Archive for November 11th, 2007
The uninvited guest: Chinese sub pops up in middle of U.S. Navy exercise, leaving military chiefs red-faced
The uninvited guest: Chinese sub pops up in middle of U.S. Navy exercise, leaving military chiefs red-faced
on 10th November 2007
When the U.S. Navy deploys a battle fleet on exercises, it takes the security of its aircraft carriers very seriously indeed. At least a dozen warships provide a physical guard while the technical wizardry of the world’s only military superpower offers an invisible shield to detect and deter any intruders.
That is the theory. Or, rather, was the theory.
Uninvited guest: A Chinese Song Class submarine, like the one that sufaced by the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk
American military chiefs have been left dumbstruck by an undetected Chinese submarine popping up at the heart of a recent Pacific exercise and close to the vast U.S.S. Kitty Hawk – a 1,000ft supercarrier with 4,500 personnel on board.
By the time it surfaced the 160ft Song Class diesel-electric attack submarine is understood to have sailed within viable range for launching torpedoes or missiles at the carrier.
According to senior Nato officials the incident caused consternation in the U.S. Navy.
The Americans had no idea China’s fast-growing submarine fleet had reached such a level of sophistication, or that it posed such a threat.
One Nato figure said the effect was “as big a shock as the Russians launching Sputnik” – a reference to the Soviet Union’s first orbiting satellite in 1957 which marked the start of the space age.
The incident, which took place in the ocean between southern Japan and Taiwan, is a major embarrassment for the Pentagon.
Battle stations: The Kitty Hawk carries 4,500 personnel
The lone Chinese vessel slipped past at least a dozen other American warships which were supposed to protect the carrier from hostile aircraft or submarines.
And the rest of the costly defensive screen, which usually includes at least two U.S. submarines, was also apparently unable to detect it.
According to the Nato source, the encounter has forced a serious re-think of American and Nato naval strategy as commanders reconsider the level of threat from potentially hostile Chinese submarines.
It also led to tense diplomatic exchanges, with shaken American diplomats demanding to know why the submarine was “shadowing” the U.S. fleet while Beijing pleaded ignorance and dismissed the affair as coincidence.
Analysts believe Beijing was sending a message to America and the West demonstrating its rapidly-growing military capability to threaten foreign powers which try to interfere in its “backyard”.
The People’s Liberation Army Navy’s submarine fleet includes at least two nuclear-missile launching vessels.
Its 13 Song Class submarines are extremely quiet and difficult to detect when running on electric motors.
Commodore Stephen Saunders, editor of Jane’s Fighting Ships, and a former Royal Navy anti-submarine specialist, said the U.S. had paid relatively little attention to this form of warfare since the end of the Cold War.
He said: “It was certainly a wake-up call for the Americans.
“It would tie in with what we see the Chinese trying to do, which appears to be to deter the Americans from interfering or operating in their backyard, particularly in relation to Taiwan.”
In January China carried a successful missile test, shooting down a satellite in orbit for the first time.
Islam’s contributions to West deliberately ignored’
Islam’s contributions to West deliberately ignored’
11/11/2007
UK-based historian Dr Farhat A Hussian speaking on “The impact of Islamic civilisation on Western Europe” at Fanar auditorium on Friday.
(SALIM MATRAMKOT)
The positive relationship which Islam had shared with the West nearly a millennium ago is kept buried by the Western scholars, said a UK-based specialist historian.
Speaking on “The impact of Islamic civilization on Western Europe” at Fanar auditorium on Friday, Dr Farhat A Hussian said Islam helped the West to get out of the Dark Ages and Middle Ages by providing it with higher level of scientific, medical and mechanical insights.
Unfortunately, modern studies of Islam in Europe are neglecting the substantive history of Islam and the influence of Islamic civilization in the making of Europe’s history and heritage, he said.
Most of the European universities teach that early civilization is limited to countries like Greece and Rome.
The impact of ancient Middle Eastern civilization upon these countries is deliberately ignored.
“The scope of Greek civilization is limited and many of its facets have been disproved by modern science.
Greeks took much from Mesopotamia and Egypt. Romans also did the same,” he said.
Bertrand Russel said that “Muslims preserved the civilization of the Greeks and lacked the intellectual tool to advance civilization’.
Many millions of people in Europe are unaware of Muslim achievements and contribution to Europe and instead feel negatively towards Islam.
Dr Farhat, who has authored several books on history and archaeology, said his forthcoming book on Islamic civilization and Europe will address these erroneous assertions.
Early spread of Islam began filtering into Spain in 711 AD and it further spread into Southern France and Southern Italy via Sicily, Crete and Anatolia in the nineth century and Russia and Baltic State witnessed the spread of Islam in 13th and 15th centuries respectively.
And it is with the spread of Islam that agriculture, nutrition, coinage, finance, trade, ceramics, textiles, mathematics, science, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, knowledge, terms and concepts witnessed advancements in these regions.
Farhat said the presence of major Muslim castles visible across the landscape of modern Spain and Portugal is a testament to their history and role and quality of their construction by the Muslims of Spain (Al Andalus), including Sultanate of Granada.
Now, a thousand years after their constructions, the castles of Al Andalus continue to stand majestically across the landscape of Spain and Portugal and allude to a great heritage.
By the 10th century, Islamic ceramics, textiles, glass and metal ware were of the highest standards and qualities.
Muslim luxury goods were sought after as high status prized goods by the more wealthy families in Western Europe.
The technology and style developed by Muslims in ceramics, textiles, glass and metal ware impacted upon Europe.
“The modern science has confirmed the knowledge stated in the Holy Qur’an and the hadith of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).
The Qur’an and Sunnah have formed the basis for Islamic civilization from the time of the Prophet and into subsequent centuries involving also the role of the Khalifas who were instrumental in the spread of Islamic civilization,” Dr Farhat said.
http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp?section=Local_News&month=November2007&file=Local_News200711113124.xml
Pentagon Forecast: Cloudy, 80% Chance of Riots
Pentagon Forecast : Cloudy, 80% Chance of Riots
By Noah Shachtman
November 09, 2007
DarpaWatch, Human Terrain
The Pentagon is paying Lockheed Martin to try to predict insurgencies and civil unrest like the weather. It’s part of a larger military effort to blend forecasting software with social science that has some counterinsurgency experts cringing.
Lockheed recently won a $1.3 million, 15-month contract from the Defense Department to help develop the “Integrated Crises Early Warning System, or ICEWS.
The program will “let military commanders anticipate and respond to worldwide political crises and predict events of interest and stability of countries of interest with greater than 80 percent accuracy,” the company claims.
“Rebellions, insurgencies, ethnic/religious violence, civil war, and major economic crises” will all be predictable. So will “combinations of strategies, tactics, and resources to mitigate against those instabilities.”
DARPA, the Pentagon’s bleeding-edge research arm, laid out the case for ICEWS this summer at its conference, held outside of Disneyworld. “Commanders will always need to have an accurate picture of enemy positions, as well as friendly units and allies,” David Honey, who heads the agency’s Strategic Technology Office, told confab-goers in Anaheim, California.
“But increasingly it’s social, cultural, political and economic information, foreign language capabilities and other clues – that are proving essential.”
Figuring out how to find those clues won’t be easy, his colleague, Sean O’Brien, warned.
He has a three-part plan for how ICEWS might get it done, however. It tracks, roughly, to how meteorologists piece together long-range weather forecasts.
Step one: dump everything we know about a country like Iraq, and “create software agents that mirror the actual communities.”
Not only does that mean identifying “government leaders‘ propensity to defuse or exacerbate potentially volatile situations,” O’Brien explained in a call for proposals.
It also requires a determination of “how a country’s macro-structural conditions (social, demographic, economic) affect the way in which the country’s citizens interact with its government.”
What’s more, according to an article in the Military & Aerospace Electronics trade journal, the ICEWS system should be designed to “capture and process vast quantities of data from digitized news media, Websites, blogs, and other sources of information that reflect the dynamic and rapidly changing character and intensity of interactions between people and governments.”
Step two in the ICEWS plan: make these agents even more realistic, by “leveraging the hundreds of social, cultural, and behavioral theories” about why people act the way they do. Step three: let commanders run mock battle plans against these modeled Iraqis, to see how they might react.
Experts on counterinsurgency are, to say the least, skeptical.
“Wait a minute, you can’t tell me who’s going to a win a football game. And now you’re going to replicate free will?” Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, who helped write the Army’s manual on defusing insurgencies, tells DANGER ROOM.
“They are smoking something they shouldn’t be,” retired Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper recently quipped to Science Magazine.
The military has been trying, for decades, to use social science data to forecast what might happen next on the battlefield — or around the world. In 1976, for example, Pentagon-funded researchers put together a “integrated crisis warning system… comprised of (1) quantitative military, political, and economic crisis indicators; (2) quantitative indicators of U.S. military, political, and economic interests abroad; (3) a unified multi-method forecasting capability; and (4) a computer base.”
More recently, DARPA has funded efforts to “anticipate the societal/regional indicators that precipitate instability.”
For these projects, the agency turned to Massachusetts research firm Aptima, Inc. VISualization of Threats and Attacks in Urban Environments, or “VISTA,” was the company’s attempt to “utilize cultural models and other social network analysis techniques to assess and forecast nation state instability and conflict.” The “Anticipatory Culture-Based Modeling Environment,” or ACUMEN, toolkit created a “simulation engine” based on “theories from psychology, social psychology, sociology, organization science, political science, and economics.”
ACUMEN modeled political, military, social, religious, and insurgent groups as agents, along with their relationships regarding hostility, support, membership, and more. ACUMEN modeled the profiles of agents and geographic regions (at the state and province levels) within specific test states using a set of social, political, economic, health, and demographic indicators. In all there were 150 indicators for the state, 60 indicators for each province, and 30 indicators for each agent.
But that was all in the lab. The goal of ICEWS is to eventually bring the tool to war. As Military & Aerospace Electronics notes, “The third phase will involve a live, in-theater test of the system.”
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/11/lockheed-peers-.html
