain soldier was not in military uniform of any kind. He was wearing a Help for Heroes T-shirt. The killers (who appear to have been acting alone) seem to have had additional information identifying him as a soldier, such as following him from the barracks.

The MoD REMFs issuing this order should be pressed to explain a) how absence of military uniform will prevent those anti-military elements from identifying soldiers in other ways and b) if these homicidal idiots were acting alone, why there is any reason to believe the current known threat to military personnel is any different from last week when they were not offering this advice. "Security" as a blanket response should be publicly derided, or at least run by a suitably cleared and independent politician to confirm that the security issue is real. Optionally, they should also explain why, if there is a significant short-term threat to personal safety of military personnel, said personnel should not be carrying personal sidearms.

I hate this kind of instinctive cover-your-arse move from the desk security weasels at the MoD. Either they have to admit that they are powerless to stop this kind of attack - in which case, what are we paying them for? - or they generate this fog of pointless and annoying restrictions solely for their own personal benefit to be seen as "doing something".

Piers Morgan redefining hypocrisy

Following the awful fatal machete attack on a soldier in Woolwich today there have been the predictable comments coming from the pro-gun contingent that stripping society of firearms did not seem to provide much protection for the poor guy who was run down and then machete'd to death. I'm in two minds about this claim - I can't see how even ubiquitous firearms access would have stopped the soldier being run down by the car, and the initial attack with the machete was so surprising that the guy would have likely been dead before anyone could respond. On the other hand, we would have been spared the two alleged murderers wandering around for 20 minutes, preaching to people and waving their blood-stained hands until the police managed to get a firearms unit together.

Anyway, uber-git Piers Morgan got into a Twitter spat with pro-gun Dana Loesch who asked:

Was the guy with the machete a member of the NRA? Asking for a friend.

It was slightly tasteless, but harked back to Piers Morgan's past few months of suggesting that NRA members were just as guilty for mass shootings as Adam Lanza et al.

Piers, of course, wasn't taking this lying down and blustered:

Can't stomach @dloesch goading Brits with her outrageous tweeting re beheaded soldier story. Unfollowed, and banned from my show.

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) May 22, 2013

This might have worked better, however, if Dana hadn't remembered why Piers Morgan got fired as the editor of the Daily Mirror:

Maybe instead of mocking the disarmament ideology that creates victims, I should have Photoshopped soldier pics, right @piersmorgan ?

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) May 22, 2013

That's right, Piers: you were fired because the paper of which you were editor ran a story based on faked photos suggesting that British soldiers were abusing an Iraqi man. If that didn't fire up the blood of people like the machete wielders and make them think that British soldiers were their enemies and deserving of death, I'd be quite surprised. Projecting much, Piers?

A new technique in bomb disposal

Courtesy of the Daily Mail, writing about two morons carrying off 120mm shells from a beach in Dorset:

Ticking time bombs! 'Idiotic' pair pick up unexploded 2ft bombs that washed ashore - to 'sell them for scrap metal'
MoD urgently appeals for duo to contact them so they can diffuse bombs

Thank goodness for the years of study that the Daily Mail subs must have put in. Presumably the EOD officers will put the rusty shells in a tank of water and let them flake off and randomly move through the water until the shells have completely disintegrated.

Image original in case they fix it:

I agree with the point of the article, however. It's not clear to me whether they are 105mm or 120mm shells, but if someone starts banging on them with a hammer then it's not going to make too much of a difference; if the shell isn't inert, they'll be spread pretty thinly over their house walls (which will be spread across their neighbours' gardens).

It's the cover-up that kills you

The principle is old, but still valid. In this case, the killing of an American ambassador in Benghazi. Even the BBC's US correspondent Mark Mardell thinks that this is going to be a problem for the Obama administration:

However you read the motives, the state department and apparently the White House did get the CIA to change its story.
This is now very serious, and I suspect heads will roll. The White House will be on the defensive for a while.

I agree with other commentators that Hilary Clinton is the vulnerable one here. There are three main political entities - Obama, Clinton, and the Republicans driving the enquiries. Since Obama is already on his second term, the Republicans gain little from attacking him. On the other hand, Obama (like any second term president) is thinking of his legacy. So he can make common cause with the Republicans to divert blame for this (deplorable) incident to Clinton. Everybody wins! except for Hilary Clinton's 2016 Presidential campaign, which has just suffered a major hole beneath the waterline.

Incidentally, I'm not persuaded that a different attitude from the State Department would have made much difference to the eventual outcome. In hindsight, it looks marginal whether the relevant aviation and ground assets could realistically have deployed to the site of conflict in time to avoid the deaths of the ambassador and his staff. That isn't the point, however. The point is that State was faced with a prolonged attack on a US ambassador, had military assets on hand which could plausibly have made a difference (based on the information available at the time) and chose to do nothing as the personally safest option. This was a disgusting dereliction of duty which deserves to be severely punished. It won't be, of course, but the attempts to cover up what happened may end up sinking the career of people at the very top.

Curiosity doesn't just kill cats

In the wake of the shoot-out with the alleged Boston bombers in the streets of Watertown, Esquire has some timely advice from Lt. Col. Robert Bateman who actually knows a thing or two about bullets:

If you are in a place where you hear steady, and sustained, and nearby (lets call that, for some technical reasons, anything less than 800 meters) gunfire, do these things:

• Go to your basement. You are cool there.
• If you don't have a basement, go to the other side of the house from the firing, and leave, heading away from the firing. Do not stop for a mile.
• If you do not think that you can leave, get on the ground floor, as far from the firing as possible, and place something solid between you and the firing. Solid is something like a bathtub, a car (engine block), a couple of concrete walls (single layer brick...nope).
• If you are high up (say 4rd story or higher) just get away from the side of the building where the firing is taking place. You will, mostly, be protected by the thick concrete of the structure.

But for cripes sake, do not step out on to your front porch and start recording a video on your iPhone, unless you actually have a death-wish, or are being paid significant amounts of money, in advance, as a combat journalist/cameraman.

He points out that nearly everything you see in movies and TV about gunfire and bullet impacts is completely wrong. Bullets don't just get absorbed by walls; anything with a reasonable amount of gunpowder behind it will smash multiple bricks with ease, and sheetrock (plasterboard) will barely slow it down. This is why, when EMS crews pull up to the scene of a shooting, they are very careful about positioning the engine block of their vehicle between them and anyone holding a gun (civilian or police).

Remember the Empire State Building shooting last year? Nine bystanders got nailed by bullets fired (16 rounds in total, from handguns) by the responding police officers, and the associated ricochets and fragments when those bullets hit walls, pavement and street furniture. That only the two Boston gunmen and one police officer were hit in the exchange of over 100 rounds of gunfire at Dexter and Laurel is a minor miracle:

David LaRocca, a local sculptor, was in the kitchen of his Laurel Street studio, where he lives and works, when he heard the first series of pops.
Instead of ducking for cover, he went outside to see what was happening, certain that he was too far away to be hit.
"I heard the pop, pop, popping. I could see the activity," LaRocca said, who stood on the sidewalk outside his house while looking down the street to site of the action. "I heard whizzing sounds. But then I later figured it was bullets going by me that I was hearing."

David LaRocca has hopefully learned how much he didn't know about gunfire, and he's lucky that it wasn't the last lesson he ever learned.

The sound of gunfire should be a cue to anyone to get low, get behind cover, and get the heck out of Dodge.

Skeet shooting Gangnam style

There's been much hemming and hawing about whether the US and Japan should attempt to shoot down any North Korean IRBM launched as a test outside the North Korea border. The US is bigging up its ABM capability and claiming that it certainly could shoot down such a missile if it wanted to. Japan has been spinning up Patriot PAC-3 interceptors and its Aegis destroyers. But should the US and Japan actually shoot at a North Korean Musudan if Kim Jong "Chubbycheeks" Un actually lets one loose?

Darn tootin' they should. This is a great information-gathering exercise. We are fairly certain that if NK fires a Musudan that it's just a demonstrator, so there's no particular pressure to nail it, but it will be a great validation of the sensor-and-shooter systems set up around North Korea. They should pick the element of their defensive system for which they have the least concrete performance information and fire a couple of munitions from that system at the IRBM. By all means they should keep more reliable interceptors in reserve, and fire those off once the questionable interceptors have entered the killing zone, but their primary aim is to monitor how well those questionable interceptors react to a typical IRBM target. This is not a manufacturer test, it's reasonably representative of the distances and climb profile of a real nuclear-armed IRBM, and the exact launch time is not known, so it should give the USA and Japanese military good data on how well their systems would actually react to an IRBM launch.

Normally you'd worry about giving defence performance information to your opponent in a situation like this, but North Korea's sensors are likely so poor that the US and Japan can pretty much make up whatever they want to tell the world about when the missile was detected, what interceptors were fired and what actually happened at the interception. When they show the footage of the interceptor striking the missile, don't believe that they're showing you any significant amount of the information they've actually gathered from the launch.

If you wanted RAF SAR you should have bought better choppers

Much wailing in The Guardian today over the news that the RAF and Royal Navy will be handing over UK search and rescue to a private firm:

Bristow, a leading provider of helicopter services to the offshore energy industry, has won a £1.6bn contract to provide SAR (search and rescue) from 2016.

Everyone currently involved in the SAR industry promptly objects to the change. It's not surprising, the change is a very significant one since the RAF and RN have been providing SAR around the UK for 70 years. So why does the Government want to fix what (apparently) ain't broken?

Money is, of course, a primary driver for this - the contract is £1.6bn, for a duration apparently unspecified in the Government press release on the SAR handover. If private cover costs this much, you can bet that RAF/RN cover costs more. The real reason for this change though, and believe me it's a good reason, is buried down in the article:

However, the government has argued that it needs to act because the famous and much-loved Sea King helicopter fleet is approaching the end of its useful life.

The Sea Kings are ancient hardware. The licence-built UK design first flew in 1969 with updates such as the dedicated SAR variant HAR3 delivered in the late 1970s / early 1980s. It's being retired everywhere else in the world, and even in the UK the troop-carrying variant has bitten the dust. There's no way that the current Sea Kings can or should keep going much longer, getting increasingly expensive and difficult to maintain.

But the RAF and Navy have a much more modern medium- and heavy-lift helicopter - the EH101 aka Merlin in UK service. Why not use these for SAR? Well, where the 14,000lb empty-weight Sea King has a regular range of 764 miles and sea level cruise speed of 129mph, the Merlin is nearly 10,000lb heavier, with a 500 mile range albeit a faster cruise speed of 167mph. Cargo carrying capacity is not generally a big concern for SAR roles - as long as it can accommodate crew + around ten passengers this will cover the vast majority of rescue situations. The Merlin is too big compared to the Sea King, and it's really expensive - the RAF bought 44 aircraft for £4.65bn and even though a lot of that cost was set-up and infrastructure you're still looking at the thick end of £30M per bird.

But let's compare it against the replacements that Bristow will use: ten Sikorsky S92s and ten AW189s. The former is an up-rated civilian version of the tremendously successful and widely used UH-70 Blackhawk, weighs 15,500lb empty with a range of 600 miles and cruise speed of 174mph - a lot faster than Sea King or Merlin, slightly less range than the former but a comparable weight, and will set you back about £20M. Spares should be easy to find and running costs low. Specs on the latter are harder to find, but it looks to have a comparable speed and be slightly lighter; presumably there's something about the cost/range/speed tradeoff that makes it a more attractive option than the S92 for certain locations.

Bristow aren't exactly newcomers to the SAR role - they've been operating helicopters to the North Sea oil platforms for decades, which is a sufficiently challenging environment to prepare them well for UK SAR. It's still going to be an interesting hand-over, but there's no reason to think that Bristow will just let random yachting folks drown because of a clause in their contract.

The other nice thing about contracting out this service is that the contract should be very easy to spec out - the variables (weather, range, accidents) are very well known and well-established, and so unless the MoD Procurement idiots have been allowed to write the contract it's not unreasonable to think that they should cover all the major issues. This is not like tendering for a future fighter or helicopter where the requirements are hazy. We know exactly what SAR involves and what's reasonable to expect. If anything, I expect the contract to be too conservative and prevent Bristow from implementing innovations in kit or procedures that would let them reduce operational cost while preserving the same effective service.

Iron Dome - success overstated?

Now the dust has settled on last year's Gaza punch-up, Professor Ted Postel of MIT has been looking at Iron Dome's performance. He's not particularly impressed:

According to Dr. Pedatzur, American expert Professor Theodore A. Postol said, "If the definition of a successful interception by the Iron Dome means destroying the warhead of the attacking missile, then the rate of its success during the Pillar of Cloud operation is very low: probably 5%."

He raises an interesting question: what is a successful interception by Iron Dome? Remember that a substantial component of Iron Dome is its knowledge of vulnerable versus safe areas for missiles to land in; it therefore engages a small subset of the ballistic missiles actually fired at it. Postol is pointing out that the warhead of a Qassam (a stovepipe with high explosive in the nose and fins welded on the back) is not huge and actually quite tricky to destroy.

If we can't judge success by the bangs in the sky, can we judge by the damage on the ground?

"Israelis have submitted about 3,200 requests to the authorities to repair homes that have been damaged by Palestinian rockets", which appears to be excessive given the IDF's claim that only 58 rockets got past Iron Dome.

Hmm. I'm not so sure about this. It depends very heavily on what "damage" consists of. I can well believe that even a small warhead, 5 to 10Kg of HE for the smaller Qassams, going off in an urban setting could mess up the windows of 10-20 houses and thus occasion a claim. That's before any fraudulent claims. So 58 rockets could conceivably generate 1000 claims; certainly, the numbers suggest more rockets landing than claimed, but it still looks like a healthy interception rate. That Rafael Armaments and the IDF are putting the best possible shine on Iron Dome's performance doesn't surprise me.

What's interesting is that Ted Postel was quoted back in November 2012 being fairly positive about Iron Dome:

"How well did Iron Dome work?"
It appeared to work very well—a lot better even than the people involved in building it expected. It's an astonishing achievement—I think it's even fair to use the word miraculous—to be able to hit these rockets with the reliability they demonstrated.
...
There were some news reports where they were talking about saving hundreds of lives, but that's a total misunderstanding of the lethality of these weapons. Before the recent attacks, some 11,000 or 12,000 rockets and mortars were launched over six or eight years, and in total, 60 or 61 people were killed. So if you are saving lives, it would be "several" lives.

It's therefore not obvious that Postel has an interest in playing down Iron Dome's performance, and he's had time and opportunity to review more data on it. I am not sure that the data he quotes fully supports his claims, but without much more detailed analysis it's hard for either of us to be sure of the real story.

The most important thing Iron Dome did, of course, was to make Israeli citizens feel relatively safe from Qassam rockets. It therefore provided political cover for the prosecution of the Israeli offensive against Hamas and their friends, which probably had a far greater medium and long term utility for Israel than keeping rockets out of homes.

A-400M: not even a bargain at half the price

Angela Monaghan, the Telegraph's "industry correspondent" clearly knows what side her bread is buttered. She writes a slavishly lickspittle article welcoming the A-400M into service at the bargain price (for the RAF) of £3.2bn for 22 aircraft:

Philip Dunne, the minister for defence equipment, support and technology, says the A400M will become the "workhorse" of the RAF's lift capability, transforming how it does business. Speaking on one of the first flights of a sample A400M at Brize Norton, he said: "It has much greater lift capacity than the Hercules it will be replacing and much greater range, so that we will either be able to lift twice as much for the same distance, or travel twice as far with the same amount of kit."

Yes, the A-400M can carry 37 tonnes of kit 3300km, cruising around Mach 0.7. This is about twice the capacity of the C-130J Super Hercules which carries 19 tonnes of kit at about Mach 0.6. So this sounds like a no-brainer - except that a C-130J will set you back about $100m with all the options, or £60m, whereas the RAF is spending over £140m per aircraft for a basic A-400M.

Comparing it to the C-17 which cost the RAF about £70m each: the C-17 carries 77 tonnes of kit 4400km at Mach 0.74. Suddenly the A-400M doesn't look like so much of a bargain in either direction.

I refer you to the inimitable Lewis Page who nailed this project back in 2010:

The UK has been able to acquire much bigger, faster, longer-ranging C-17 Globemasters from the US in recent years for acquisition costs of £70m at most. A Globemaster carries more than twice what an A400M can and costs half what an A400M does: it is four times better value for money.

He quoted RAF Wing Commander Roger Green who was similarly forthright:

There is a problematic situation regarding the A400M should it go unserviceable whilst away from a main or RAF support staging base. Because the C–130 is in service with many air forces, and both the C–130 and the C–17 are operated by the USAF, the RAF has been able to take advantage of the mutual assistance that exists between national air forces on a global basis. That is not going to be the case with the A400M and it is likely that outside Europe, RAF A400M operations will have to be supported from its main base with the concomitant operational penalties.

Mr. Page was not impressed back in 2010, and his humour is unlikely to have improved over the past 3 years.

The A-400M is a staggeringly stupid and expensive project which was conducted solely to funnel money to the European aviation industry in order that they could continue to compete with Boeing, Lockheed Martin et al. It hasn't even achieved that aim - no-one sane would buy an A-400M when the C-130J or C-17 are available, established, operated world-wide and well-supported. I don't see any of these issues covered by Ms. Monaghan in her Telegraph article. Perhaps she should consider going out and doing some actual journalism.

Cult of the warrior

Today, famed US sniper Chris Kyle was mourned in Texas at the Dallas Cowboys football stadium. His coffin was placed at the centre star of the pitch. It struck me that this is a very American (and, indeed, a very Texan) reaction to the passing of a warrior. Kyle was a SEAL, very active in post-invasion Iraq and known to the anti-American fighters there as "al-Shaitan Ramadi" - the Devil of Ramadi. His record in killing opposition fighters there was legendary, more so because according to US combat rules each kill had to be independently witnessed and justified.

Kyle's autobiography American Sniper described what it was like to set up and patiently stalk targets, waiting for the few seconds when a fighter presented himself in a threatening position with a weapon. By his own admission he was not a crack shot, although in a sniper community even an average shot is lethal at over 1km and he once successfully killed an insurgent at 1.9km. His skill seemed to be in being in the right place at the right time, combined with an aggressive urge to get things done; with the co-operation of a corpsman he got himself medically evacuated into a busy combat zone.

What's interesting about today's memorial service is the reaction of a US state to the death of one of its warriors. While the citizens of Wootton Basset lined the streets to salute silently the UK military casualties from Afghanistan through RAF Lyneham, the Texan event is a more direct, more personal memorial for a soldier whose fame derived principally from his unregretted talent at killing:

"The first time killing someone, you're not even sure you can do it," he said. "You think you can, but you never know until you actually are put in that position and you do it. ... And then, you're worried when you get home, are the politicians going to hang you out to dry and put you on trial for murder?"
Did he regret any of his 160 kills? "No, not at all," he told Time.

It seems that America, and in particular Texas, is comfortable with the celebration of the life of a warrior; I can't imagine a British town or city conducting the same kind of veneration for fear of seeming "gung-ho" or thoughtless about the victims of the soldier. This, I think, is America's essential strength; a refusal to fear the consequences of its citizens' opinions and actions as long as they defended the country.

Inside North Korea

Google chairperson Eric Schmidt went to North Korea with a small posse including his daughter Sophie. You should definitely read her blog of the visit:

When we asked how old Un had turned (29? 30?), we were told that "Koreans keep track of age differently" than we do. Alright, then.
[...]
In a fantastic bit of timing, as we exited the train, the station's power cut out (above right). The commuters around us immediately pulled out flashlights, which they presumably carry all the time. Can't win 'em all, minders.

One is left with the impression of a bankrupt country straining to put on an act of "Juche" (self-reliance) that could collapse at any moment. The only question is what the butcher's bill will be when the collapse comes.

The perils of principality

Guardian journalist (deputy fashion editor) Hadley Freeman is branching out; fresh from a fawning column on Obama's inauguration, she chooses a similarly royal figure as her next subject - Captain Harry Wales, aka Prince Harry:

No matter how many times he insists he is just a normal soldier, and no matter how many members of his squadron are trotted out to parrot the line, the fact remains he is royal and his presence there arguably – as many have pointed out previously, including Harry – puts his fellow soldiers in danger.

Harry's part of the UK Apache contingent, Hadley. They have been top of the Taliban target list ever since their deployment in 2007. Apaches are hated and feared by the Taliban - see for instance the book "Apache" by UK AH-64 pilot Ed Macy. Having Prince Harry in Bastion or cruising around the sky in an AH-64 is not going to make the Apache crew any more of a priority target than they already are. The Taliban would like nothing better than to kill an Apache crew, or better yet capture them and film them having their head slowly sawn off. I'm sure that if they caught Harry rather than J. Random other Apache pilot it would be an extra frisson for them, but that doesn't make it any more likely to happen. They would have to be exceptionally lucky with a heavy machine gun or RPG, or be in luck when an Apache suffers a serious mechanical failure far from base.

Hadley's take on Captain Wales is fairly clear:

The nation's eyes will collectively remain unbatted at the revelation from Captain Simon Beattie, Captain Wales's commander, that his charge is "pretty forward on the banter". No word on whether that banter includes racist terms such as "Paki" and "raghead", as it did three years ago in reference to one of Harry's then Sandhurst colleagues.

Ah yes, the racially prejudiced and colonial UK monarchy. Now we see where you're coming from, Hadley. No doubt you're waiting with baited breath for a UK version of Bradley Manning to leak UK Apache gun camera tapes showing Captain Wales mercilessly gunning down Afghan civilians.

I perhaps ought to take up commentary on fashion, since I'm clearly at least as well informed on that topic as Hadley is in matters military.

Post-crisis in Algeria?

The bloody siege at Amenas in Algeria is over, and five alleged kidnappers have been taken alive. I believe that the Algerian authorities have a "robust" approach to prisoner rights, and right now the kidnappers are likely wishing they'd been shot instead. Anyway, the dust is settling on the action with 23+ hostages and around 30 kidnappers dead. What was this all about, and what does it forecast of future terrorist activity in the Maghreb?

The siege was clearly targeted at Western governments; reports seem consistent that the kidnappers left the Algerian staff more or less alone and concentrated on the Western staff as hostages. What gives a little more colour to that view, though, comes from blogger Wretchard writing about Filipino engineer and hostage Ruben Andrada:

With detcord wrapped around his neck and caught in the gunbattle between the Masked Brigade and Algerian forces, he regarded his chances of survival as doubtful. Andrada retreated into that classic Filipino attitude: "bahala na". He thought 'leave it to God' as bullets kicked up the ground around him.

It's odd that a Filipino would be regarded as Western - except, of course, it's not the "country of nationality" that the hostage takers care about. Filipinos are predominantly Christian - 90% of the population, and most of those are Catholic. The kidnappers weren't targeting "Westerners", they were targeting "non-Muslims".

The assault itself was the classic Russian model - go in, slaughter the bad guys, try not to kill hostages if you can help it, but never mind if some of them get hit. Taking prisoners is strictly optional, which is why I was surprised that five kidnappers appear to have survived - I wonder if this group was based away from the gas plant as a support/escape element and was detected and ambushed by the Algerian forces suddenly enough that fighting wasn't really an option. There will be any amount of explicit and implicit blame placed on the Algerian forces in the next few weeks, but really they did exactly as they were supposed to. Algeria doesn't want attacks like this to happen, especially not around its revenue-producing gas plants. It wants to make plain to any attackers that no deals are made, that Algeria won't hesitate to go in shooting, and that holding hostages won't really slow down any attack. From now on, any Western kidnapping in Algeria will likely be by really badly-informed small-scale terrorist / criminal groups (and therefore relatively easy to manage). Jihadi attacks will be aiming to shoot-and-scoot or suicide-bomb, not hold hostages and hang around. Both of these situations are much easier to manage than a hostage siege, and generally less expensive in destruction to industrial facilities.

It will be interesting to see where the next hostage-taking occurs. I'm assuming Mali is now quite a hard target as Westerners are alerted to danger. I wonder if Morocco and Tunisia will be the next target, or perhaps further afield in Nigeria if Boko Haram can be persuaded to up their current game of blowing up churches, providing logistical support for better-trained and more determined jihadi from the Maghreb.