Stone Corporation, SERI and the brief window when China’s political and economic 'doors' were open- Gordon Housworth [ 5/22/2009 - 16:49 ] #
The Chinese research community and business sector are the focus of this 20th anniversary note on the events of May-June, 1989, culminating in the military’s expulsion and dispersal of demonstrators, later their parents and sympathizers, from Tiananmen Square on 4 June. As the Chinese place added importance to anniversaries at a multiple of five to the event, I hope to do justice to themes and outcomes now largely lost to western readers.
James Miles’ The Legacy of Tiananmen: China in Disarray is recommended for a traverse of the events leading to 4 June, as is Goldman’s The Twentieth Anniversary of the Democracy Wall Movement. The events of June 1989 can reasonably be said to rise from the Democracy Wall of 1978-1979:
Beijing democracy activists [were] encouraged to criticise the Gang of Four and failed government policies. But the [Chinese Communist Party (CCP)] became dismayed as more and more posters began to call for a complete overhaul and even the abolishment of the CCP. As the current leadership and policies came under fire, a new wave of party intolerance at political dissent began.
One might think that this should have come as no surprise as:
Most of the participants were ex-Red Guards and workers, who might have been students but for the suspension of their education from 1966 to 1976. They used the methods and strategies they had learned in the Cultural Revolution forming unofficial groups, putting up large-character posters, writing and printing pamphlets, and setting up their own networks to achieve their own political goals. In the Cultural Revolution, they had employed these practices initially to purge party officials and the intellectual establishment in response to Mao's summons to "rebel against authority."
Elements of this note rose from a discussion with colleagues who were involved in construction technology transfer to and through a series of joint ventures in China in the early 1980s. One was working with the founders of Stone Corporation of China prior to the May 1989 uprising. Stone Corp was highly regarded as the new symbol of Chinese capitalism before 1989, but condemned by Li Peng as “counter-revolutionists” days after suppression of the uprising and fall of Zhao Ziyang, then general secretary of the Communist Party.
As some of the early documents are not easily available in electronic text, I have tried to site enough for readers to pursue.
Never underestimate your enemies
From If you want food, find Ziyang"; If you want Ziyang, pierce the Golden Shield:
An administrator given to revisionist thinking or pragmatic solutions depending upon your political viewpoint, Zhao was tapped by Deng Xiaoping to revitalize the economy. Zhao created much of the 1980s economic package credited to Deng Xiaoping:
- Coastal development with special economic zones, drawing investment and creating exports
- Agriculture reform that disbanded communes, returning private plots to farmers while assigning production contracts to individual households.
- Industrial reform that included expanded self-management for peasant farmers and some industries
- Price reform allowing farmers and factories to set prices for their products
Zhao threaded the policy needle with a 1987 speech that declared China to be in a stable, "primary stage of socialism" that could afford to experiment with approaches to stimulate economic production. In a stroke, market economics appeared within the evolution of socialism.
Zhao's pragmatism led to his stepping on the third rail of political reform, thinking the "goal of Chinese political reform was to build up democracy and rule of law." Having acquired a legion of old school enemies, Zhao was said to have doomed himself by making public (to Mikhail Gorbachev, already a tainted reformer in communist eyes) that all major Central Committee decisions had to be approved by the nominally retired Deng, which implicitly showed Deng to be the stonewall of reform...
Without approval of conservative elements of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Zhao commenced to simultaneously open what would later be called the political and economic doors to a dissatisfied citizenry.
The nascent RAND: Beijing Social and Economic Sciences Research Institute (SERI)
Independent of government, Chen Ziming set up his first think tank, the China Political and Administrative Sciences Research Institute, to fulfill a “long cherished dream.” (Wang Juntao joined Chen's second think tank in the late 1980s the Beijing Social and Economic Sciences Research Institute (SERI) and was "deputy editor of SERI's newspaper, Economics Weekly, at the time of the 1989 demonstrations):
“[Chen] said that he wanted to turn his organization into something like the U.S. Rand Corporation, doing consultancy work for government decision-making bodies, providing top-level advice and strategies for reform,"... Among the group's founding members was Wang Juntao. [Both Chen and Wang had activist histories dating preceding the Democracy Wall.] The two men quietly built up an organization of extraordinary sophistication, quite independent of party control. Unlike more conventional dissidents they did not seek out the Western media, preferring instead to cultivate good relations with radical reformers working for the government. Their groundbreaking efforts thus went almost entirely unremarked by the outside world. “The two men’s long-term aim was not to pursue scholarship... If they'd wanted to do that they could have done it in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Their aim was to change the socialist system." It was only after Tiananmen [that] most Western journalists and even many Chinese intellectuals learned their names.
[In 1987] Chen founded a new [group] called the Beijing Social and Economic Sciences Research Institute [SERI, whose] activities ranged from conducting public opinion surveys - a science then in its infancy in China - to publishing books on social and political issues. Within two years, the institute had nearly 50 employees and more than 100 associate researchers. It had office space consisting of 60 rooms. sophisticated computer equipment, and dozens of cars. By the time the Tiananmen Square protests erupted, it had launched nearly 40 research projects, organized 14 academic conferences, and published more than 100 books on the social sciences... Hardliners were deeply suspicious of the institute's activities, but thanks to the relative strength of reformist leaders at the time, the Chinese media gave the institute considerable encouragement by publishing some of the results of its surveys...
It is a testament to the strength of the reformers that the shock of hardliners could be restrained when Chen was publishing polls such as this 1987 item:
[M]ore than 3,000 respondents answered questions about their attitude toward highly sensitive political issues. A book based on the results contained what for China were embarrassing revelations about people's political views. It said, for example, that more than a quarter of private entrepreneurs surveyed believed that it was right to rebel against the state “if the state caused you to lose hope.” More than 15 percent of peasants gave the same reply and nearly 10 percent of intellectuals and officials. Even asking such a question would have been unthinkable a few years earlier.
[F]ewer than 45 percent of peasants felt proud of living in a socialist country and only just over 50 percent of intellectuals. Officials showed the greatest enthusiasm for socialism, with more than 65 percent expressing pride in the system. Nonetheless, more than 10 percent of cadres replied that “there is nothing to be proud of.” Asked whether they trusted the government, nearly 40 percent of peasants surveyed replied “No.” Most respondents expressed dissatisfaction with the behavior of civil servants, including nearly 70 percent of officials themselves. A similar proportion agreed that “problems in the political system are the main reason why China is developing slowly.” Fewer than half expressed satisfaction with the amount of freedom of speech and belief they enjoyed...
In retrospect, with such political explosives in hand it is a marvel that Chen and Wang were not silenced prior to being accused as the "black hands" behind the 1989 movement. The thirteen-year prison sentences imposed on both “probably had more to do with what they represented - the emergence of an organized, independent intellectual force - than with anything they actually did in 1989.” Wang’s wife said, “I cannot but respect the Communist Party's insight, their ability to see at a glance who are their real adversaries.” Think tanks and research institutions henceforth curtailed any social commentary not acceptable to CCP interests.
China’s 'first IBM'
Wan Runnan was the business equivalent to Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao in the research community:
Wan said his aim was to create China's answer to IBM [just as] Chen wanted his company [SERI] to become China's Rand Corporation... “When Wan established [Stone Corporation] with 20,000 yuan [$5,400] in a two-room office provided by a rural factory, nobody could imagine this humble 'Stone' would become a computer empire with 30 million yuan in fixed assets and a turnover last year of 300 million yuan," gushed Xinhua in 1988, when Wan was still a model entrepreneur lionized by the official media. “Some People call these new entrepreneurs China's 'red capitalists' of the 80's," the agency said.
Unlike Chen and Wang, Wan, who was in his mid-forties by the time Tiananmen erupted, was not a man with a long record of political activism on the wrong side of the party line. Wan was, in fact, a party member. But that did not stop him from sharing some of Chen and Wang's interests. When one of his employees proposed setting up a think tank, Wan readily agreed. In 1988 he established the small but influential Stone Social Development Research Institute, appointing the well-known political and legal scholar Cao Siyuan as its head. Cao, a former researcher in one of Zhao’s think tanks, had extensive contacts in the official world thanks to his role as the chief drafter of China's first law on bankruptcy, the most fiercely debated piece of legislation ever considered by China's normally docile parliament. The law was adopted in 1986 and went into effect two years later, providing a legal framework for the winding up of loss-making, state-owned industries that for decades had been propped up by massive state subsidies.
One of Cao's jobs as director of the Stone think tank was to do consultancy work on the new law, But his activities also strayed into the more sensitive realm of politics. Cao had long been an outspoken advocate of giving the National People's Congress greater clout and removing overtly political jargon from the constitution. In March 1989, not long before the student protests erupted, Cao's institute organized a large-scale conference on constitutional reform attended by many of the country's radical intellectuals. Among the constitutional amendments Cao wanted to see were provisions that those brought to trial should be presumed innocent until proved guilty and that the secretive proceedings of the National People's Congress should be broadcast live and published in full. Cao wanted ordinary members of the public to be admitted to the Great Hall of the People to observe the meetings. His suggestions fell on deaf cars. The only part of the congress the government was prepared to broadcast live was the carefully scripted opening address by the prime minister. This was not a concession to Cao. Such broadcasts hid been introduced several years earlier. The government was not prepared to take even the remote risk of a dissident voice being heard by publishing a full record of debates, and it certainly did not want members of the public observing the sycophantic behavior of the “people's representatives” close up.
By the time of Tiananmen, Wan's Stone Corporation employed more than 700 people, many of whom eagerly joined the demonstrations. Unlike Chen and Wang, who preferred to stay in the background, Wan threw himself and his company into the movement, donating large sums of money to the students and organizing meetings of protest leaders. As the People’s Daily put it, -Wan Runnan picked up a big stone - 'the entire company' - and threw it at Beijing.” Cao Siyuan and his think tank helped Hu Jiwei, a liberal member of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, collect the names of fellow members on a petition calling for an emergency session of the Standing Committee to discuss the unrest. The authorities later accused Hu and Stone of including the names of people who had not agreed to give their support and of plotting to use the Standing Committee to dismiss Li Peng and rescind martial law. Hu was stripped of his post and expelled from the party. Cao also lost his party membership and was imprisoned without trial for nearly a year.
The Chinese Communist Party’s clear and present danger
While the events of May-June 1989 have been assiduously scrubbed from Chinese media and contemporary histories by the CCP, they have also fallen from Western minds by the passage of time. To many, only the image of the Tank Man, stripped of context, remains in Western consciousness:
Tiananmen Square was a war zone [in June 1989]. An army 300,000 strong - that's almost twice the numbers we sent into Iraq - the People's Liberation Army, fought its way into Beijing from four directions, with orders to converge on the square. Unarmed citizens and students faced armored personnel carriers, tanks and soldiers armed with semi-automatic weapons. By 5:30 A.M. on June 4th, 1989, the army's mission had been accomplished...
The protests [had] begun five weeks earlier with a mass student demonstration, and in most Western media, continued to be treated as a student phenomenon... The students had touched a nerve, and soon everyone seemed to be out there protesting against hardship, government corruption and 40 years of repression. In Tiananmen Square and on the streets of Beijing, in cities right across China, there were tens of millions of Tank Men. Whole swathes of the country were in open revolt...
In Beijing, one in ten of the population was joining in, and that includes all the old people, all the little children. So it was massive... There were people in heavy earth-moving equipment. Honey bucket collectors and a tank truck came in. There were pilots. There were hotel workers... It was just a carnival of protest. All the groups were out there with their own banners, saying, "We are the Beijing journalists. We demand press freedom. We demand the right to tell the truth." ... You had doctors and nurses and scientists and army people demonstrating. The Chinese navy was demonstrating. And I thought, this is extraordinary because who's left? It's just the top leaders who aren't out there...
For the very first time, press and television were reporting freely and truthfully. The virus of freedom quickly spread... Uprisings occurred all over China, in at least 400 cities - we know this from the Chinese press and from their own military museum - all the way from Mongolia in the northwest down to the southeast near Hong Kong... And from these cities, hundreds of thousands of supporters converged on the capital. The students had started the protest, hoping to cleanse the party of graft and corruption and encourage free speech. They sought reform, not revolution. After all, they were, by and large, the children of the elite. But as their movement spread outwards to the middle classes and then to the workers and peasants, attitudes hardened...
It is instructive to revisit the threat perceived by conservative politburo members to the continued existence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP):
The move from student uprising, if you will, to a worker uprising is what really scared the Chinese government. They felt that they could deal with the students. After all, students had been involved in uprisings for many, many years. But where it became dangerous to the stability and to the survival of the Communist Party was when ordinary workers became involved...
After all, the Chinese Communist Party had originally used the workers' movement to gain power for itself. Now those in government were terrified that we'd take it back from them... In fact, the government was paralyzed by infighting between those who advocated peaceful negotiation and hard-liners who demanded a crackdown. On May the 19th, Zhou Ziyang, the reformist general secretary of the Communist Party, suddenly appeared in Tiananmen Square to appeal for compromise. It would be his last public appearance. That night, before an audience of party faithful, hard-line Premier Li Peng showed the way forward. "We must end the situation immediately. Otherwise, the future of the People's Republic will be in grave danger." He completed his address with a declaration of martial law. Troops would occupy the city and put an end to the protests in Tiananmen Square...
Never before in the 40-year history of communist rule had China put its citizens and its army in this situation... It was a massive display of force, 300,000 troops by most counts... all converging on the city... Four days after [this] attempted entry, the army withdrew to bases outside the city. Beijing was euphoric... But it also was an enormous humiliation for the leadership. They had been thwarted and they had lost face, and they weren't going to let it happen again... The party elders feared that the whole edifice of communism was going to collapse, like it was collapsing in the Soviet Union and in other parts of Eastern Europe. They needed to make a stand - and a bloody stand - to show their population, in effect, to cow their population back into submission... Over the next 10 days, Supreme Leader Deng Xiaoping hatched a new plan. Troops armed with semi-automatic weapons and backed by tanks were drawn from military districts across China [rural units with no attachments to the urban center]... On the night of June 3rd, a huge invasion force [came in again] from all directions but mostly from the west, this time with live ammunition, this time strict orders: the square must be cleared by dawn on June 4th...
The end of nascent political reform came quickly:
Angry citizens were everywhere. People just couldn't understand why this country and its army, the People's Army, would slaughter its own people, the Beijing citizens... People still pour into the streets... People were just so angry, so furious at what was happening in their city that they were not going to step back and let the army do what it was doing... Troops began to fire in all different directions... Everybody was frightened by this overwhelming use of force... What was amazing was that the army used battlefield weapons...
[It] was a one-sided pitched battle all the way from the western suburbs until [the PLA], about 1:30 AM, began to arrive at Tiananmen Square... [The] troops had orders to clear the square by dawn [of 4 June]. That was the deadline... And it was clear to everyone from that point on that we were absolutely trapped. You had the military coming in from the west with their tanks. We knew there were tanks coming in from the south of Tiananmen Gate. And now on both sides of the square, you had hundreds, if not thousands of soldiers... And then the firing started. Even at this late stage, many couldn't believe the army was using live ammunition, and they stood their ground... And there was this continual announcement of, "Under the martial law regulations, no one should be on the street. If you stay on the street, you will be responsible for what happens to you"...
Firing on civilians recommenced later in the morning as parents came to search for their children:
The tactics of overwhelming force that were used had a point. They were meant to shock, terrify and awe... No one knows for certain how many people died. The Chinese Red Cross initially reported 2,600 and immediately retracted under intense government pressure The official government figure is 241 dead, including 23 officers and soldiers, and 7,000 wounded... In the aftermath of the Beijing massacre, tens of thousands all across the country were arrested. Unknown numbers were executed. Some are still in prison today. China television portrayed these people as counter-revolutionaries, hooligans and agents of foreign powers...
By the close of 4 June, the People’s Liberation Army was again in complete control. Readers can now understand the velocity of retribution directed against firms such as Stone:
SOLDIERS of the People's Liberation Army are occupying the offices of China's most successful independent computer company, the Beijing Stone Group. Wan Runnan, the software engineer who founded the company, is in hiding and officials have issued a warrant for his arrest as the government continues to crack down on supporters of democracy.
The authorities have pinpointed Stone as a symbol of the 'counter-revolution'. The company, founded five years ago, rapidly became the vanguard of China's computer industry and, in its management style, established itself as a model for economic reform...
Stone owed its success and its downfall to the prominent position it played in China's reform and to the associations it had forged with prominent politicians. Wan had been a confidant of Zhao Ziyang, the reformist general secretary of the Communist Party, and his supporters. But with Zhao's fall from grace, Stone lost its [influence and protection]...
Stone’s founder and president, Wan Runnan, had overplayed his hand, likely due to his having been a privileged child of the establishment:
Because the government did not imprison leaders of the 1985-86 democracy protests, many of them became important figures in the 1989 movement. The voices of Fang Lizhi and Wang Ruowang were openly heard, and Liu Bin Yan became a key organizer. Other leaders emerged as spokesmen and organizers for the movement, most having privileged backgrounds and associations with their supposed enemies:
• Sun Hui, a Beijing University student, helped found the Autonomous Students’ Federation to organize the demonstrating students. Sun’s parents were Communist Party members, but his death at the Tiananmen massacre suggests that he may not have fully understood the dialectic he was a part of. Nevertheless, Sun’s ties to the regime made him vulnerable to manipulation.
• Wan Runnan has been married twice, both times to daughters of high Communist Party officials. According to one undisclosed source in the student democracy movement, Wan closely associated with members of the inner circle of control in the Communist Party of China. These connections helped him financially, since he was allowed to own and build the Stone Corporation, the largest private corporation in mainland China and its main producer of computers. Wan supplied public address systems, walkie-talkies, and other equipment to help the student leaders organize. Given his contacts, he probably knew Communist Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang rather well; Zhao was purged after the June massacre for supporting the democracy movement. Wan Runnan was quoted in a July 1990 Reason article as insisting that “we are not counterrevolutionaries.” After hinting that he supported free market reforms in addition to democracy, he qualified himself by noting, “The transformation must take place in stages… the communication, transportation, and energy sectors will remain in government hands.” Wan now heads the Paris-based Federation for a Democratic China, one of the two largest organizations in the currently exiled Chinese democracy movement…
Wan at least escaped the blade that befell many of his peers, ultimately making it to the US:
Wan Runnan: former Chairman of FDC (the second and third Congress). He was the founder and Chairman of Stone Corporation which was the first private company in China. He was on the wanted list of CCP, because he had supported the democratic movement of 1989. After June 4th Massacre he escaped abroad and has settled in the USA.
Without this background it would be hard for Wan to think that he could get away with providing financial and logistic support to the democracy movement. With backing from hard liners, Li was happy to root out Wan and his counterparts as part of bringing the private sector to heel under party control:
Despite its importance, in a system that is still largely owned and controlled by the government, the role of the private sector is limited: Even today [2002], as management responsibilities have been passed on to managers and local officials, and as industrial output has shifted to the private sector, the government still owns about 70 percent of the industrial assets... Yet, this sector has played a significant role in encroaching upon state sovereignty in two ways. First, in times of crisis, this sector has played a role of outright resistance. During the Tiananmen movement, it was the private entrepreneurs of Beijing that provided the students with fax machines, radio equipment, televisions and other perishable goods that became a staple of the movement... The Stone Corporation was the largest and most famous of these behind-the-scenes participants, but there were many others. It would be a stretch to argue that private businesses in China are predisposed to resistance. However, it is the case that these organizations are structurally the ones that hold the greatest degree of independence from the state, and therefore have the greatest latitude in protesting when the opportunity presents itself.
Continuing the theme of lawful suppression of "counterrevolutionaries," the Communist Party staged an exhibition in September 1989 containing images of "burned out tanks and armored personnel carriers, photographs of soldiers who had been burned to death or hanged from overpasses, and photos of burning buses and clashes between students and police in riot gear." On the 5th anniversary, Li Peng announced "new security regulations defining political discussions outside the Party line as sabotage." On the 10th anniversary, the government released a lengthy documentary on the "counterrevolutionary rebellion."
Termination of modest entrepreneurial support for liberalism
Political dissidents placed too great a faith in private entrepreneurs to spur democracy. (Note: geti are individual entrepreneurs, often in consumer services, while siying are larger privately owned businesses or enterprises.):
It is in the interest of entrepreneurs to cooperate with local cadres. Cooperation allows private-sector businesses to operate more smoothly, and sometimes just to get started in the first place... "Capitalist entrepreneurs see capitalist growth as possible because of, not in spite of, the involvement of officials." Rather than the larger siying enterprises being most autonomous, moreover, ties to officials matter tremendously for the development of the largest and most profitable enterprises. Even a large and innovative private enterprise like the Stone Corporation had to depend upon strong bureaucratic connections to succeed...
Some commentators have pointed to banners of support hung by geti entrepreneurs and to monetary and material donations made by entrepreneurs, such as managers of the Stone Corporation to demonstrators in 1989, as evidence for growing activism and political consciousness among entrepreneurs. But as a rule [members] of the business elite in the private sector have shown strong inclinations toward neither political activism nor the formation of strong horizontal ties. Stone's actions and supportive banners cannot be used to proclaim the existence of a politicized, much less democratizing, class. Donations by the Stone Corporation were not exceptional and, as noted previously, most entrepreneurs [did] not actively support the student demonstrators. More generally, entrepreneurs' participation in politics outside of state-sponsored organizations has been unusual, and has not been sustained...
The enthusiasm that reformers were expressing in the mid-1980s for the growth of "interest groups" and "social pluralism" was accompanied by the growth, immediately prior to and during the Tiananmen demonstrations, of what appeared to be an autonomous Chinese associational life. Examples of new organizations included the Beijing Autonomous Students' Union and the Capital Independent Workers' Union, which were founded during the 1989 protests. Similarly, the Beijing Institute for Research in the Social and Economic Sciences [founded] by Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao, both of whom had been active in the 1979 Democracy Wall movement and, later, the publication of Beijing Spring. These organizations were perceived by some to be harbingers of a second "golden age"... Yet these liberalizing trends of the mid-1980s, along with many others, were reined in by the 1989 Tiananmen protests. The autonomous organizations proved to be highly vulnerable and failed to become enduring features of post-Mao state-society relations. The [independent] unions were crushed by the government, while the Institute saw much of its autonomy undermined subsequent to the arrests of Chen and Wang for their role in the 1989 events.
Altering the education system to produce a new patriotic citizen
Beyond wounded national pride and primarily anti-US and anti-Japanese resentment:
Chinese nationalism in the 1990s was also constructed and enacted from the top by the Communist state. There were no major military threats to China's security after the end of the Cold War. Instead, the internal legitimacy crisis became a grave concern of the Chinese Communist regime because of the rapid decay of Communist ideology. In response, the Communist regime substituted performance legitimacy provided by surging economic development and nationalist legitimacy provided by invocation of the distinctive characteristics of Chinese culture in place of Marxist–Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. As one of the most important maneuvers to enact Chinese nationalism, the Communist government launched an extensive propaganda campaign of patriotic education after the Tiananmen Incident in 1989. The patriotic education campaign was well-engineered and appealed to nationalism in the name of patriotism to ensure loyalty in a population that was otherwise subject to many domestic discontents. The Communist regime, striving to maintain authoritarian control while Communist ideology was becoming obsolete in the post-Cold War era, warned of the existence of hostile international forces in the world perpetuating imperialist insult to Chinese pride. The patriotic education campaign was a state-led nationalist movement, which redefined the legitimacy of the post-Tiananmen leadership in a way that would permit the Communist Party's rule to continue on the basis of a non-Communist ideology. Patriotism was thus used to bolster CCP power in a country that was portrayed as besieged and embattled. The dependence on patriotism to build support for the government and the patriotic education campaign by the Communist propagandists were directly responsible for the nationalistic sentiment of the Chinese people in the mid-1990s.
From Beijing moves to preempt flash mob behavior for any purpose, be it civil, commercial, nationalistic or anti-state...:
The authorities are highly attentive to young nationalists known as fenqing, or the 'angry youth' among other translations:
"These people have been trained in an authoritarian system. They are at the same time victims of an authoritarian system, but they also behave in an authoritarian way towards others and are incredibly self-righteous... We should be more tolerant and respect the right of people to disagree with us but these people do not understand such values."
The definition of fenqing has morphed:
Cultural Revolution: urban-dwelling students who were sent to the countryside to toil with peasants and became embittered towards a society that had stolen their futures.
1980s: students and intellectuals who shaped the movement for greater social and political freedoms that ended when the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square
2000s: patriotic, xenophobic, nationalistic and, in some cases, violent in their defence of the motherland. This latest incarnation has partly emerged as the result of government policies implemented in reaction to the events of 1989, after which "patriotic" indoctrination became an even more important element of the education system.
Fenqing are tailor made to meet CCP needs for sustained legitimacy.
Closing the political door; expanding the economic door
From "If you want food, find Ziyang"...
Confined to house arrest, Zhao remained "steadfast that his views are correct, and their views were wrong," and he remained a remembered, if unheard, symbol that demonstrations were not a "counter-revolutionary rebellion" and that Tiananmen must be reassessed. Even in death, Zhao is a lightning rod of accountability.
Whereas Zhao and his generation made enormous contributions to individual wellbeing and thus much gratitude, e.g., "If you want food, find Ziyang," he is said to be less well known to younger generations either focused on wealth generation on the coast, or cut off in rural isolation.
Deng reasserts himself:
What the Party has relied on to prevent [public] pressure from building up is to allow people to exercise all of their ambitions and urges to be able to advance themselves and to have lives on the economic side of the ledger. This was Deng Xiaoping's great moment of genius. After the massacre of 1989, he in effect said we will not stop economic reform; we will in effect halt political reform.
What he basically said to people was: "Folks, you are in a room. There are two doors. One door says 'Politics'; one door says 'Economics.' You open the economic door, you are on your own. You can go the full distance to basically whatever you want: get wealthy, help your family have a bright future, move forward into a glorious future. If you open the political door, you are going to run right into one obstruction after another, and you are going to run into the state." People logically being practical -- and Chinese are very practical -- opened the economic door. They wouldn't open the political door. It was foolish to do so.
Private companies and research groups proceeded to chose the economic door, avoiding the political:
In retrospect, it seems extraordinary that the leadership of such an authoritarian state should allow the emergence of large, wealthy, independent institutions such as those operated by Chen Ziming and Wan Runnan. It is particularly remarkable given that, at least in the case of Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao, the authorities had been keeping [both under surveillance]...
The leadership would almost undoubtedly have meted out similar punishment to the private businessman Wan Runnan [as they had to Chen and Wang] had [Wan] not fled the country after Tiananmen.
Wan Runnan wrote a reflective retrospective of the CCP, Why The Chinese Communists Are Not Doomed To Finish Yet, in 2006. Recommended. Idealism and compromise are now absent:
During the 1989 democratic movement and the Russian/Eastern European changes, the Chinese Communist became even firmer in the will and determination to suppress the opposition... How did the Communist Party defeat the Nationalist Party to win the country? One point was the will and determination to sacrifice. By sacrifice, they mean sacrificing the lives of their warriors in large and systematic ways... The Communists won the nation by this rule and they governed the nation by this rule. What is political power? Lin Biao understood: Political power is the power to suppress. To maintain political power is to maintain the power to suppress... That was the will and determination to suppress that the Communists exhibited during the June 4th massacre...
Deng Xiaoping said: "Development is the only solid reason." This should actually read "Getting rich is the only solid reason." The reason is solid, but the words are soft. According to Comrade Zhang Chunqiao's critical opinion: "This is a capitulation to the national capitalist class." On this issue, I have the right to speak. I started the company Stone (四通), which had sales of over 1 billion RMB in 1988. I accounted for half of Zhongguan village. I was called by the western media as the "most outstanding result of the ten year flirtation between Deng Xiaoping and capitalism." At the time, a western reporter asked me: "Do you think that Deng Xiaoping is on your side?" I answered without hesitation: "Of course, because I am on his side." After the June 4th massacre, I could no longer be on his side and therefore I parted ways with the Communist Party.
Wan summarizes the CCP as follows:
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From the lessons of the former Soviet Russia and eastern Europe, the Communist Party is more firm and clear about suppressing the opposition;
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After forming alliances, the Communist Party has established a relatively stable international environment;
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The continuous economic development has provided adequate resources for improving their ability to govern;
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Under the pretext of "we won't argue," the Communist Party has actually totally abandoned their former ideology;
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The Communist Party has become a political party that represents wealthy people and the social elite. This newly created middle class is the foundation of stability in Chinese society today;
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The confirmation of their model for power succession has eliminated the concerns about their ability to maintain government.
Keep this in mind when you read Drezner’s “wishful thinking” about the capacity of the pro-democracy petition Charter 08 to induce a new popular rebellion. Drezner’s piece is valuable solely for the reader comments that gently but firmly correct him. China will still grow at about 6% per annum; not enough to keep everyone happy but enough for the CCP to sacrifice what it must to keep the political door closed and the economic door open, at least for the privileged, cooperative business class.
Epilog
Stone and SERI were part of a remarkable flowering that, along with far less adventuresome firms, quickly learned that in order to survive they had to work with the CCP and PLA as opposed to operating in relative independence.
In the same period, the PLA was disgorging its money losing firms onto provincial government and was expanding its overt and covert subsidiaries tasked with capturing needed foreign Intellectual Property (IP). When that network proved to be insufficient at capture an entrepreneurial bounty system was instituted by which Chinese firms otherwise unrelated to the PLA could capture IP and share it in return for various means of reward.
Americans continue to overlook the extremely high degree of nationalism among Chinese, a characteristic sharpened by post-1989 education reforms. (I do not impute anything negative to the Chinese; my point is that Jingoism is not purely an Occidental disease.) Had this flowering continued, Stone and its peers would have become technical powerhouses that would have become even more efficient at foreign IP collection as foreign firms flocked to partner with Stone et al.
Firms such as Stone were perfectly positioned to be both attractive to foreign government and corporate assets while being able to absorb and transmit the IP on offer into the Chinese economy. If Wan could have even remained an international democrat, there would have been many in the firm that would have supported IP diversion to Chinese national interests.
Thus this analyst is left to wonder if Li Peng’s retrenchment slowed rather than accelerated foreign IP collection. In other words, the crushing of this technical flowering may have slowed IP collection. It is interesting to consider the implications if Zhao had bested Li.
Exiled Tiananmen-era dissident detained in China
Associated Press
May 13, 2009, 11:13 pm ET
It's Just History: Patriotic Education in the PRC
By Julia Lovell
The China Beat
4/22/2009
The war that changed China
Posted by: Benjamin Lim
Reuters
February 17, 2009
In China, a Grass-Roots Rebellion
Rights Manifesto Slowly Gains Ground Despite Government Efforts to Quash It
By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post
January 29, 2009
China's Charter 08
Translated from the Chinese by Perry Link
New York Review of Books
Volume 56, Number 1 · January 15, 2009
What does Charter 08 tell us about China in 09?
Daniel W. Drezner
Foreign Policy
Mon, 01/05/2009 - 9:51am
NOTE: The post is wide of the mark; reader responses are on point
The United States and China
Bill Moyers Journal
August 22, 2008
Peking U. Draws Fire for Demolishing 'Democracy Wall'
Chronicle of Higher Education
November 5, 2007
Cross Cultural Dialogue on China’s Traditional Universalism
Thomas Bartlett
Response to Xiong Peiyun’s (熊培云) article “China’s Nationalism, and How Not to Deal with It”
Posted by Xiao Qiang
China Digital Times
May 11, 2008 7:37 PM
China’s Nationalism, and How Not to Deal with It
Posted by Michael Zhao
China Digital Times
May 10, 2008 10:02 PM
China’s angry youth vent their feelings
By Jamil Anderlini in Beijing
FT
Published: May 2 2008 17:15 | Last updated: May 2 2008 17:15
Summary of Chinese History ruled by Chinese Communist Party
Contributed by Federation for a Democratic China, (FDC)
Monday, 10 December 2007
Last Updated Monday, 10 December 2007
Tiananmen Veteran Chen Ziming Talks to RFA
by rfaunplugged
RFA Unplugged (Radio Free Asia blog)
Posted on December 27, 2006
My Life After Tiananmen: Chen Ziming
Radio Free Asia
Original reporting in Mandarin by An Ni. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Translated, written and produced for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.
2006-12-27
Why The Chinese Communists Are Not Doomed To Finish Yet
Wan Runnan
EastSouthWestNorth
2006
THE TANK MAN
Written, produced and directed by Antony Thomas
FRONTLINE
Air date: April 11, 2006
Wang Juntao: "To Resign from the Communist Party is for the Future of China"
Voluntary Resignation from the Chinese Communist Party Sets the Standard for Morality and Justice
By Xin Fei
The Epoch Times
Apr 21, 2005
Annex 1 How is “Private” Defined in the People’s Republic of China?
The Development of Private Enterprise in the People's Republic of China
Asian Development Bank
2003
Information Technology, Sovereignty, and Democratization in China
Doug Guthrie
New York University
Social Science Research Council
2002
Problems of democratization in China
By Thomas Gong Lum
Edition: 2, illustrated
Taylor & Francis, 2000
The Twentieth Anniversary of the Democracy Wall Movement
By Merle Goldman
Harvard Asia Quarterly
Summer 1999
page last updated: March 22, 2001
DEMOCRACY WALL: A Sudden Explosion of Free Speech, 1979
Unorthodox Opinions Are Heard on the Street
By WEI JINGSHENG
TIME Asia
SEPTEMBER 27, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 12
A state-led nationalism: The patriotic education campaign in post-Tiananmen China
Suisheng Zhao
Communist and Post-Communist Studies
Volume 31, Issue 3, September 1998, Pages 287-302
China's New Business Elite: The Political Consequences of Economic Reform
Margaret M. Pearson
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
1997
The Legacy of Tiananmen: China in Disarray
by James A. R. Miles
University of Michigan Press
1996
Beijing Revokes Parole, Returns Dissident to Jail
By Rone Tempest
LA Times
June 27, 1995
Free Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao
New York Times
February 13, 1992
How to Resist the Memory Hole
New York Times
Published: Wednesday, February 13, 1991
Playing the China Card
The New American
Jan. 1, 1991
Chinese troops turn on computer pioneers
by KATHERINE FORESTIER , HONG KONG
NewSceintist
Magazine issue 1671
01 July 1989
Democracy Wall
BBC
Democracy Wall
China’s Communist Revolution
BBC
Gordon Housworth
Cybersecurity Public InfoT Public Infrastructure Defense Public Intellectual Property Theft Public Risk Containment and Pricing Public Strategic Risk Public
|  | | A greased pig race: US cybersecurity architecture and organization- Gordon Housworth [ 3/14/2009 - 14:01 ] #
The nature of modern cyberwarfare makes a mockery of present legal boundaries that have heretofore usefully served the US and its citizens.
The similarities between asymmetric and cyberwarfare are striking, so much so that it is increasingly useful to interchange titles of one when reading materials about the other. It is already clear that cyberwar cannot be won with the equivalent of 'conventional forces':
-
State and nonstate actors coexist and cooperate, with nonstate actors offering useful plausible denial.
-
Attacks, botnets included, have both foreign and domestic computer and network components, many of which are unwitting accomplices.
-
Attacks are increasingly a swarm of blended attacks combining probing, intelligence gathering, phishing (including spear phishing), DDoS, interruption/disruption, spoofing/sensor overload and/or tampering, penetration.
-
Hostile C2 (command and control) nodes may rotate, either for security or operational needs.
-
Attacks can share cyber and electrical grid components, with attacks on one compromising the capacity of the other.
-
Only certain parts of the attack may be visible at any one time - and those visible parts viewed in isolation without confirming intelligence - may have severe jurisdictional and statute roadblocks.
Generally speaking, the ability of states - at least the OECD states - and their militaries to adapt to these asymmetrical challenges seems perpetually in doubt; bureaucratic and doctrinaire issues alone make established bureaucracies and armies vulnerable. We know that, "Systems fail at their boundaries, and that includes boundaries between components and clusters of components that act as subsystems." See: Structured IT risk remediation: Integrating security metrics and Design Basis Threat to overcome scenario spinning and fear mongering, 5/17/2007.
It is painful to watch someone so attentive to cyber issues as Defense Tech's Kevin Coleman as he attempts to parse cyber threat ownership in such a fluid, borderless environment. Without a wholistic analysis capacity of all active and passive threats, regardless of the jurisdiction of first observance, subtle signals of surveillance and attack patterns will be missed until it is too late.
Time to zero exploit is narrowing. Writing in 2004, Delta between worst-case and realistic cyberattacks narrow:
[cyberattacks come in] three categories: data, analysis of data, and control. Data is often of modest value, especially when data volumes are large and/or frequently changing, and time is short. Actionable information comes from the speedy analysis of data. Poor design, design driven by cost cutting, and design taking immediate advantage of newer technologies without thinking of security intrusion have conspired to create conditions in which data, analysis and control increasingly merge...
I submit that increasing systems interconnectivity and interdependence is narrowing the gap between loss of data and loss of life. Pursuing the analysis of data as opposed to raw data allows perps to obtain insight that allows them to attack a target either directly or gain an understanding of the means to attack its control systems. If the default shutdown conditions of a control system are poorly designed, interrupting the control system is tantamount to overtaking the system... If the perps can spot an asymmetrical weakness they will take that path of least resistance, least cost, and least exposure.
Quaint idea: The Forward Edge of the Battle Area
Neither cyberwars or contemporary battlefields have a well defined FEBA (Forward Edge of the Battle Area). In many instances they share little of conventional battle structure:
-
Forward Edge of the Battle Area (FEBA) - The foremost limits of a series of areas in which ground combat units are deployed, excluding the areas in which the covering or screening forces are operating...
-
Main Battle Area (MBA) - That portion of the battlefield in which the decisive battle is fought to defeat the enemy...
-
Substitute cyber warriors for asymmetricals in this item from a conference on complex systems, of which homeland security was one of over forty topics:
For insurgents to exploit their asymmetries, they must also negate the asymmetries that favour the conventional force. In particular, they must avoid direct, large scale confrontation against the better equipped, trained and synchronized conventional force. This can be understood using a multi-scale perspective: by generating and exploiting fine scale complexity, insurgents prevent the conventional force from acting at the scale they are organised for: large scale but limited complexity environments.
By dispersing into largely independent cells, insurgents can limit the amount of damage any single attack from the conventional force can inflict. This significantly reduces the threat of retaliation from acting as a deterrent, since the insurgents have negligible physical resources exposed to retaliatory attack. Insurgents that do not wear uniforms and blend into a civilian population cannot be readily identified or targeted until they attack, in a situation of their choice. There is no longer a forward edge of the battle line, meaning softer support units are vulnerable. The number of possible locations, times and direction of attack increases significantly compared to attrition warfare, increasing fine scale complexity. The heightened potential for collateral damage from mixing with civilian populations dramatically increases the task complexity for a conventional force that must minimise the deaths of innocent civilians for any hope of strategic victory.
US cyberdefense cannot be a perpetual 'greased pig race'
Having long struggled for an appropriate analogy to our dysfunctional cyber jurisdictional divisions between DHS, DoD, NSA, CIA and the FBI, I first chose baseball’s Pennant Race, then NASCAR’s Race to the Chase. But both pretend too much structure; I finally settled for old fashioned pig wresting or greased pig chases. It should be noted that the pig is a juvenile, merely evasive, not hostile. Were the pig an adult sow or boar, its pursuers would be greatly the worse for wear.
In yet another failed run at the pig, a recent director of the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), Rod Beckström, resigned "over what he said is the National Security Agency's (NSA) domination of the nation's cybersecurity efforts" and that "allowing the NSA to control national cybersecurity efforts is a "bad strategy on multiple grounds."
My observations:
-
"Homeland security" starts far beyond US borders; waiting till it arrives onshore to be discovered by DHS is too late.
-
DHS may be the traditional protector of civilian networks but they have done an miserable, execrable job of it, washing through one cyber-czar after another. (When even Dick Clarke departs, you know the situation is untennable, and there has been no effective improvement.)
-
Anyone who thought that a tiny appendage within DHS such as Rod Beckstom's National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) could perform a task that Clarke could not has no clue of how the federal bureaucracy functions, but then Beckstrom was the infinite outsider.
-
Only a group with the prestige, capability, scope and bureaucratic muscle of an NSA can mandate a Pax Cyberica.
-
-
Protecting civilian networks is herding cats UNLESS changes/upgrades are mandated to all parties lest one player think that another player is gaining a competitive advantage by skipping infrastructure upgrades. (This is exactly the same problem that is inhibiting protective improvements in the commercial power grid).
-
Yes, NSA has, in my opinion, made missteps but I extend the benefit of the doubt in saying that NSA was forward leaning in a very permissive, even cheerleading, environment coming on the heels of 11 September. Better to hold judgment until operation is reviewed under Obama’s rules.
-
I suggest that the "Beckstrom function" needs to exist, if nothing else, to deliver external news, needs and opinion back to NSA, but to do that it needs to be a group attached more to DCI and not DHS.
In a similar vein, an earlier head of DHS’s National Cyber Security Division, Amit Yoran, stated that while DHS had been demonstrably inept (demonstrated "inefficiency and leadership failure"), ceding the function to the one group that could reasonably work the problem, the intel community and NSA in particular, placed the nation in "grave peril." I submit the greater peril is to continuing to chase pigs while expecting different results.
The following snippets from Yoran carry my observations following COMMENT:
The government's national cybersecurity efforts would be in "grave peril" if they were dominated by the intelligence community
COMMENT: Possibly, by no means an absolutism.
"One of the hard lessons learned from the Terrorist Surveillance Program is that such a limited review can lead to ineffective legal vetting of a program," Yoran said. "The cyber mission cannot be plagued by the same flaws as the TSP."
COMMENT: Agreed. TSP was dimly architected, archaic in responsiveness. In short, all manner of silliness that should not be repeated in any application.
Yoran said the intelligence community's mission -- to collect information on adversaries -- is at odds with the mission to secure networks. Faced with a network compromise, the intelligence community's focus would be on counterintelligence activities targeted at the offender rather than working with the public and private sector to secure the network. "Simply put, the intelligence community has always and will always prioritize its own collection efforts over the defensive and protection mission of our government's and nation's digital systems,"
COMMENT: The reflex is in that direction, but a charter can be established to achieve the mission, including all the standard career tracking for those involved so that it does not become a black hole. Also, staff must be selected, not subject to the "each dept give x people" as those people will be the most expendable.
"High levels of classification prevent the sharing of information necessary to adequately defend our systems... It also creates insurmountable hurdles when working with a broad range of government IT staffs that do not have appropriate clearances, let alone when trying to work with, communicate and partner with the private sector. Classification cannot be used effectively as a cyber-defensive technique, only one for avoiding responsibility and accountability."
COMMENT: Can be, but if standards are going to be mandated, they must be discussed for impact and rolled out to all. There can be no effective standards proliferation without sharing, negotiating, and defining both process and firmware changes.
Charney said that there was no question that the NSA was the government's center of technical expertise, but that to get the public "to trust that the networks are being secured well in a transparent fashion, the mission cannot reside in NSA."
COMMENT: The mantle of the new administration can wipe away much of that 'trust' issue. As to mechanics, see answer immediately above.
Instead, he recommended that the DHS retain its lead operational role over cybersecurity but work with the NSA in a way that utilizes the agency's technical expertise.
COMMENT: DHS has been copeless at worse, not architected to deliver or enforce at best. DHS is categorically not the center of excellence in IT hardening skills. Only NSA fullfills that role whereas DHS is seen, with good reason, as feckless.
Yoran said DHS had demonstrated "inefficiency and leadership failure" in its cyber efforts and that "administrative incompetence and political infighting" had squandered its efforts to secure the nation's infrastructure for years.
COMMENT: Correct, and if you believe this, you cannot possibly park the cyber effort within DHS.
The forgotten asset
It was widely recognized among the military collection assets, Army Security Agency (disbanded, assets rolled into INSCOM), Naval Security Group (now NIOC), and the Air Force Security Services (now Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency (IRS), that they were regarded by NSA as "cheap hired help" in field collection and analysis.
Conversely, conventional force commanders of all services rarely understood what these three security services did and how conventional forces could reduce their electronic vulnerability. Career intelligence soldiers that did not command an infantry or armored unit, vessel or aircraft did not ascend the promotion ladder, often being transferred into non-technical billets.
It appears that matters are now worse as the need is ever more critical. Writing in Spring 2009 issue of the Information Assurance Technology Analysis Center (IATAC) newsletter, two serving officers, Conti and Surdu, state:
The Army, Navy, and Air Force all maintain cyberwarfare components, but these organizations exist as ill-fitting appendages that attempt to operate in inhospitable cultures where technical expertise is not recognized, cultivated, or completely understood. The services have developed effective systems to build traditional leadership and management skills. They are quite good at creating the best infantrymen, pilots, ship captains, tank commanders, and artillerymen, but they do little to recognize and develop technical expertise. As a result, the Army, Navy, and Air Force hemorrhage technical talent, leaving the Nation’s military forces and our country under-prepared for both the ongoing cyber cold war and the likelihood of major cyberwarfare in the future. One need only review the latest computer security report card, which gave the Federal Government an overall grade of C, and the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Interior, Treasury, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs a grade of D or lower, to understand our nation’s vulnerability.
Richard Bejtlich summarizes the issues and provides corroborating personal observations. The implications for a sustaining military cybersecurity asset are ugly and not easily resolved.
Microsoft Executive Tapped For Top DHS Cyber Post
By Brian Krebs
Security Fix
Posted at 6:53 PM ET on Mar 11, 2009
A Ship Without a Captain
Kevin Coleman
Defense Tech
March 10, 2009 07:49 AM
NSA Dominance of Cybersecurity Would Lead to 'Grave Peril', Ex-Cyber Chief Tells Congress
By Kim Zetter
Wired
March 10, 2009 | 6:24:42 PM
A Struggle Over U.S. Cybersecurity
By Brian Krebs
Washington Post
March 10, 2009
10 IT agenda items for the first U.S. CIO
Obama's appointment of Vivek Kundra marks an important first step for rectifying the nation's concerns about IT
By Paul Venezia
InfoWeek
March 09, 2009
Federal cybersecurity director quits, complains of NSA role
Rod Beckstrom resigns from NSCS after less than a year, citing concerns over what he said is the NSA's domination of the nation's cybersecurity efforts
By Jaikumar Vijayan
InfoWorld
March 09, 2009
Cybersecurity chief Beckstrom resigns
Reuters
Sat Mar 7, 2009 6:19am EST
Cybersecurity Chief Resigns
By SIOBHAN GORMAN
WSJ
MARCH 7, 2009
Cyber-Security Czar Quits Amid Fears of NSA Takeover
By Noah Shachtman
Wired
March 06, 2009 | 11:52:14 AM
New Cyber COCOM Likely
By Colin Clark Friday,
DoD BUZZ
March 6, 2009 6:44 pm
NSA gains support for cyber security role
HS Daily Wire
Published 4 March 2009
NSA should beef up civil cybersecurity
Ian Grant
Computer Weekly
Posted: 17:39 26 Feb 2009
ANNUAL THREAT ASSESSMENT
HEARING OF THE HOUSE PERMANENT SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE
WITNESS: MR. DENNIS C. BLAIR, DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
CHAIRED BY: REPRESENTATIVE SILVESTRE REYES (D-TX)
LOCATION: 334 CANNON HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.
TIME: 9:00 A.M. ET
DATE: WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2009
Statement for the Record
Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
Dennis C. Blair
Director of National Intelligence
25 February 2009
Buck Surdu and Greg Conti Ask "Is It Time for a Cyberwarfare Branch?"
Posted by Richard Bejtlich
TaoSecurity
February 24, 2009
Army, Navy, Air Force, and Cyber—Is it Time for a Cyberwarfare Branch of Military?
by LTC Gregory Conti and COL John "Buck" Surdu
IA Newsletter (IATAC)
Volume 12 Number 1, pp 14-18, Spring 2009
Outsider to Run Cyber-Security Initiative
By SIOBHAN GORMAN
WSJ
MARCH 20, 2008
About the bears and the bees: Adaptive responses to asymmetric warfare
Alex Ryan, DSTO, Australia
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Complex Systems
Editors Ali Minai, Dan Braha, Yaneer Bar-Yam
June 25-30, 2006, Boston, MA
U.S. cybersecurity chief resigns
By Robert Lemos
Staff Writer, CNET News
October 1, 2004 2:52 PM PDT
Where is the Battle-line for Supply Contractors?
By Susan A. Davidson, Maj, U.S. Army
AU/ACSC/038/1999-04
April 1999
Reprinted: Air Force Journal of Logistics, Vol 23, No 2, pp 12-19
Summer 1999
Published by DIANE Publishing
ISBN 1428990941, 9781428990944
FM 101-5-1/MCRP 5-2A
Operational Terms and Graphics
Headquarters, Department of the Army/U.S. Marine Corps
30 September 1997
Gordon Housworth
Cybersecurity Public InfoT Public Infrastructure Defense Public Intellectual Property Theft Public Risk Containment and Pricing Public Strategic Risk Public
| | | Asymmetrical air force symmetries: Biafra Babies and Air Tigers, part II- Gordon Housworth [ 3/6/2009 - 14:16 ] #
Part I: Asymmetrical air force opportunities in interstate and intrastate conflict
Thirty-nine years apart, the two great asymmetrical air forces, the Biafra Babies and LTTE Air Tigers, had remarkably similar aircraft performance criteria:
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Single engine monoplane
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Basic "two-place" or two-passenger trainer aircraft (stable responsive platform, easy to fly/control, at best forgiving)
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Four-seat (2+2) monoplanes in trainer class offer increased ordnance carrying capacity
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Modifiable to light-strike attack role
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Forward and downward cockpit visibility (high wing or cockpit forward of low wing) for ground attack role
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Short field, unimproved field take-off and landing
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Low maintenance ("field maintainable") and broad parts availability, low operating costs
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External hard points (presence of, or ability to retrofit, hard point releases to either fuselage and/or wings w/o compromise to aircraft cg or weight limits)
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Mixed ordnance delivery (bombs, rockets, gun)
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Weapons/ordnance carrying capacity
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Operational range (with ordnance)
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Survivability (combination of surprise, time over target, maneuverability, speed, enemy capabilities)
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Transportable to operational area (ferry distance with additional fuel tanking or disassembly for covert delivery)
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IFR capacity for night or low visibility conditions (surplus military aircraft already possess capability)
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Modest acrobatic capacity (often possessed by surplus military aircraft, increasingly common to sport aircraft)
Aircraft meeting these criteria can perform in an environment where the:
Pertinent TAZ characteristics are:
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Areas beyond global nation state control
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Staging grounds for operations against "controlled" areas
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Sanctuaries created as needed in areas without global/state order
Both the Biafran and Tamil aircraft were dismantled, smuggled in and reassembled. In both cases, a substantial part of pilot training occurred outside the conflict area.
This writer has not seen any citations indicating that the Tamils studied and applied the lessons of the Biafran Air Force to Sri Lankan airspace, but I rate it a reasonable possibility for four reasons:
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Most observers have forgotten the Biafran experience - to the point that the LTTE Air Tigers have erroneously been called the 'first' asymmetrical air force.
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An asymmetrical air force is well within the LTTE's capacity for inventive and creative military solutions.
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Given the extensive propaganda campaign the LTTE waged to buoy its diaspora and its operational cadres, it is reasonable to assume that they would like to claim an air force as their own and not a copy.
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Suppressing the intent to emulate the Biafra Babies continued to lull the SLAF into complacency.
The LTTE is certainly aware of the Biafran experiment as they have appropriated its image into their agitprop materials. At 1:59 into this LTTE propaganda video (which in typical fashion mixes LTTE and non-LTTE footage as well as stills from the 2001 LTTE commando raid on Colombo International Airport), there is a hold on a still illustration of the Biafran MFI-9 MiniCOIN aircraft attacking a Nigerian airfield.
The lessons of those two engagements have shown the optimum means of aerial interdiction to be:
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Helicopter gunships, not conventional frontline jet aircraft. Helicopters have the speed range, maneuverability, armament and loiter capacity necessary to engage such light aircraft attack assets.
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Military propeller-driven COIN (counterinsurgency) aircraft. Military COIN aircraft overlap the performance envelope of light aircraft attack assets while providing superior weapons and a more stable gun platform.
Conventional frontline jets could perform the role if they had the look down-shoot down firecontrol radars able to parse very cluttered background landscapes, but they are far more expensive to operate and more difficult to forward base in an emergency.
Operation Biafra Babies - Biafran Air Force
The Nigerian-Biafran War rose in an attempt to reverse the secession of Nigeria's southeastern provinces as the Republic of Biafra. The Biafrans were generally at a disadvantage in all respects, including fielding a substantive army and securing any form of air force. Carl Gustav von Rosen conceived and coined the MiniCOIN (Mini-Counter Insurrection) role:
It had occurred to von Rosen that in a "low intensity conflict" small piston engine aircraft, even a featherweight like the MFI-9B, is quite capable of making a difference. This is especially true of operations under primitive conditions in rough terrain... The Nigerian civil war fit the bill perfectly. The Biafrans had exhausted all of the conventional sources in their search for aircraft and were desperate for any kind of an air capability. It was probably their desperation that overcame their initial skepticism when von Rosen approached them with his idea...
[Von Rosen's] choice fell upon the Malmö Flygindustri MFi-9B, a small two seat sports plane intended as a trainer (also called "kit-plane"). Being a trainer the aircraft had a good view forward and downwards, the platform were also stable and easy to fly/control. Von Rosen realized that with some simple modifications the MFI-9Bs could be used as light-strike attack planes. A total of nine MFI-9Bs were obtained in two different sets. The planes were obtained on the civilian market (in Sweden), then they were disassembled and smuggled into Biafra.
The MFI-9B had the advantage of being a low profile aircraft type. Although it had been militarized it was widely regarded as a sporting plane and was not likely to show up on the radar screens of international inspectors enforcing non intervention policies. Another advantage of the MFI-9B [was] its low price, the initial batch of 5 MFI-9B's plus a complete supply of spares, bought under cover provided by the Tanzanian government, cost the Biafrans only $60.000 2) which rose to $140.000 including refitting and initial payments to pilots and technicians. This still left the problem of obtaining armament and military avionics. The avionics problem was quickly solved by purchasing surplus reflector sights from decommissioned SAF J-22 fighters. This left the problem of armament.
[The] how and where the Biafran MFI-9B's acquired their armament [appears to be that] French technicians helped change the MFI-9B's electrical system from 24V to 12V, wired the aircraft up for weapons, designed attachment points for armaments and suggested the most sensible warheads for the rockets the MiniCOINs would fire. The armament chosen consisted of two small 68mm 3) six round Matra rocket pods, one fitted to a hard point under each wing. It was also decided to use primarily AP-rockets since it was presumed that the majority of targets would be vehicles and buildings.
The performance of the Biafra Babies was remarkable:
The MFI-9B's flew more than 300 combat missions in Biafra attacking Nigerian Air Force facilities and airplanes... The actual effectiveness is not known, since the Nigerian casualty reports are probably too low while the MFI-9B pilotes estimates are too high. Although the destruction of only one NAF MIG 17F can be positively confirmed, that single MIG 17 (serial, NAF 620) probably cost the NAF more money than the entire MFI-9B fleet cost the Biafran government. It is clear that the NAF escaped more serious damage in many BAF attacks because of the lack of experience of BAF pilots (including the von Rosen group) and the limited arsenal of the MiniCOIN. The effectiveness of the mini-COIN’s was much a psychological one, irritating the Nigerian Air Force and forcing them to be on the alert for attacks. Together with the confirmed destroyed MiG-17 there were several MiG’s and Il-28’s together with NAF facilities reported damaged during the raids.
The raid on Port Harcourt airfield of 22 May, 1969, changed the asymmetrical landscape, redefining the art-of-the-possible. Despite prodigious efforts by the Nigerian Air Force (NAF), it scored only a sole victory in its effort to route the BAF MiniCOINs on 29 November, 1969:
A MIG17 following a couple of MiniCOINs back after an attack on Nigerian army positions conducted a strafing attack on the Newly landed MiniCOINs. [Both pilots] escaped but one MiniCOIN exploded. The second MiniCOIN was damaged but later repaired.
The MiniCOIN aircraft "remained very active" through the final months before the collapse of Biafra. Some observations beyond the lack of BAF pilot training which tempered their motivation and risk taking:
[The] MiniCOIN bases proved to be almost impossible to find... without a disproportionately large recconaisance effort... since the MiniCOINs could take off from any reasonably flat patch of minimally prepared ground and constantly changed bases... The Biafran MiniCOINs and their North American T-6 bretheren could be operated for long periods, in the deep bush, out of the back of a lorry... [Conversely, the NAF] MIG 17F fighters were tied to a hand full of high grade runways and sophisticated maintenance facilites which made them vulnerable...
The MiniCOINs also proved to be surprisingly immune to Ground fire and when they were hit it was usually 7.62mm or 12.7mm small-arms hits and the damage could usually be fixed with an aluminum patch and some glue. [Conversely, a] NAF MIG 17F or Il-28 damaged in a MiniCOIN attack could be out of commission for days and even weeks pending delivery of parts [from] the Soviet Union and arrival of specialist, military-jet qualified mechanics...
We will see these lessons reappear in the Tamil secession in Sri Lanka.
Vaanpuligal - Tamil Tiger Air Force
The LTTE began to employ modified Czech-built Zlin aircraft against the Sri Lankan state in 2007:
On March 26, at about 0045L, two light strike aircraft manned by dissidents of the previously unknown Air Force of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) attacked Sri Lanka's international airport North of Colombo (CMB). They focused their attention on the Katunayake Air Force Base on the opposite side of the runway to the international terminal...
Tiger aircraft were able to come right up to Colombo's outskirts, bomb a supposedly well-protected military installation, and fly back to the safety of LTTE-controlled territory. They were not even close to being intercepted...
At least three airmen were killed and 17 others injured in the attack. Terrified passengers waiting for flights at the nearby international airport described panic and chaos as people ran for cover amid the sound of explosions. All flights into and out of CMB were suspended and passengers on aircraft were evacuated into the airport terminal building.
Cathay Pacific, which had one of its aircraft trapped on the ground full of passengers, has suspended all flights into Colombo until further notice. Two light aircraft dropped three bombs on the air base, but the bombs were directed at the barracks and did not hit the more valuable targets: the Israeli Kfir and Russian Mig 27 fighters and helicopter gun ships parked there.
The Tamil Tigers' last suicide attack on Bandaranaike International Airport was a ground assault on July 24, 2001, when sappers destroyed more than a dozen military aircraft plus two A330's, one A340 and one A320 at the civilian terminal. The greater damage was to the economy and tourism...
The Czech Zlin aircraft were modified to carry "four bombs mounted on a light series carrier that is attached in line with the wing's trailing-edge between the undercarriage struts." See photos here. Confounding the embarrassment of the Sri Lankan government, it is likely that the LTTE paved the runway under their nose:
Careful examination of commercially available satellite imagery indicates clearing and laying of asphalt on an airstrip to the east of the Iranamadu reservoir in the LTTE dominated areas during the period 2003-2004. In January 2003, the Asian Development Bank embarked on a road development project [to] resurface and asphalt the A9 highway which runs through LTTE-dominated areas using the services of eight subcontractors. It is possible that construction material from the project may have been pilfered to asphalt the airstrip. The airstrip is believed to be 1250 meters long. A defence correspondent in Sri Lanka has reported that a Searcher UAV of the Sri Lanka Air Force, conducting a reconnaissance flight over LTTE dominated areas detected a light aircraft on the Iranamadu airstrip on 12 & 13 January 2005. On a subsequent night mission on 03 February, the infrared cameras of the UAV detected thermal images of a second light aircraft landing on the airstrip. The images which were shared with US intelligence, have confirmed one aircraft to be a Czech built Zlin Z-143.
The Sri Lankan government was willfully ignorant of the growing LTTE threat:
The Tigers have been trying to put together an air wing for more than two decades. In 1988, the Indian Peace Keeping Force then in the country found assembly parts of micro-light aircraft and instruction manuals in LTTE hideouts. In subsequent years, the Lankan armed forces have discovered LTTE workshops where attempts were being made to assemble aircraft. Aircraft spare parts too were found in these workshops.
Through the 1990s, intelligence and media reports indicated that Tigers in Europe and North America were purchasing technical manuals on aircraft and shopping around for light aircraft and parts. It appears that the Tigers managed to purchase a micro-light craft around the mid-1990s. They dismantled it and smuggled it into northern Sri Lanka by sea. In November 1998, the LTTE radio, the Voice of Tigers, reported that the LTTE used aircraft to shower petals on the graves of its fighters on the occasion of Martyrs Day.
Despite clear evidence that the LTTE's ambition of acquiring air power was rapidly taking wing, the government chose to deny this throughout the 1990s - it finally acknowledged the fact after 2004. In May 2005, Hagrup Haukland, head of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM), confirmed to journalists in Colombo that the LTTE had "air assets". He said he had seen an airstrip while flying in a helicopter over LTTE-controlled area, but the Tigers had denied the SLMM access to the runway...
The LTTE proceeds to put Sri Lanka in a state of panic by launching two more aerial attacks:
In what is regarded as the "Fourth Eelam War," at least three successful air raids have been carried out by the LTTE's Tamil Eelam air force (TAF) since 26 March, the date of the first such attack on the Sri Lankan air force (SLAF) base at Katunayake...
In the second successful air strike on 24 April, the TAF inflicted extensive damage to a Sri Lankan army engineering unit in the Palali military complex, leaving six soldiers dead and a dozen others wounded.
Once again the TAF returned to strike the Katunayake air base on 26 April, likely in commemoration of the one month anniversary of the first successful air strike. The 26 April attempt, however, failed.
Not deterred by the Sri Lankan air force's pledge to destroy the LTTE's air capability with the deployment of anti- aircraft artilleries, another air raid was carried out in the early hours of 29 April, when the TAF bombers targeted two oil storage facilities that cater to SLAF in Kolonnawa and Muththuraajawala areas.
In this pre-dawn swoop, fuel facilities belonging to Indian Oil and the Dutch Shell were targeted successively, only hours after the SLAF's air strike in the town of Kilinochchi - an LTTE stronghold.
The LTTE proceeded to launch sorties across the island, perhaps as many as ten, including the February 2009 attacks. It remains to be seen how many of the Zlin-143 aircraft remain in LTTE Air Tiger inventory:
[In 2007] It had been widely expected that the Tigers would use their air wing to carry out suicide attacks, using the craft as deadly flying bombs. Instead, they chose to herald their arrival as an air "power" not with a spectacular suicide operation but with a conventional bomb attack. This could have been a purely logistical decision as a suicide attack would also destroy the aircraft, and the Tigers do not have many in reserve...
In 2009, the LTTE is now being forced into a "use it or lose it" strategy as LTTE territory has been reduced to a "small area in the north-east of the island."
The Sri Lankan government was further embarrassed by a two-plane sortie on the night of 20 February, 2009. While it appears that the state "Air Defence System" was able to confirm the downing of at least one aircraft, after one dropped at least one bomb, the attack followed a state claim "to have destroyed all the rebels' hidden runways and put its small air force out of action":
The city was put on full alert at about 2130 (1600 GMT) on Friday as electricity was cut and searchlights and tracer fire from anti-aircraft guns cut through the night sky. [Correspondents] heard firing of heavy anti-aircraft guns. Heavy shell fire. This lasted 20-25 minutes... then there was a massive explosion."
One plane was downed attempting to reach the civil and military assets at the adjoining International Airport and the SLAF base at Katunayaka. Despite the raid’s lack of significant damage, its propaganda value was enormous to the Tamil diaspora:
The Tamil diaspora has in recent weeks been increasingly vocal in its condemnation of the war - almost at the same time as Friday's raid, about 14,000 people in Geneva rallied demanding independence for Tamil areas of Sri Lanka. Some of the Tamils in Europe, Canada, and Australia have provided the rebels with significant financial support over the last three decades and many will see this raid as a morale-boosting development in the face of recent setbacks.
"It is very significant that the rebels have carried out such an audacious attack when the government say that they are all but finished... It confirms what many of us already knew - the rebels may be experiencing reverses on the battle field but they are not simply just going to disappear."
Diasporas as funding and weapons procurement channels
Rebel groups must acquire “start-up finance” as:
The survival condition imposes a minimum size on rebel forces below which they cannot be operational in resource predation. This implies that there are threshold start-up costs. Since rebellions may not be able to raise funding from conventional sources, they must look elsewhere...
The three main sources of rebel revenue are primary commodity exports, diasporas and foreign powers, either or both great powers and regional states:
An economic calculus of the costs and opportunities for the control of primary commodity exports appears to be the main systematic initial impetus to rebellion, with an additional effect from fear of domination by an ethnic majority. After peace has been restored, the legacy of conflict-induced grievance enables rebel movements to restart conflict by drawing on the support of their diasporas...
Having no, or denied access to, primary commodity or foreign state funding, rebel groups must fall back on their diasporas (A rebel group fighting to overthrow then Congolese President Laurent Kabila took "their fight to the Internet in a bid to raise funds and publicize their cause" in 1998.):
A further potentially important source of start-up finance for rebellion is a diaspora living in OECD countries. Such diasporas are usually much richer than the population in their country of origin. They are better-placed for collective action: emigrants have a cultural incentive to create diaspora organizations which can then discipline free-riding. They do not suffer the consequences of the conflicts they finance. As with grievance among the local population, in the greed-model grievance among the diaspora is assumed to be manufactured by the rebel organization rather than being an original cause of conflict. Hence, the diaspora increases the risks of conflict renewal, but not the initial risk of conflict...
A large diaspora considerably increases the risk of further conflict. [Comparing] the post-conflict society with the largest diaspora against that with the smallest [after] five years of peace the risk of renewed conflict is around six times greater.
Haiti is an example of a weak state subject to constant interference by its diaspora:
Following the resignation of former Haitian President Jena-Bertrand Aristide..., the Haitian diaspora representatives in the US have announced that their community was ready to get involved in the country’s reconstruction... The Haitian diaspora accounts for more than 1.5 million people, and 600.000 of them live in New York. This community is the result of successive waves of immigrants fleeing from poverty and political repression since the 1960’s... "The Haitian diaspora must play an important role this time. It is in our own interest, it is the United States’ interest and the international community’s. We have competent people and relevant means of action, but we have to be integrated, not left aside." [World Bank Press Review for Mar. 2, 2004. Scrolled off]
It is interesting that while diaspora groups initially manipulate and finance their in-country colleagues, once the rebel group gains critical mass or reaches nation state status, the in-country group reverses roles, manipulating and "milking" their diaspora. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka and the the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) in Eritrea are notable examples.
After exterminating rival groups that they could not absorb, the LTTE emerged as one of the deadliest, resourceful and commercially minded terrorist groups. (But readers should note that ethnic Tamil-Sinhalese turmoil significantly predates even the 1970s. A colleague who was living in Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, back in "the early fifties" told me that Tamils and Sinhalese "were fighting then." [private email]):
Ethnic Tamils, who are largely Hindu and make up 18 percent of Sri Lanka's population of 20 million, began a largely nonviolent movement in the 1960s to champion more government recognition. But it was not until the early 1970s that the Tamils began forming several rebel groups. In 1976, Tamils gathered as the LTTE and for the first time called for the formation of a separate state of Tamil Ealam covering the northern and eastern provinces, where they are in the majority. The LTTE established itself as a major guerilla group in 1983, when a Tamil attack on an army patrol inflamed a series of violent clashes between Sinhalese mobs and Tamils that left thousands dead and produced several hundred thousand refugees. Violence has since escalated [including] an alarming list of political assassinations, including five Cabinet ministers, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, and Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa.
Beyond funding, the diaspora can involve itself in procuring weapons and war-fighting technology:
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is known to have an active presence in several informal sectors such as credit card cloning, money laundering and human smuggling in Europe and North America. However, the LTTE has emerged as a formidable force and influence within the informal arms market and such has attracted collaborative arrangements with other terrorist groups...
[While the] Bakaaraha arms market near Irtogte in South Mogadishu is [seen as a] central distribution point for the informal arms trade in the Horn of Africa... Eritrea has emerged as a major transshipment point and sanctuary for key players in the informal arms trade. The LTTE established a presence in Eritrea primarily to operate in the informal arms market. It is believed the LTTE maintains regular interactions with many armed groups including groups affiliated to the Al Qaeda operating in the Eritrean Network...
The links between the Islamist terrorist groups and the LTTE are not driven by ideological compatibility, but by the need to influence factors of pricing and convenience in the informal arms market. In most cases the LTTE has developed links with Islamist groups to organize consolidated purchasing opportunities. The LTTE with an annual budget of US$ 200-300 million, supported by an institutionalized procurement network, diaspora based technical expertise and a shipping fleet is a valued partner to other terrorist groups in negotiating procurement deals. The LTTE has the capacity to provide logistical support and facilitate training to partner entities. The LTTE has used its shipping fleet and technical expertise for the delivery of weapons and transfer of competencies most often driven by financial motives and lucrative commercial opportunities.
Transition
While the SLAF were unable to either search out and destroy LTTE air assets on the ground or interdict their sorties en route to target, they have demonstrated an improved capacity for point site defense, at least for a high value target as the environs of Colombo. Given the ongoing success of SLA ground assaults against LTTE positions and SLN interdictions of LTTE marine traffic, the continuance of LTTE air attacks is problematic.
The February 2009 sorties may have been the last 'use it or lose it' attacks by the LTTE. This writer expects future asymmetrical air forces to learn the lessons of the Biafran and Tamil experiments as they absorb UAVs and other R/C aircraft into their inventory in order to operate in more confined airspaces against more effective defensive measures, and even launch swarm attacks against the superior force.
In this operational envelope, it is all too easy to envision, say, an asymmetrical UAV swarm launched from protected areas in South Los Angeles against targets in the greater Los Angeles Basin.
Part III forthcoming: Asymmetrical air force intersection with Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and drone warfare, part III
The aircraft - LTTE ZLIN Z-143 and Biafran MFI-9B:
ZLIN Z 143 L
Primary/Advanced Training, Touring and Business Flying Aircraft
Moravan Aeroplanes a.s., 765 81 Otrokovice, Czech Republic
MFI-9B Militrainer (1966-1968)
Malmö Flygindustri
http://www.avrosys.nu/aircraft//Mod_arme/601Fpl801.htm
Malmö MFI-9
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malm%C3%B6_MFI-9
Biafra Airforce (BAF) operations:
Fleas versus Falcons over Biafra
Historical and Current Conflicts Forum
December 4 2007 at 7:48 PM
Text mirror of parts I and II from Brushfire Wars
Operation Biafra Babies
Military aviation, Swedish and worldwide
General citations:
Soldiers, Martyrs, Traitors, and Exiles: Political Conflict in Eritrea and the Diaspora [with excerpt]
Tricia Redeker Hepner
University of Pennsylvania
2009
Air Tigers were on ‘9/11′ mission
Lanka Daily News
Feb 21st, 2009
Tigers call suicide air raids successful
RANGA SIRILAL | COLOMBO, SRI LANKA
Mail&Guardian
Feb 21 2009 10:55
This is how last LTTE air craft came to Colombo and shot down
YouTube
[Much more extensive SL Naval infrared camera footage]
February 21, 2009
Tamil Tigers Air Force crash near Columbo Sri Lanka 2009022
YouTube
21 Feb, 2009
Black Air Tiger attack on Colombo's Air Force HQ, Air Base
YouTube
February 21, 2009
LTTE Aircraft Had Explosives & Bombs Inside; Both Tiger Pilots Confirmed Dead
Sri Lanka Army
2009-02-21 03:30:06
4th Update
Tamil Tiger planes raid Colombo
BBC News
Page last updated at 09:52 GMT, Saturday, 21 February 2009
S Lanka rebels attack despite losses
By Alastair Lawson
BBC News
Page last updated at 19:21 GMT, Friday, 20 February 2009
LTTE: Black Air Tiger attack on Colombo's Air Force HQ, Air Base
TamilNet
20 February 2009, 22:55 GMT
Tiger aircraft bomb Colombo, 2 killed, 51 wounded
TamilNet
20 February 2009, 16:25 GMT
6TH LEAD
Tamil Eelam Song - Air Tigers
YouTube
December 18, 2008
[At 1:59 into this LTTE propaganda video shows a still illustration of the Biafran MFI-9 MiniCOIN attack]
Transnational governance and the centralization of state power in Eritrea and exile
Tricia M. Redeker Hepner
First Published on: 03 August 2007
Ethnic and Racial Studies
Vol. 31 No. 3 March 2008 pp. 476-502
DOI: 10.1080/01419870701491986
MIRROR
Tamil Tiger Links with Islamist Terrorist Groups
Shanaka Jayasekara
Terrorism Researcher, Centre for Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism (PICT), Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT)
02/03/2008
Ground attack aircraft questions
Aircraft of World War II - Warbird Forums
August 2007
Sri Lanka bombs Tigers, wants tattered truce reviewed
By Simon Gardner
Reuters
(Updates with government, Norway comment)
07 May 2007 14:36:03 GMT
Fleas versus Falcons over Biafra
Short history and assessment of the MFI-9B "MiniCOIN" in Biafran air force service
Part I
Kristjan Runarsson 2002
THE POGROM, WAR & STARVATION
June 28, 2007
Sri Lanka bombs Tigers, wants tattered truce reviewed
By Simon Gardner
Reuters
(Updates with government, Norway comment)
07 May 2007 14:36:03 GMT
S.Lanka says rebels a threat to India nuclear sites
Reuters
07 May 2007 14:58:31 GMT
Background Sri Lanka conflict
Gas shortage looming after LTTE air raid - paper
2ND LEAD (Correction)
TamilNet
06 May 2007, 14:27 GMT
Sri Lanka buying advanced fighter jets from Russia - paper
TamilNet
06 May 2007, 11:50 GMT
Tamil Tiger Air Attacks
Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC)
South / Central Asia - Sri Lanka
3 May 2007
Sri Lanka: Rebels with an air force
Commentary by Animesh Roul
ISN Security Watch
02/05/07
Tamil Eelam air planes change war dynamics
Amal Jayasinghe
AFP/Tamil Guardian
01 May 2007
Flying Tigers Hold Sri Lanka To Ransom
by Amal Jayasinghe
AFP
May 01, 2007
LTTE planes launch third raid
Tamil Guardian
01 May 2007
Factoring in the Air Tigers
By Tisaranee Gunasekara
Asian Tribune
Published by World Institute for Asian Studies. Vol. 7 No. 001
April, 2007-04-30 04:56
Tigers air attack rattles Colombo
By Joe Leahy in Mumbai
Financial Times
Published: April 30 2007 23:19 | Last updated: April 30 2007 23:19
Tamil Tiger air raids hit capital's oil stores
Amal Jayasinghe in Colombo
AFP
April 30, 2007
Tiger planes bomb Palaly base
Tamil Guardian
25 April 2007
Sri Lanka says jets destroy Tamil Tiger naval HQ
By Ranga Sirilal
Reuters
(Updates with India Foreign Minister comment)
04 Apr 2007 14:45:45 GMT
LTTE Air attack: Air Defence and Related Issues
Guest Column by Commodore RS Vasan IN (Retd)
Intellibriefs
Posted by Naxal Watch at 11:40 AM
April 03, 2007
Expecting The Unexpected
Terror Tactics Take A New Turn
Aviation Today/Air Safety Week
Monday, April 2, 2007
Air Tigers' Maiden Attack
Motives and Implications
N Manoharan
Senior Fellow, IPCS
Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies
IPCS ISSUE BRIEF
NO 45
APRIL 2007
NEW URL
MIRROR
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND SECURITY NETWORK (SN)
Tigers take their struggle to new heights
By Sudha Ramachandran
Asia Times
Mar 28, 2007
The Tamil Tiger's 26 Mar 2007 Colombo International Airport Strike [photographs of strike aircraft]
International Aviation Safety Association
March 2007
Revising Haitian Constitution Is Necessary
By Jean-Michel Voltaire, Esq
Caribbean Voice
March 10, 2007
EVOLUTION OF INDIA'S COUNTER-TERRORISM CAPABILITIES
by B.Raman
IntelliBriefs
( PRESENTATION MADE BY THE WRITER AT A CONFERENCE ON INTERNATIONAL HOMELAND SECURITY ORGANISED BY THE ROYAL UNITED SERVICES INSTITUTE (RUSI) FOR DEFENCE AND SECURITY STUDIES, LONDON, ON MAY 10,2006)
May 11, 2006
Sliding into War?
Ajit Kumar Singh
Research Assistant, Institute for Conflict Management
SOUTH ASIA INTELLIGENCE REVIEW
Weekly Assessments & Briefings
Volume 4, No. 41, April 24, 2006
A Culture of War and a Culture of Exile
Young Eritreans in Germany and their Relations to Eritrea
Bettina Conrad
Institute for Political Science, University of Hamburg
2006
Operation Biafra Babies
FlyboyJ
ww2aircraft.net
09-15-2005, 05:05 PM
Terrorism and Civil Aviation Security: Problems and Trends
Jangir Arasly
Connections, The Quarterly Journal
Partnership for Peace Consortium of Defense Academies and Security Studies Institutes (PfP Consortium)
PfP Consortium of Defense Academies and Security Studies Institutes, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany
pp 75-89
Spring 2005
Tigers with Wings - Air Power of the LTTE
N Manoharan
Senior Fellow, IPCS
Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies
Article no. 1720
Date 28 April 2005
Air capabilities of global terror groups and non-formal States
By Shanaka Jayasekara
(Postgraduate Intern, Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, University of St Andrews Scotland)
Sri Lanka News Updates with Discussions
Tuesday, 22 March 2005 - 2:34 AM SL Time
Govt. losing control of east
Situation Report
By Iqbal Athas
The Sunday Times (SL)
ISSN: 1391 - 0531
Vol. 39 - No 41
March 13, 2005
Black Tigers take to the skies
LankaNewspapers
6 February 2005 - 3:05 AM SL Time
MFI-9B's used as mini-COIN's in Biafra
Military Photos.net
10-24-2004
Fleas versus Falcons over Biafra, Part I
Short history and assessment of the MFI-9B "MiniCOIN" in Biafran air force service
Part I
Kristjan Runarsson
Brushfire Wars
2002
SITE currently yielding "The site is being renovated, please come back later."
Fleas versus Falcons over Biafra, Part II
Short history and assessment of the MFI-9B "MiniCOIN" in Biafran air force service
Part II
Kristjan Runarsson
Brushfire Wars
2002
SITE currently yielding "The site is being renovated, please come back later."
Operation Biafra Babies
The Swedish military aviation page
Text last updated 1993 OCT 27
In the Spotlight: Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)
Center for Defense Information (CDI)
April 26, 2002
Tigers stick to their guns
By Sudha Ramachandran
Asia Times
December 4, 2001
Intelligence failures exposed by Tamil Tiger airport attack
Jane's Security
3 September 2001
The Global Reach of Tamil Militancy: Sri Lanka's Security Predicament
P. K. Rao
Strategic Affairs
No. 0025/ Issue: August 1, 2001
Greed and grievance in civil war, Volume 1
Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler
Policy, Research working paper WPS 2355
World Bank Development Research Group
May 31, 2000
Forward visibility
Don’t Leave Home Without It
Vans Air Force Net
2000
Innehållsförteckning till SFFs publikationer från 1962
Uppdaterad 2009-03-05
SVENSK FLYGHISTORISK FÖRENING
SWEDISH AVIATION HISTORICAL SOCIETY
30 år sedan op. Biafra Babies, 5/1999
Operation Biafra Babies II, 6/1999
International and Regional Implications of the Sri Lankan Tamil Insurgency
Rohan Gunaratna, British Chevening Scholar UK
2 December 1998
MIRROR
Gerillapilot i Biafra INB (Guerrilla Pilot in Biafra)
av Gunnar Haglund
Allt om hobby AB (All about hobby)
ISBN 91-85496-23-5
Swedish with English summary
1988
National Library citation
Operation Biafra Babies: The Swede Carl Gustaf Von Rosen and the Biafran Air Force
The Swedish military aviation page
Text from "Gerillapilot i Biafra" by Gunnar Haglund, 1988
Text last updated 1993 OCT 27
Gordon Housworth
InfoT Public Infrastructure Defense Public Risk Containment and Pricing Public Strategic Risk Public Terrorism Public
| | | Missile design sources for the aspiring asymmetric, amateur or hostile state scientist- Gordon Housworth [ 2/5/2009 - 18:29 ] #
Having built rockets in earlier decades as part of an investigation of kinetics, warhead design, fuzing and explosives, I wondered where would the aspiring asymmetric attacker or amateur scientist go now to build rockets capable of offensive capacity? In those years DuPont's Blasters' Handbook and many military field manuals on fuzes and explosives were readily available.
Spotting a short piece on engineering sources for missile design in Arms Control Wonk in which contributors commented on titles of seminal, still applicable - though often out of print - sources for missile design, I decided to chase them down in order to see what was available to an asymmetrical missile builder.
Many of the initial links had inaccurate titles and/or lacked full provenance or sources. All are properly sourced below. Having been a builder, I’ve added items from the amateur side which can have asymmetrical applicability.
The best were indeed a short list, with many key works rising in the 1960s. Here they are, divided into three sections:
Perpetual threat of hostile IP collection
The NASA Special Publications cited here are but an infinitesimal fraction of the IP housed at NASA facilities and subject to repeated attacked by Chinese and Russian assets. A highly recommended article is Epstein and Elgin’s Network Security Breaches Plague NASA. You know things are bad when the then head of IT security for the Ames Research Center rings the network admin in the middle of the night to demand, "Disconnect us!...Disconnect us from the Internet!":
By early 1999 the volume of intrusions had grown so worrisome that [Talleur], the most senior investigator specializing in cyber-security in the Inspector General's office at NASA, wrote a detailed "network intrusion threat advisory" [describing] the sly tactics behind a particularly virulent series of attacks on agency networks, which he said had been perpetrated by Russians...
[Starting] in May 1997, virtual intruders masking themselves and their IP addresses slipped undetected into networks at the Goddard center, a hub of space science activity. The trespassers penetrated computers in the X-ray Astrophysics Section of a building on Goddard's campus, where they commandeered computers delivering data and instructions to satellites. Before being discovered, the intruders transferred huge amounts of information, including e-mails, through a series of stops on the Internet to computers overseas. The advisory stated: "Hostile activities compromised (NASA) computer systems that directly and indirectly deal with the design, testing, and transferring of satellite package command-and-control codes"...
Talleur, now 59, retired in December 1999, frustrated that his warnings weren't taken more seriously. Five months after his advisory was circulated internally, the [GAO] released a public report reiterating in general terms Talleur's concerns about NASA security. But little changed... "There were so many intrusions and hackers taking things we had on servers, I felt like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike," he explains, sitting on the porch of his home near Savannah, Ga. On whether other countries are behind the intrusions, he says: "State-sponsored? God, it's been state-sponsored for 15 years!"
Huntsville, Ala., known as Rocket City, is home to the Marshall Space Flight Center, [home to] one of the richest lodes of high-tech secrets anywhere in the world. Around the clock for four days in June 2002, a prowler methodically probed enormous volumes of proprietary information at Marshall, according to NASA documents. The electronic intruder, without setting foot anywhere near Rocket City, gained access to servers handling sensitive work on new versions of the Delta and Atlas rockets that power intercontinental missiles, enhancements of the Shuttle's main engines, and Lockheed's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, an advanced fighter jet that remains in development...
The secrets from Marshall could have helped the Chinese design engines and fuel to lift heavier loads beyond the atmosphere, according to NASA documents. Investigative case files prepared for a federal grand jury following the Marshall intrusion [include] information from the statement of an unidentified witness under the heading "Allegations of Sale to a Foreign Government."
Readers are recommended to pursue this and other links in the bibliography below for the greater national security IP threat. The balance of this note returns focus to open source materials available to the asymmetric attacker:
FOR LAUNCHER DESIGN:
Handbook of Astronautical Engineering
Edited by Heinz Hermann Koelle
McGraw Hill. 1961
Out of Print – used copies about a $100-150 dollars
Here and here
Best overall missile design. Much "relevant material, terse summaries and collections of tables, graphs, and reference material not found elsewhere."
Aerospace Vehicle Design: Volume II - Spacecraft Design
by K. D. Wood
Johnson Publishing Co. (1964)
Out of Print – used copies about $150 dollars
Here
For general launcher design. Despite its title, "almost entirely a launcher book, and the only real tutorial overview of launcher design. Long out of print and quite scarce. (Beware, vol. I is an aircraft-design book; it was a standard text in its time and is okay, but it has nothing to do with launchers, so know what you're buying.)" Many empirical relationships.
International Reference Guide to Space Launch Systems
Steven J. Isakowitz, Joshua B. Hopkins, Joseph P. Hopkins
American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics (AIAA)
1999, Third Edition
ISBN: 1563473534
Out of Print – used copies about 40 Pounds
Here
Reference book "on existing launchers... interesting technical material... 3rd ed. is much better than earlier editions."
International Reference Guide to Space Launch Systems, Fourth Edition
Steven J. Isakowitz, NASA
Joshua Hopkins, Lockheed Martin Astronautics
Joseph P. Hopkins Jr., Andrews Space and Technology
Library of Flight Series
Published by AIAA, 2004, 4th Edition
ISBN-10: 1-56347-591-X
ISBN-13: 978-1-56347-591-7
Ballistic Missile and Space Vehicle Systems
Edited by Howard Stanley Seifert, Kenneth Brown
Wiley (1961)
ASIN: B001LQY49A
Out of Print – used copies about twenty five dollars
Here
"Uneven quality... chapters on liquid propulsion are nearly useless... some of it is excellent, e.g. a chapter on predicting ascent losses"
Space Vehicle Design Criteria, SP-8000 series
NASA Special Publications
Introduction and General Series
by Donald Boggs
When the United States Congress created NASA, part of its charge was to disseminate to the public the product of its research and exploration. NASA began almost immediately to do so and its publications have continued to this day. Although there are a variety of NASA publications, the ones of most interest to collectors are the Special Publications (SPs), Educational Publications (EPs), Conference Publications (CPs), Reference Publications (RPs) and Technical Memoranda (TMs).
By the spring of 1966, the number of SPs was large enough to warrant the printing of a small (35 page) booklet listing each of them with a short summary of its content. By 1983, it took a 127 page Special Publication (#470) simply to list the titles. This essay is meant to provide some modest information on the NASA Special Publications to those who seek to collect them.
The newest of the NASA SPs are available from the NASA Information Center in Washington, D.C. (see their website for a long out of date listing) or through the Government Printing Office (GPO). All of these publications are available from the NASA Center for Aerospace Information (website), in the original edition, if available, or on microforms or Photostat. Prices are significant higher than the original price and in some cases even higher than the current market value.
Lunar Missions and Explorations
Edited by C. T. Leondes and R. W. Vance
Wiley (1964)
ASIN: B0007EJ5P0
Out of Print – used copies about 40 Pounds
Here
Launch centric with "excellent chapter on launcher design, and a somewhat shorter one on launch facilities... biased toward very large launchers" but still useful
Fundamentals of Astrodynamics
by Roger R. Bate, Donald D. Mueller, Jerry E. White
Dover Publications; 1 edition (June 1, 1971)
ISBN-10: 0486600610
Good section on trajectory computation
Scud Ballistic Missile and Launch Systems 1955–2005
New Vanguard 120
Author: Steven J Zaloga
Illustrators: Jim Laurier Lee Ray
February 2006; 48 pages; ISBN: 9781841769479
FOR ENGINE DESIGN:
Rocket Propulsion Elements, 7th Edition
by George P. Sutton, Oscar Biblarz
Wiley-Interscience; 7 edition (December 29, 2000)
ISBN-10: 0471326429
For engine design. The 6th and 4th editions were favored. Huzel and Huang is better for liquid propellants.
The Design of Liquid Propellant Rockets
by Huzel and Huang
NASA SP-125: "The Design of Liquid Propellant Rockets"
2nd edition by Huzel and Huang 1971
Available online download
Mirror
Good for liquid propulsion
Space Vehicle Design Criteria, SP-8000 series
NASA Special Publications
Introduction and General Series
by Donald Boggs
Items from this series also address motors/propulsion
Mechanics and Thermodynamics of Propulsion (2nd Edition)
by Philip Hill, Carl Peterson
Prentice Hall; 2 edition (September 27, 1991)
ISBN-10: 0201146592
Said to have better coverage of some theory areas than Sutton, but note "unit-conversion errors in some of the engine specs given as examples."
Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants
by John D Clark
Rutgers University Press (1972)
ISBN-10: 0813507251
Out of Print – used copies about a thousand dollars
Here
FROM APPLIED THEORY TO BEGINNING PRACTICE:
The AROCKET Discussion List
Since early in 1996, the aRocket e-mail list has been active, providing a forum for discussion for all sorts of experimental rocketry topics worldwide. There are almost 400 people using this free service.
HOW to DESIGN, BUILD and TEST SMALL LIQUID-FUEL ROCKET ENGINES
ROCKETLAB / CHINA LAKE, CALIF
Copyright 1967 by Leroy J. Krzycki
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing: March 1967
Second Printing: March 1971
First WWW Edition: June 1996
SBN 9600-1980-4
Amateur Rocket Motor Construction
A Complete Guide to the Construction of Homemade Solid Fuel Rocket Motors
David Sleeter, Teleflite Corporation
ISBN 0-930387-04-X
2004
Also here
Ball Milling Theory and Practice for the Amateur Pyrotechnician
By Lloyd Sponenburgh
Also here
Grinding your own materials, making better black powder
See also Ball Milling 101 in Skylighter Fireworks Tips
March 10, 2008 -- Issue #91
Rocket Science Books Catalog
Catalog Updated 10 July 2007
Note: Ignore the category/section links as they are null. Scroll down to the individual book descriptions. Many good basic texts on the basics of physical design.
Solid Rocket Motor Internal Insulation
by Hercules Incorporated, Aerojet-General, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and NASA Lewis Research Center
Also scroll down to bottom of page for companion volumes: Solid Rocket Motor Metal Cases, Solid Rocket Motor Nozzles, Solid Rocket Motor Performance Analysis, and Solid Rocket Thrust Vector Control.
Solid Rocket Motor Internal Insulation can also be read online at SCRIBD.
Postscript: As it turns out the Blasters' Handbook lives on, the International Society Of Explosives Engineers (ISEE) having purchased the rights to publish the Blasters' Handbook from Explosives Technology International (ETI Canada) which consolidated DuPont's US and Canadian commercial explosives business.See also:
International Society Of Explosives Engineers (ISEE)
ISEE Library
Institute of Makers of Explosives (IME)
Bibliography
Three Wonks Walk Into a Bar…
by Geoffrey Forden
Arms Control Wonk
posted Friday January 16, 2009
Obama Moves to Counter China With Pentagon-NASA Link (Update1)
By Demian McLean
Bloomberg
Jan. 2, 2009
Analysis: China space launch raises fears
by Sara Sargent
Washington (UPI) Oct 3, 2008
Report: U.S. vulnerable to Chinese cyber espionage
Posted by Elinor Mills
CNET News
November 24, 2008 5:12 PM PST
Network Security Breaches Plague NASA
By Keith Epstein and Ben Elgin
BusinessWeek
November 20, 2008, 5:00PM EST
U.S. – CHINA COMMISSION CITES CHINESE CYBER ATTACKS, AUTHORITARIAN RULE, AND TRADE VIOLATIONS AS IMPEDIMENTS TO U.S. ECONOMIC AND NATIONAL SECURITY INTERESTS
U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission
November 20, 2008
China launches space walk mission
By David Barboza
IHT
Published: September 26, 2008
Blasters' Handbook
by Robert Hopler
International Society Of Explosives Engineers (ISEE)
17th edition, 2003
ISBN-10: 1892396009
ISBN-13: 978-1892396006
Books for aspiring rocket scientists?
uk.tech.rocketry
Henry Spencer
Aug 20 2000, 3:00 am
Shenzhou and China’s Space Odyssey
By: Jing-dong Yuan
China Brief Volume: 5 Issue: 24
Jamestown
December 31, 1969 07:00 PM
Gordon Housworth
InfoT Public Infrastructure Defense Public Strategic Risk Public Terrorism Public
| | | ICG's Supply Chain-Outsourcing Abstracts, April 2004 - December 2008- Gordon Housworth [ 12/15/2008 - 16:39 ] #
ICG's Supply Chain-Outsourcing Abstracts
Supply chain analysis must extend beyond the piece part cost, beyond purely commercial aspects, in order to prevent surprise, interruption or termination.
Commercial calculations are the essential first step in risk evaluation; they are necessary but not sufficient to define total chain risk. Supply chain analysis must go beyond piece part cost to include Intellectual Property (IP), IT, criminal, terrorist, cyberterrorist and environmental issues - and their interactions.
Good supply chain analysis on the manufacturing downstream and outsourcing upstream must be an all-source risk analysis effort in order to preempt strategic surprise.
And in order to be effective, risk guidelines must be harmonized between downstream manufacturing and upstream outsourcing. Too often they proceed in isolation, or risk guidelines of either or both are faulty.
Why steal COTS products or processes?
4/25/2004
Targeting countries appear to wait for a successful US commercial application of a technology before seeking to acquire it as the kernel of capability for military use is often contained in the commercial variant. An airborne IR sensor is a good example that applies to all dual-use technologies.
I would stress that "failed" applies to collectors' time horizon and that the early securing of a commercial variant will act as a "gap filler" in both their defense and commercial posture and will act as a development seed in their research institutions.
As developed countries suffer legacy drag as we do, preferring not to change computer systems when an upgrade is needed, they target absorbable enhancements. Not so encumbered developing countries will attempt quantum leaps in capacity by acquiring newer, more advanced systems... more
Similar mitigation trajectories: Intellectual property theft and quality
6/4/2004
I had the opportunity to share some opinions on the impact of intellectual property (IP) theft, some already posted to this list, with a large, global supplier of parts and subsystems that was known for its production and quality focus but it had not been clear to me that the supplier was also ahead of many of its peers in its understanding of the diversion risk that it and its subsuppliers faced in certain regions.
I mentioned certain points from Hemorrhaging intellectual property to Asia, notably that on the established industrial side:
[The] OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers at the top of their respective supply chains) have been virtually ordering their suppliers explicitly or implicitly to China (a) to produce lower cost products for resale back to the OEM or one of the subsuppliers in the chain, or (b) support OEM plants in-country. The demand for cost reduction is the pole star. Our prediction is that the OEMs, whose hubris leads them to mistakenly feel themselves above the risk horizon, will not protect their suppliers as new Chinese or other low-cost country providers come on line and will shift purchases to those new firms, hollowing out their own industrial infrastructure, even as OEMs press those same suppliers for cost reductions on a year-to-year basis.
To this, I added that since the OEMs had financial pressures of their own and would not relent in their demands for immediate direct cost reduction such that the supplier had no opportunity to not go to the desired low cost area, that it was up to the supplier to address the incursions against the intellectual property of their firm and the subsuppliers in any critical path of their supply chain. .. more
The defender's dilemma: common threads in exploiting commercial supply networks
8/17/2004
We devote substantial research to asymmetrical warfare exploits involving COTS (commercial off the shelf) openly available dual-use equipment and processes... Tools and weapons derived from such sources are perfect tools "for the asymmetrical warrior, and devastating to US commercial and military installations."
It is a truism in every COTS weapon system production capacity that we investigate that investigating authorities place self-imposed blinders upon themselves, too often assuming that their opponent is a mirror image state opponent, such as Russia, or state-sponsored opponent, such as Libya, and thus compelled to access the same production base, employ state-of-the-art production processes, assume a continuous production level when manufacturing is involved, observe common industrial manufacturing and recovery processes, and expect similar military delivery means.
Just as military forces habitually look for mirror image adversaries instead of an asymmetrical opponent exploiting a key weakness that you have overlooked, so does the FBI too often look first to new, retail commercial purchase instead of looking for "good enough" components from the used, resale, internet, closure, overstock, bankruptcy, or theft sources. The perp's goal is path of least resistance and not path of greatest production... more
Invisible reallocation of supply chain vendors based on perceived threat to buyers
9/22/2004
It has been my experience that while many industrial firms have made a strategic IT commitment to the likes of Microsoft or Cisco in volume purchases that significantly lower the per seat product cost, they exhibit a very different -- lower and more transient -- loyalty to the suppliers in their product supply chains.
Based upon our work in the automotive sector, we can say that OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) -- or vehicle manufacturers -- in this relentlessly cost sensitive sector have less than rigid loyalty to suppliers and certainly feel "hostage" to certain suppliers, especially those suppliers who dominate the market in a specific part/subsystem or even a high percentage of overall industry production to all OEMs. OEMs are reacting by reallocating their part production awards to other than the industry leader, irrespective of that supplier's ability to provide a technically and financially acceptable component.
This does not mean that OEMs will award business to firms with substandard performance, quality, and robustness, but rather that they will select among a group of suppliers capable of providing a peer level of performance in order to reduce the dominance of particular suppliers in critical market subsystems. I hasten to add that "critical" may be based upon internal OEM criteria not available to the supplier who would otherwise presume that they have the business based upon being the incumbent supplier offering a competitive cost and functional bid for a subsequent model year... more
When clients for risk assessment/risk pricing take on a risk of their own
10/10/2004
While virtually every risk client will subscribe to the idea that there is added value in managing risk, i.e., shifting from the default condition of accepting risk to the pricing of risk though such mechanisms as mitigants, offsets, and transfers, the client rarely sees themselves as among the criteria of risk. Risk clients commonly divide themselves into one of three categories:
- Finance/risk managers without operations skill
- Finance/risk managers with operations skill
- Operations/in-country managers ... more
The merger of Inability to distill, Not invented here, and Competitive bad advice
10/11/2004
The merger of Inability to distill, Not invented here, and Competitive bad advice give rise to a persistent condition we see among many that are party to risk assessment or risk pricing: Deming's "They don't know that they don't know." Furthermore, there is little time to teach them, especially without causing embarrassment to one party or another.
Under Inability to distill, I had noted that they "can't analyze what they have," and so lapse into the condition of being "better informed without the ability to act." This is the crux of the operable decision problem, i.e., they do not "see" the data in first instance, do not see context, do not see relevance, do not see pattern at any time, and do not see patterns maturing over time. They are deprived of a meaningful means of prediction... more
Brief introduction to China risks
10/12/2004
Before turning to a brief introduction to China risk, space limitations in the previous post required that I defer the operational component.
Operational, in-country side of the commercial client:
1. These people are close to the problem and bear the pain
They are often the wariest depending upon their corporate structure and whether true P&L responsibility resides at this operational level. A reasonable indicator of local control would be a local partnership or other tax effort that limits US asset consolidation.
2. They feel risk keenly in all aspects of the business
While this is true, situations vary as to whether it is more effective to approach the financial/risk group or the operations group -- even if on-the-ground people have contracting authority. Working with operational units can be daunting if the financial/risk group is in denial (see part 1) as any counter-corporate views quoted by local operators, and sourced back to us, complicate our ability to support the client ... more
Starter questions to begin -- just begin -- to understand country risk
10/13/2004
Here is a starter list of questions for the novice to begin -- just begin -- to understand the risk in your country of interest. Or you can charge in with your risk unmeasured and unpriced. Many do.
1. Judiciary
- Is there an independent judiciary?
- Is there a mechanism for independent arbitration?
- Is the country subject to bilateral treaty with the US?
The PRC does not have an independent judiciary.
2. Intrastate conflict between state, province and enterprise zones
- Which country to the casual observer seems more risky?
You can never, ever judge this from afar. Yes, there is enormous interference from Beijing and enterprise zones, but substitute the relevant government agency, and this pertains to almost any almost-developed nation; even democracies like India, Argentina, Brazil, and Australia that to the uninformed may appear benign or less risky... more
Refining a China forecast
12/3/2004
Continuing our effort to refine a prediction for Chinese economic direction, I believe that China will:
(1) Increasingly digest and take advantage of foreign technology to create increasingly effective and efficient local products (and only then will it more rigorously enforce anti-piracy laws -- akin to what Japan is now doing in such areas as flat panels)
(2) Go beyond commercial, increasingly commodity products to embed unique Chinese standards that bar or slow foreign entry, i.e., increasing Chinese price-volume curve efficiencies while damping foreign efficiencies and denying revenue to Chinese competitors (e.g., DVD, CMDA, PC chipsets, Red Flag Unix, encryption algorithms)
(3) Continuing reduction or elimination of foreign royalty payments for any and all products - a corollary to (2) - be they products made for domestic Chinese consumption or export (the recent Microsoft contract cancellation is a mere tip of this iceberg)... more
Using SARS to predict H5N1 Avian Flu impacts on regional & global supply chains, Part 1
1/22/2005
Suspected human-to-human Avian Flu H5N1 transmission has occurred in Vietnam, and is the kind of trigger news that could launch the epidemic/pandemic "event" noted in The flu season not yet underway and uncomfortable signs that 'when, not if' is shifting to 'soon, not when'. Worse, the lack of reliable or widely available tests may be masking other cases. H5N1 is vastly more fearsome than SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome).
In the case of SARS and now Avian Flu, governments are voting short term economic gains, reducing the flow of accurate infection information, impeding inspection by foreign epidemiological staff, and forestalling destruction of infected fowl, thereby blinding themselves - and us - to the tipping point of a pandemic.
Independent actions by local, regional, and national governmental entities effectively conspire to make the situation opaque. Vietnam, Thailand, and China are now repeating news suppression and denials in avian flu animal-to-human and human-to-human transmissions... more
Using SARS to predict H5N1 Avian Flu impacts on regional & global supply chains, Part 2
1/22/2005
Host nation (PRC and HK) "Public" or core event hierarchy:
- Restaurant activity
- Public small to medium group activities
- Mass transit
- Tourism revenue
- Airline revenue
- Service industries (restaurants, hotels, airlines, cinemas, and theaters)
- Host nation quarantine commences
- Service industries suppliers (air navigation services, wholesalers, food providers)
- Discretionary products (notably luxury goods)
- Global airport sales of all items
- Foreign (offshore) quarantine rises
- Host nation quarantine methods increase in intensity
- Host nation (PRC) mismanagement of news/story continues
- 'Phonecam nation' collects and provides data about virus spread to unofficial databases beyond government control
- Asian markets/indices... more
Cost pressures on supply tiers prompt loss of supplier intellectual property
2/2/2005
Suppliers worry that design reviews by an OEM prior to contract award are efforts to extract price concessions, extracting information to compare (1) proprietary cost buildups and (2) ideas among competing suppliers. OEMs, for their part, may be mistaken in asking the supplier for full disclosure of the supply chain during this period of minimum trust and maximum fear, a more common occurrence among the three "US" OEMs than Toyota or Honda.
In reality, the supplier has often not gone to the cost and effort to fully detail the part. OEM staff profess outrage when they 'find out' this is the case. We ask them what they expected. Would they not do the same were circumstances reversed?
The following [sanitized] exchange involves AutoCo and CarCo, two automotive OEMs, MetalCo, a Tier One supplier, and MasterCo, a related subsidiary. AutoCo is under financial pressure to produce improved results. Such pressure always creates hot spots under excruciating demand, to the point of program cancellation and (participant) job loss... more
Lenovo's transition to Dell and HP peer competitor should be measured in months rather than years
2/3/2005
Market Assumption: The transition period between (1) Lenovo's purchase of IBM's PC group and (2) the appearance of robust Lenovo desktop and laptop products (products that challenge the likes of Dell and HP) is to be measured in terms of years.
Our Forecast: The transition period between Lenovo's purchase of IBM's PC group and the appearance of robust Lenovo products is far shorter than what the perceived wisdom (years) would indicate. The transition could easily be accomplished within twelve months, less with a more concerted effort, requiring little or no additional dependence on intellectual property (IP) diversion.
Rationale: Lenovo has already positioned itself to climb out at the top of the electronics supply chain. It lacks only in brand and distribution (both of which it believes it has purchased). Pricing pressures in the electronics industry are no less fierce than those between automotive manufacturers (OEMs) and their Tier One suppliers. Dell, HP, and IBM, among others, have placed unrelenting pressure on their Taiwanese suppliers for price reductions. It is understood in the sector, but seems not to have reached the level of actionable risk analysis, that this pricing pressure has driven much "Taiwanese" electronics to China with supplier badging remaining in Taiwan. (See activity location 2003 versus 2006.)... more
Pan-industry “beggar/maker-prince/maker” initiatives in supply chains
2/4/2005
Enter Intel, a chipset manufacturer that is promoting "white box" (generic PC) and "white book" (generic notebook) devices using generic designs, cases and hardware modules. Intel's intent is said to be the creation of a family of more compliant suppliers and so escape their current vulnerability to the two US giants - Dell and HP.
Intel seems to be pursuing an approach that mimics the "beggar/maker-prince/maker" process that we see emerging among US automotive OEMs. (As Intel provides roughly a fifth of the world's server products (at higher margins than PCs) and so competes with their server customers, it may be to Intel's advantage to suppress their current troublesome generic PC vendors while created a wider market for their chip sets.)
For those readers unfamiliar with beggar/maker-prince/maker, we see OEMs in a number of sectors, automotive included, that perceive themselves increasingly captive to powerful Tier One suppliers. To escape that burden, we believe that the OEMs are in the process of elevating smaller suppliers (making princes out of serfs) while taking business away from the leading suppliers for future models (making beggars out of kings). The result in both automotive and electronic market sectors is to leave the top of the manufacturing tier in stronger control of its supply chains... more
Implications of absence of liability: shifting the cost from perpetrator to consumer and bystander
2/27/2005
Absence of liability in software design and data aggregation share a common theme: The absence of liability or responsibility for human action in any system leaves a massive open loop in which damaging action is allowed to rise, and to continue, without impact to the perpetrator's finances, equity and reputation. The unregulated impact of such action is a form of collateral damage to consumer and bystander as the cost to correct wrongful action or inaction is transferred to them.
The politico-economic system is as much at fault as are the perpetrators as the latter are only responding to the risk-reward calculations that the system presents them. If I am producer of product, tangible and intangible, and am not held accountable for the quality of those products, I will devote more attention to 'features' than to the quality of those features. If I am an aggregator of information and not held accountable for the security and accuracy of that information, I will focus on gathering/acquiring more information and designing data mining tools to exploit that information than to securing and updating that information. In both cases, it comes down to the consequences of shabby 'product.'... more
At what point does a decision maker bound the system that describes options with the least destructive outcomes?
3/3/2005
Just as customers had to "take either the horse nearest the stable door or none at all" from Thomas Hobson's livery stable, so must Microsoft decide between stopping piracy revenue loss or driving clients elsewhere or indirectly propagating vulnerable installs; and the US must decide between US-EU cooperative agreements that permit transatlantic technology transfer underlying cooperative programs such as the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) or accelerated EU, principally French and German, arms exports to China.
Choices in complex systems are increasingly maddening, and in geopolitical systems those choices can have disastrous consequences. Many have written on the short term thinking of certain political elites that lead to an endless string of unintended consequences, so I am not the first to suggest that setting width of scope and length of timeline is essential in defining a solution space with the least damaging outlines. (Whenever clients task us for a solution to an especially vexing problem, we find that the solution space is not large enough to define a solution and that we have to widen the solution space, i.e., reset scope, in order to define one or more solutions that can be presented to the client for evaluation.)... more
China: a planners' preference defense industry succeeds in spite of systemic shortcomings
3/30/2005
China's military-industrial complex is a study in contrasts. Effectively unique in the third world/developing world in that it produces a complete range of military equipment that includes "small arms, armored vehicles, fighter aircraft, warships, submarines, nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles; is one of the oldest and largest defense sectors, yet faces system shortcomings that have evinced difficulties in "translating theory and design into reliable weapon systems":
- Technologically backwards defense industries (much indigenous design equivalent to 1970s-1980s technology
- Critical R&D gaps (aeronautics, propulsion, microelectronics, computers, avionics, sensors and seekers, electronic warfare, and advanced materials.
- Systems integration and program delays
- Inefficient, wasteful production dogged by excess capacity
- Consistently poor production quality control
- Small and sporadic production runs
- Inadequate funding
- Centralized and personality-centric production management leading centralized, hierarchical, bureaucratic, and risk-averse state-owned enterprises (SOEs)... more
The world is flat save for the depression that we occupy: Friedman on global opportunity and competition
4/8/2005
The head of Infosys (India) told Tom Friedman that "the playing field is being leveled" as decades of massive investment in technology, computers, global broadband connectivity, education, communication and information processing tools created a condition in which "countries like India were now able to compete equally for global knowledge work as never before -- and that America had better get ready for this."
Friedman made a great tag line leap from 'leveled' to 'flattened' to 'flat' with the observation that: When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. The impacts are enormous in terms of economic, political, military, and demographic changes at the level of shocks - and an inability to predict when and where those leaps will occur... more
Supply chain paradigm shifts: read the tea leaves and add minor twists
4/21/2005
Chrysler's consideration of a Chinese JV to make Chrysler vehicles in China and export them to North America and SeaCode's intent to anchor a used cruise ship converted into a 24/7 floating programming factory off the US coast are seen by some as a shock, a new departure, but are in reality a tweaked progression of trends already in motion.
DaimlerChrysler's 'export Chryslers' made in China
DaimlerChrysler's effort is an attractive proposal to a Chinese firm in that it:
- Builds a new substitute supply chain in China for "a totally new [DCX] segment"
- Provides technological assess to the technology and design of that new segment
- Offers an early export exit path against other Chinese competitors
- Reduces buyer reticence as the Chinese vehicle is sold as a 'Chrysler' and not as an unknown Chinese badge
- Provides an opportunity to intimately study Chrysler marketing and brand awareness process (much like two of China's largest state-run tobacco companies will do as part of permitting Altria/Philip Morris to manufacture and sell Marlboros in China)... more
Supply chain paradigm shifts, part 2: SeaCode's floating Maquiladora
4/24/2005
Continuing our review of 'tweaked progressions of trends already in motion,' SeaCode's very near offshore seaborne platform solves a number of nettlesome problems:
- H1B visa requirements avoided by anchoring the vessel outside US territorial jurisdiction
- Lack of communication and poor program management that dogs so many offshoring projects is remedied by clients being a short water taxi ride away while the vessel is always within the client's 'day' window for telephone access
- High performing programming staff as I wager that good programmers and engineers will vie for the 600 positions if the pay and working conditions remain as advertised
- High output as teams will work in team "pods" of overlapping shifts, thereby shortening development time
- Higher security and potentially better intellectual property (IP) control
- Total costs to clients are commensurate with genuinely offshore project costs but a goodly portion of costs are envisioned to revert to US firms and coffers
- Client staff trips to offshore destinations for project collaboration conferences are eliminated... more
Commercial blindness: a "twofer" attack on the Indian state and US and European outsourcing assets
6/28/2005
One must wonder how inattentive major US outsourcers can be, and how 'missing in action' that major consultancies such as Forrester can be, so as to not recognize the physical threat to core outsourcing facilities in India. Perhaps it is the mere continuation of the lesser lapse of failing to factor intellectual property (IP) theft risk in supposedly low cost areas. (See Intellectual property theft: the unspoken unknown of offshoring.) Even more curious is the effective absence of concern by Europeans who would normally have an attentive ear to the near and middle east. (The UK has a term EMEA for Europe, Middle East, and Africa to describe their version of the 'Near Abroad.')
The threat to IT and outsourcing assets in Bangalore and Hyderabad should be taken seriously despite the bland denials from Indian authorities who are understandably anxious to protect what amounts to the core of Indian economic revival... more
Threat of H5N1 avian flu pandemic rises to point that business must actively consider contingency plans
7/26/2005
The threat of an avian flu H5N1 human-to-human outbreak - which holds the specter of a global pandemic - is now at a point that I submit that firms that do not address the potential impacts to their global supply chains are at a point between a near total supply chain interruption and fiduciary breach. This is cheap prose to firms that are struggling with financial and competitive demands and who can rightly retort that they are no different from the federal government in ignoring the rising warnings from WHO, CDC and others. The supply chain impacts, leave aside the death toll, are going to be stunning. I draw readers to a January 2005 two part series, Using SARS to predict H5N1 Avian Flu impacts on regional & global supply chains.
The tipping point could occur at any time but the forthcoming fall flu season could see the crossover from avian to human transmission as many of those falling prey to human flu chance to be in proximity with animals and birds with avian flu. Once genomic reassortment occurs in one or more doubly infected humans, the game is up for an unprepared globe. SARS was a cakewalk as a disease vector as it is actually hard to transmit in comparison to H5N1... more
Threat of H5N1 avian flu pandemic rises to point that business must actively consider contingency plans, part 2
7/27/2005
China is again failing to provide requested urgently information and samples, this time about three outbreaks among migrating wild birds in the remote western provinces of Qinghai and Xinjiang where avian flu outbreaks now threaten all of previously unaffected countries of Central Asia and Russia... Based upon prior Chinese performance over SARS reporting, one is left unsatisfied with the Chinese response that "the infection in Xinjiang has been contained." Independent Chinese scientists that report on avian flu outbreaks are again under attack by the Agriculture Ministry while foreign researchers are quiet lest China bar them from entry. The stakes are rising as the virulence of H5N1 rises. Infected domestic flocks now die in a day rather than many... more
Multisourcing: belated recovery of forgotten first principles
10/18/2005
Having long held that "insultants" outnumber consultants, and mindful that certain consultancies prey upon the short attention spans of their clients even as certain clients use their consultant's opinions as 'security blanket' surrogates for omissive decision making, I am displeased that the consulting community has ridden the outsourcing pony for years and only now is actively turning on the outsourcing concept as its political and structural impacts are becoming increasingly obvious. In point of fact, the consulting community is beginning to issue a new prescription for a disease which they themselves helped to construct.
I would like to offer a realistic assessment of why and how firms outsource. Firms almost universally devolve the problem to a divisional or unit level, thus the means, omissions and results that are achieved will vary on a case-by-case basis. The upshot is that the same problem is solved in differing ways, as a colleague said, "to avoid some organizational consequence" such as cost savings, headcount reductions (which can be to protect existing staff or to get credit for any reduction), functionality (that is missing, failing or inconvenient), or at the personal level, a positive annual personnel rating (which may be measured against suboptimizing criteria). What is missing is a decision making framework that integrates global and national aspects of need, technology, business considerations, risks, scope, duration, cost implications and ultimately solutions (there is always more than one solution, depending upon the desired outcomes and the bounds of monies, mindshare, and timing available)... more
Multisourcing: belated recovery of forgotten first principles, part 2
10/20/2005
For those of us that come from a background of a Counterterrorism (CT) and Counterintelligence (CI) threat analysis, a Governance Model that Gartner belatedly embraces is the essence of effective performance definition, and the Design Basis Threat (DBT) becomes an integral, inseparable part of that governance model as the mechanism that informs the Command or Senior management of the types of threats it may face over time and allows them to define the threats that are in or out of scope, the level of deflection or defense that will be committed to each threat, and the cost for that level of deflection or defense. The commercial side could learn much the military in essential risk management starting with Field Manual FM 100-14, Risk Management, which is the commander's principal risk reduction process to identify and control hazards and make informed decisions... more
Failing the Manwaring paradigm: Surprise over jihadist targeting Muslim oil transport and refinery assets
3/1/2006
The wide surprise over the public posting of a two year old jihadist document sanctioning the targeting of Muslim oil transport and refinery assets is a failure on multiple levels:
- Failure to read already published jihadist strategy documents
- Failure to see the rising capacity of the "new jihad"
- Failure to transpose the value to insurgents of attacking Iraqi electrical and oil infrastructure to other Muslim "near enemy" regions
- Failure to grasp the value of a "twofer" attack against a neutral or "near enemy" state in which the attack damages the local apostate government while damaging US and European firms indirectly -- where an attack on US soil would be prohibitive
- Failure to understand the impacts of the Manwaring paradigm to both attacker and defender
In June 2004, I addressed an infrastructure attack in Exceeding $100 USD a barrel in a stroke: attack Ghawar, Abqaiq, and Safaniya ... more
Symbiotic and predatory relationships between immigrant migration chains and supply chains
3/14/2006
As migration patterns have long been a staple of ethnographic research, I have begun to extend the term 'Migration Chain' as an analog to Supply Chain in that they form symbiotic relationships and can be another predictor of future events. Reflecting over the Latin migrations into the US which I am coming to broadly class as legal, illicit (immigration), and illegal (criminal), while admitting to some fuzzy boundaries between legal and illicit, if nothing else, for getting in illicitly and then having one's child born here. These migration patterns have both sheep and wolves. Here are the sheep... more
Double edged sword of optimizing China-based and US/EU-based supply chains
6/16/2006
Bleeding our China-monitoring interests over to logistics, I highly recommend two articles by George Stalk at BCG on the trade-offs between China-based and North American-based supply chains. The first is the HTML article from Supply Chain Management Review, Surviving the China Riptide, and the more developed PDF article from BCG, The China Rip Tide: Threat or Opportunity? Stalk portrays the scope of the problem in trying to improve China-based chains as reaching epidemic proportions... more
Chinese mercantile absorption of Sub-Saharan and East African infrastructure, energy, mining, development, political and military
6/27/2006
Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe are actually a stellar recommendation for China among African elites, i.e., no matter how despotically my clan and I behave, China will be my protector and lender of last resort against the international community. No one in the West is able, or willing, to make that bargain. I have the luxury of remembering a prosperous Rhodesia under Ian Smith, his UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) from England, the rise of two black parties - Zanu (Zimbabwean African National Union) under Robert Mugabe and Zapu (Zimbabwe African People's Union) under Joshua Nkomo, the creation of Zimbabwe, the marginalization of Nkomo, Mugabe's period as a post-colonial liberation hero, and the trajectory of decline to what is now a prison camp of a nation. For those readers unaware of the sinkhole that nation has become see Frontline's Zimbabwe: Shadows and Lies. Were I an up and coming clan leader bent on control, I'd pick China... more
Globally dispersed, indigenously sited communities of terrorists upgrading to locally produced chembio agents
11/10/2006
The marriage of John Robb's GLOBAL GUERRILLAS IN THE UK with my Designer bioagents: Why a potential Iranian, or existing Pakistani or DPRK, nuclear weapon does not overly excite me creates the terrorist chembio agent landscape that the UK's head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, has elected to describe in a rare public address.
Manningham-Buller uncloaked to "set out my views on the realities of the terrorist threat facing the UK in 2006; what motivates those who pose that threat; and what my Service is doing, with others, to counter it"... more
The continuing strategic failure to address our slide in Pre-K through 20+ education
12/8/2006
During the preparation of Islamic flashpoints: Even adjustments may be outside Western control,... which was a requested deeper dive on Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine from the survey of Colonial/Western-Arab relationships in Islamic territory from North Africa to South Asia: No solutions, only adjustments,... I found myself frequently thinking of vital national issues that have been neglected as Iraq continues to divert US attention, manpower, diplomacy and money to Baghdad:
- China's growing mercantile net
- Russia's kleptocracy class armed with the energy weapon
- Eclipse of US dominance of technologically sophisticated, major weapons systems
- Pre-K through 20+ education
- Conservation policy and conservation technology
- While it is transient - resolving the Republican struggle from the Bush Family struggle
In keeping with my view that 'The hole is as good as the donut,' that is, a thoughtful observer needs to look at what is missing as well as what is present, I opened the presentation with these six issues as I felt that they increased the gravity of the Iraqi situation in particular and the Middle East in general. It is one thing to be succeeding in Iraq, Afghanistan (we were, but we relocated attention and assets to Iraq and have likely lost it as well) and the Middle East so that one could argue that the tradeoff was worthwhile, but it is quite another to be singularly failing in those conflict areas as well as neglecting strategic areas of need... more
Deducing IP collection targets among military, commercial and dual use applications from Chinese science and technology core competencies
1/12/2007
The identification and analysis of the science and technology core competencies of China permits much deduction, from a targeting standpoint, of Chinese interest against foreign military, commercial and dual use technologies. A first in the unclass area, this Office of Naval Research (ONR) comparative effort contrasts the impact/quality of all of China's research (versus India and Australia) and research investment emphases/strategy (versus the US); Its algorithmic data is of interest to those of us interested in automated search.
This analysis has rising interest as China surpassed Japan in 2006 to "become the world's second highest investor in R&D after the United States"... more
Chlorine is only the beginning of a spectrum of instant asymmetrical chemical weapons
2/25/2007
A chemical weapon (CW) in the hands of an asymmetrical attacker or terrorist will generally not be 'WMD-scale,' certainly not in the context used in connection with Iraq under Saddam Hussein and OIF, but it will be a chemical weapon nonetheless. (Under current (but not future) means of delivery, the most likely "WMD chemical event" will be the placing of conventional explosives in an existing chemical plant.)
We must recalibrate our definition of a chemical weapon in order to understand how a terrorist can add chemical leverage to their attacks, likely using one or more items (mixtures greatly complicate defensive responses) drawn from local industrial chemical and pesticide stocks. In conflict situations where hazmat protection greatly complicates combat operations and/or local infrastructure is inept or unprepared to deal with chemical events, a simple chemical additive (even a benign additive if the defenders momentarily believe it to be a chemical additive) can be a significant force multiplier - directly against combat formations and indirectly against domestic public opinion... more
Informationalization in Chinese military doctrine affects foreign commercial and military assets
5/31/2007
Informationalization, the computerization of business, industry, and military, has entered Chinese military thinking in earnest, affecting both foreign commercial and military assets. US and EU commercial assets have already suffered serious predation from Chinese military assets and Chinese commercial assets operating under military direction.
In the absence of a US counter-cyber warfare strategy, Chinese IT technologists enter all but the most secure US systems, exceeding the limits of passive examination and surveillance. Naval Network Warfare Command (Netwarcom) and others observe... more
Prediction: the Cisco-Huawei IP debacle repeated itself with Denso, and likely for the same reasons
6/2/2007
In briefings three years ago to some of the largest tier one automotive suppliers, we forecast that Toyota/Denso would be the wholesale Automotive OEM target for IP theft as it was one of the few (the only significant) OEM that retained the capacity to design and manufacture everything that they purchased. (All other OEMs were in the process of surrendering their production technology via joint ventures so the only items worthy of hostile collection were their vehicle designs, preferably the mathdata CAD files thereof.) Another forecast was that any Toyota/Denso JV with a Chinese entity would be an IP siphon to the Chinese. The first forecast has now come true, and is likely only the beginning of the loss. The second is undoubtedly in progress.
In March Kyodo News reported that a Chinese engineer, Yang Luchuan, 41, at Denso's facility in Kariya, Aichi Prefecture, was suspected of "embezzling [Dowjones prefers "stealing"] information on about 1,700 types of products, including sensors and industrial robots [of which] about 280 types were considered top secret by the company." ... more
The Mu shu pork Index for predicting Chinese propagation of inflation
6/12/2007
If you manufacture product in China as part of your global supply chain or purchase Chinese products for inclusion into your manufacturing or processing efforts, you should pay attention to what we are calling the Mu Shu Pork Index in the spirit of the Economist's Big Mac Index (1986) and Starbucks Tall Latte Index (2004). But whereas the Big Mac and Starbucks Indices are based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP) that argues that exchange rates will, over time, equalize the price of identical baskets of goods and services in any two countries, our Mu shu Index will define a basket of effects that will flush rising costs and inflation through the Chinese economy and out into the global supply chain that absorbs Chinese product... more
A China facet: Defective materials and products driven by greed and ineptitude
9/13/2007
Our clients are familiar with our longstanding forecast of Chinese 'thrifting' in materials, coatings and platings, more so when they occur on interior surfaces, on in internal components, where testing is more difficult. Such thrifting occurs frequently in Chinese supply chains, often evidenced by multiple, substandard parts from different suppliers in the same subassembly.
This thrifting is matched by an aggressive IP theft/harvesting by the Chinese as these same materials areas are key to significant cost and structural improvements in sectors such as autos and elsewhere. Often the US/EU supplier possessing these skills is a tier two or three almost completely unaware of the attack. This bifurcation is understandable as the thrifting and the thefts are being executed by different entities with different goals in the greater Chinese supply chain. No one ever said that China was not a land of contrasts. Unrecognized by many, the risk has been there... more
Trends point towards Mexico's destabilization
9/25/2007
How will you deal with the assassination of Calderon?: A working example of all-source risk analysis was my quickly assembled presentation when asked to step in and address the monthly meeting of the regional NAPM (National Association of Purchasing Managers) chapter this September.
I chose the title purposefully even though I might be accused of "profiting on assassinations and other terrorist acts" as was DARPA's Policy Analysis Market (PAM) futures market which actually was a superb idea designed to trade in, and gather knowledge of, "things that the US and incidentally the target country would be deeply interested in."
As an all-source risk analyst, I know that supply chain analysis must extend beyond mere commercial aspects, that while commercial calculations are an essential first step in risk evaluation, they are necessary but not sufficient to define total chain risk. Intellectual Property (IP), IT, criminal, terrorist, cyberterrorist and environmental issues - and their interactions - must be included... more
Confluence of thinking on Chinese outsourcing and supply chain risks from DSB and USCC
11/17/2007
Rather than selling US securities, consider China restricting microchip supplies to the west at a critical junction (which would hit Taiwan, the current global producer of electronic componentry). This is no more implausible than Russia restricting energy flows to the Ukraine which despite the repercussions remains a viable distress option. (Think of combining securities with chips.)
Consider a foreign nation-state or its proxy embedding malicious code somewhere in a software developer's global outsourcing tier. (If bugs get in, certainly purpose-crafted malicious code can get in.) The state actor can be camouflaged by the nationality and location of its proxy. Think of the implications of the Defense Department "inadvertently outsourcing the manufacturing of key weapons and military equipment to factories in China."... more
The triple canopy of infection, birds over cats over pigs cascading feces, urine and DNA, returns
12/12/2007
I've appropriated the tropical term triple canopy forest (also here) to describe the triple canopy of infection prevalent in China and Asia, birds over cats over pigs cascading feces, urine and DNA to a new 'forest floor' on traditional wet markets (photo, video) where recombination can work wonders in proximity to man. Similar cage stacking of wild and domesticated animals was widely seen in the SARS epidemic:
SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, first appeared in China in 2002. It spread widely in early 2003 to infect at least 8,098 people in 26 countries, according to the World Health Organization. The disease died out later in 2003, and no cases have been reported since.
A refresher on SARS, including its timeline... more
In-the-wild attacks against electrical utilities coupled with extortion demands: implications for response to criminal and terrorist action
1/20/2008
CIA announced what appears to be the first, documented in-the-wild successful SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) attack against utilities infrastructure. Surely more to follow but with the agency making the announcement, it appears to be a concrete example unlike the staged attack against a captive diesel powered generator (video, text, more text):
US Central Intelligence Agency senior analyst Tom Donahue told a gathering of 300 US, UK, Swedish, and Dutch government officials and engineers and security managers from electric, water, oil & gas and other critical industry asset owners from all across North America, that "We have information, from multiple regions outside the United States, of cyber intrusions into utilities, followed by extortion demands. We suspect, but cannot confirm, that some of these attackers had the benefit of inside knowledge. We have information that cyber attacks have been used to disrupt power equipment in several regions outside the United States. In at least one case, the disruption caused a power outage affecting multiple cities. We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all involved intrusions through the Internet."
Said to be "virulently allergic to hyperbole," Donahue would not have made a public announcement, nor would the agency have granted permission, "if he didn't think the threat was very large and that companies needed to fix things right now."... more
Themes and variations in Chinese and Indian Intellectual Property protection
2/1/2008
Protecting your Intellectual Property in China and India was produced in response to GlobalAutoIndustry's request to contrast issues in Chinese and Indian Intellectual Property protection as part of China and India: Decreasing Costs Across Global Operations, a look at factors, advantages and concerns in Low Cost Country Sourcing (LCCS) to these automotive and component manufacturing areas.
Readers can treat China and India as the 'low cost is not low risk' abstract to separate presentations devoted to each country... more
Submarine fiber optic cable breaks: a study in hysteria and ignorance against analysis
2/10/2008
The global submarine fiber optic network almost perfectly mimics the global electricity grid in its inability to mount any reasonable defense against attack. (I say 'almost' as the fiber optic industry is far less aware of its being a target than is the electricity grid.)
Here is Richard Clarke in 2000 speaking of cyberwar as "a threat that US government cannot defend solely by federal means"... more
Supply chain blowback of cocaine production hopping the Andes to Argentina and Uruguay
2/24/2008
In attempting to study the unintended blowback of forcing cocaine production to move from Andean states to Argentina and Uruguay, it is not new news that:
- Cocaine production shifted to Argentina and Uruguay because of an ill-thought-out restriction of precursor chemicals entering Bolivia which drove starved cocaine production east where the precursors were cheap and easily available - and actually improved shipping costs to Europe.
- Byproducts of cocaine production had long ago ravaged the poor of Bolivia who could not afford the higher order product, cocaine.
- The byproducts of this migrated production has been ravaging the poor of Argentina and Uruguay for five years.
The news value of this note is occasioned more by the intersection of... more
Semi-autonomous "killer robots" are already within reach of asymmetrical attackers
2/28/2008
As part of my work revolves about inverting toys, technical gadgets, and industrial "found objects" into asymmetrical weapons, I was attracted to Noel Sharkey's presentation at RUSI's The Ethics of Autonomous Military Systems as well as his earlier efforts in venues such as Robot Wars and Techno Games. I have come to see Sharkey inhabiting the intersection of engineering, the application of engineering and ethics of application... more
Asymmetrical air force opportunities in interstate and intrastate conflict
3/3/2008
This asymmetrical air force series rose from a recognition of the operational similarities between the Air Tigers of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) against the Sri Lankan government and the Biafra Babies of the secessionist Biafran Air Force against the Nigerian government, forty years earlier. Apart from the "convergent evolution" of their operational profiles, there were also important differences in sourcing aircraft, pilots, ordnance and maintenance, not to mention understanding the value of going offensive against a superior power in an audacious, headline-grabbing manner.
The exercise to optimize the best characteristics of these asymmetrical attackers while reducing the retaliatory effect of the superior power leads quickly to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating in place of, or along side, manned aircraft... more
Intellectual Property (IP) risks in Brazil and Mexico
4/14/2008
Protecting your Intellectual Property in Mexico, Brazil and China was a recent presentation done in response to a request to compare IP risks in key Western Hemisphere states with those in China. As it is difficult to address three such diverse regions in a short presentation, readers are recommended to also look at:
The Brazilian IP risk is new to the list as it contains:
- Unique Brazilian characteristics
- Brazil as a mixed threat environment
- Condition of ungoverned areas, ill-equipped lawenforcement agencies and militaries
- Endemic IP abuse environment
- Moderate anti-IP intellectual environment
- Pressure to remain preferred Southern Cone regional automobile supplier
- Brazil as part of China's mercantile strategy
- Brazil's attractive IP targets
... more
Foreign vulnerability inherent in US globalization of its commercial and defense supply chains
5/6/2008
The US and, and to a lesser degree, Europe have lost control of their defense and commercial industrial supply chains. Exporting capability rather than capacity, the US has increasingly retained only a top tier or integrator role while exporting its tier 2-tier n base. Worse, the US cannot realistically define discrete and net risk as the chains are too opaque for identification and there is decreasing ability to direct sourcing to less risky tiers.
The loss has not come without warning, especially in the seminal analyses of the mid-1980s to early 90s (much of which is cited here) and near-disaster supply chain bottlenecks that nearly sidelined front line equipment during Desert Storm (1990-91).
Having surveyed four decades of research on globalization impacts, we can state that there are virtually no metrics in open source. There are drivers and characteristics but there are no actionable metrics of sufficient robustness to pass the test of falsifiability. At a macro level we are secure that we and some others have the compass right, but actionable information about a specific chain condition and greatest risk at component at tier in the chain is fuzzy at best. Given our supply chain analytic experience, we can see the tracks of bland assumptions without the understanding of how supply networks actually work. Defense and commercial sides of the house share the same problem - insufficient granularity of analysis which if they get there they find that they do not have accurate and timely data. At this point the commercial side generally gives up. The defense side can't so spends much time... more
FBI Cisco counterfeit investigation is live fire demonstration of failed supply chain oversight
5/15/2008
The recent bureau investigation outlined in FBI Criminal Investigation: Cisco Routers of counterfeit Cisco routers, switches, interface converters (GBIC), and WAN interface cards (WIC) is a long overdue spotlight on the failure to properly manage and assess critical supply chains. Two themes stand out:
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Validation of insufficient supply chain analysis at tier: From a supply chain analysis standpoint, the problem is worse that the FBI notes. If the tier 0 is the OEM or top level consumer as it is in the manufacturing sector, then the malicious entry is coming in at tier 4, not tier 3, as the “GSA IT Vendor” is the tier 1. The ‘tier 3’ to the tier 1 is thus a tier 4 to the OEM/top tier consumer and thus well below superficial oversight limits. Alternately, f ederal purchasing guidelines were so loose that malicious equipment could be effectively sanitized at tier 2 as noted in the eBay and federal credit card procurement paths. As noted in Foreign vulnerability inherent in US globalization of its commercial and defense supply chains, the lack of effective means and metrics had led to complacency and ignorance.
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Probably PLA participation at overt/covert subsidiary: From a motivation standpoint, this analyst believes that the question of “ For profit or state sponsored?” is not an ‘or’ but an ‘and,’ i.e., both motives are cooperating within the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and have been for well over a decade... more
Israel was planting malicious chips in US assets before China
5/20/2008
Reporting on the FBI investigation of Chinese counterfeit, some possibly malicious, electronics has made no mention that Israel had embedded malicious chips in nothing less than the White House phone system by 2000. Outside of members of the intelligence community and attentive technical readers of the period, this will come as a surprise, possibly coupled with the erroneous assumption of anti-Israeli bias, to many readers.
Nothing in open source then or since has convinced me that the US telecommunications network is either secure or immune to further interruption or breach. Whereas SCADA control networks, primarily for power grid generation, transmission and distribution applications (genco, transco, disco), and recently fiber optic networks have been identified as vulnerable to attack, little has been made publicly of telco vulnerability until the China Cisco counterfeits. The vulnerability of the US/EU telco network to a variety of state and nonstate actors is so great that it should be ranked adjacent to the vulnerabilities of our SCADA networks, for all applications, and fiber optic networks... more
Realistic Intellectual Property (IP) Protection in China, Updated: 26 Jun, 2008
7/4/2008
Realistic IP Protection in China, 26 Jun, 2008, is the latest in our series on Intellectual Property (IP) threat and remediation given at the GlobalAutoIndusty (GAI) conference on 26 June.
In preparation of this particular conference, GAI asked for "What you will learn" bullet points to include in their trade press. My immediate response was this set of six key takeaways:
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Define IP and its loss
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Redefine the nature of IP loss into a workable global framework
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Understand the nature of supply chain "risk at any tier" as opposed to "risky countries"
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Learn the common "solutions" that do not work, that actually leave the user more vulnerable
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Overview an approach that does work, drawn from counterintelligence practice
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Know that most of your advisory firms are less skilled in IP protection than you are ... more
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