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
|  | | At first blush, LTTE’s Prabhakaran appeared to have been executed, not KIA- Gordon Housworth [ 5/21/2009 - 18:04 ] #
Many readers know that I follow the Tamil Tigers (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)) both for their perfection of suicide terrorism and their remarkable ingenious homemade (still photos, video) weapons and asymmetrical applications, notably their modest air force, the Air Tigers, which I have compared to the earlier Biafra Babies of the Biafran secession. See Asymmetrical air force symmetries: Biafra Babies and Air Tigers, part II, 3/6/2009.
The Sri Lankan Army completed its military campaign Monday, 18 May, against the LTTE. (After years of battering by the smaller LTTE forces, Colombo dispensed with years of large unit tactics and adopted the same long range, small unit interdiction strategy used by the LTTE).
The key high value target for the government was the LTTE commander, Velupillai Prabhakaran. (Also here). Originally said to have been caught up in a firefight while escaping with other cadres in an ambulance (itself a Geneva violation), the government revised its commentary to say that Prabhakaran died along with other cadres in a sharp firefight.
Possibly. This government article confirming Prabhakaran’s death has images which show an entry wound above and between the eyes. (See images here and here, and this video.) There are no other obvious wounds to the body, and a kerchief oddly covers the back of Prabhakaran’s head, which I assume is to shade exit path damage, which is usually extensive) Forensics, if they are permitted by the government, could indicate proximity by presence or absence of powder residues on the face.
I would have expected the LTTE Tamil diaspora to erupt over these indicators of execution but the closest that I have found is an item in the New Kerala (India) which notes:
Prabhakaran's body, placed on a stretcher, was in his trademark battle fatigues, the eyes wide open. Soldiers standing around him had placed a handkerchief on the head, seemingly to cover portions that appeared to have been blown away.
There is always the chance of a fortunate shot, but the early data says summary execution and not killed in action (KIA). The next question is killed by whom, the Sri Kanka Army or LTTE cadres?
While the news hole is filled with government exultation, Tamil shock and a potentially explosive IDP (Internally Displaced Person) problem, I see another story unfolding that has yet to gain press notice.
As three decades of war come to a close, one of the world's finest international arms procurement and smuggling operations will now be up for hire to other militant groups as it seeks revenue for another Tamil assault on the majority Sinhalese. That is a story in and of itself.
[This article an extension of a 19 March client note]
Sri Lanka: War-zone access becomes flash point
Despite the government's declaration of victory, the area remains off limits, raising concerns about human rights violations and getting aid to civilians.
By Anuj Chopra
Christian Science Monitor
May 19, 2009
Voices: Tamil diaspora in shock
BBC
Page last updated at 13:36 GMT, Tuesday, 19 May 2009 14:36 UK
War crime in the massacre of LTTE officials
TamilNet
Tuesday, 19 May 2009, 01:52 GMT
Tamil doubts over rebel leader's death
By Alastair Lawson
BBC News
Page last updated at 13:32 GMT, Tuesday, 19 May 2009 14:32 UK
Daya Master & Karuna Amman Confirm Prabhakaran’s Identity
Sri Lanka Army
Updated :: 2009-05-19 17:29:45 Hours
Dead or alive, Prabhakaran lingers on
By Col R Hariharan
Sri Lanka Guardian
May 19, 2009
Prabhakaran's body found, Rajapaksa says LTTE vanquished
New Kerala
May 19, 2009
Sri Lanka Army Video
Sri Lanka Army
[Prabhakaran’s body, identity documents, cyanide capsule]
May 19, 2009
World’s Most Ruthless Terrorist Leader Prabhakaran Confirmed Dead
Sri Lanka Army
Updated :: 2009-05-19 17:33:15 Hours
Obituary: Velupillai Prabhakaran
BBC
Page last updated at 09:38 GMT, Monday, 18 May 2009 10:38 UK
The enigma of Prabhakaran
By Alastair Lawson
BBC News
Page last updated at 06:53 GMT, Monday, 18 May 2009 07:53 UK
Sri Lanka civil war
The News (PK)
Monday, May 18, 2009
Bodies of Prabhakaran's son, six LTTE leaders found
(Source: IANS), Samay Live
Published: Mon, 18 May 2009 at 13:11 IST
Sri Lanka wins civil war, says kills rebel leader
By C. Bryson Hull and Ranga Sirilal
Reuters
Mon May 18, 2009 3:23pm EDT
Bloody Sri Lanka
FT
Published: May 14 2009 19:22 | Last updated: May 14 2009 19:22
Mirror As:
‘Tigers will regroup with a vengeance’ - FT
TamilNet, Saturday, 16 May 2009, 02:02 GMT
Prepare for the end!
DefenceWire
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Post #6, Army Finds Tamil Tiger Rebel Submarine Factory In Jungle
Military Photos.Net
02-01-2009, 10:00 AM
Army Finds Tamil Tiger Rebel Submarine Factory In Jungle [Video]
LiveLeak
SRIN LANKA (January 31. 2009)
Breaching the Fortress Wall
Understanding Terrorist Efforts to Overcome Defensive Technologies
By: Brian A. Jackson, Peter Chalk, Kim Cragin, Bruce Newsome, John V. Parachini, William Rosenau, Erin M. Simpson, Melanie W. Sisson, Donald Temple
RAND MG481
2007
Gordon Housworth
InfoT Public Strategic Risk Public Terrorism Public
| | | Supposition: CIA voter fraud detection software turned on US systems, possibly as test, inadvertently discovering fraud- Gordon Housworth [ 4/6/2009 - 22:01 ] #
After reviewing all data in context, my supposition is that CIA voter fraud detection software assets were turned on US systems, possibly as a test. Inadvertently fraud was discovered; fraud which the agency has not reported, and/or cannot report through regular channels.
We now know that federal assets have committed widespread surveillance of US data, voice and email traffic without subpoenas. Why, in the same period of permissibility, would a well intentioned agency not surveil voter data, especially if it was under external assault.
If the agency did so, no reader should think that this analyst finds fault with such actions. Our various electronic voter mechanisms are fraught with obvious threat vectors that cry out for discovery, identification and resolution. One only has to read Stephen Spoonamore's comments in GOP cyber-security expert suggests Diebold tampered with 2002 election. Writing of this item in private email, I noted, "Spoonamore is an extremely capable fellow. I would accord his comments high validity, more so by virtue of his conservative leanings. Regardless of which side of the aisle you sit, it bears reading." See other items in the bibliography at end.
The flaws in US electronic voting are so great that the US needs a public Black Hat hacking conference that targets US voting systems, exposing their flaws, before exploitation by criminal or adversary state assets.
A helpful if tortured causal description
A certain Steven Stigall recently spoke before (as opposed to offered sworn testimony before) the Standards Board Meeting of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) in Orlando, Florida. Never identifying his organization, his verbatims used verbiage such as "Where I come from...," "worked with others in my organization...," and "did my organization actually discover..." The EAC put paid to his efforts at anonymity by publishing his unclass resume:
Steve Stigall joined CIA in 1985... His early analytic career focused on Soviet-era Russian strategic missile forces... Since 1995 he has specialized in foreign computer threats. In 2000 Mr. Stigall was inducted into CIA’s Senior Analytic Service. In 2002 and 2003 Mr. Stigall served in Afghanistan and was at the US Army’s Camp Doha, Kuwait for Operation Iraqi Freedom...
While Stigall was scrupulous in avoiding any commentary on specific voting machines or their manufacturers, and effectively precluded questions from EAC board members, one does wonder what, if any, hand the agency might have had in surfacing the many Diebold faults (here, here and here). (In pursuing these and other citations, readers should remember that Premier Elections Solutions is merely the renamed Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (DESI).)
Disclaimer and linkage
Modifying Stigall's testimony courtesy of the EAC, first the disclaimer:
[At CIA], we do not do vulnerability assessments of any U.S. systems. We don’t look at U.S. systems. What we do is we identify foreign threats to those systems and we relay that information via a variety of mechanisms to the owners and operators of those systems. Typically, the owners and operators typically, but not always, are going to be the U.S. Government...
Stigall then turns to a description that to this analyst demands some evaluation of US voter systems:
For several years, I’ve worked with others [at CIA] to try and identify foreign threats, emphasis on “foreign threats,” to important U.S. computer systems. A few years ago it occurred to us that that should include potential foreign threats to the computers upon which our elections in this country are increasingly dependent. [The] first question in your mind is [did CIA] actually discover any foreign threats to the computers upon which our elections are increasingly dependent? I’m just going to say this, we’re in an open, unclassified forum, rest assured that were we ever to discover specific and credible information about foreign threats to our critical U.S. election computers we would do in my organization what we’ve done since 1947; we would bring that attention to the most senior policymakers in the country and they would act accordingly.
Rendering political process into an IT regimen
Stigall again:
When I look at an election system, I see a computer system, because increasingly that’s what they are. And to the extent that there are foreign hackers who have shown interest in developing unauthorized access into U.S. computer systems, that’s where I get interested in it...
[When] I look at a foreign election system I’m not probing it [for] vulnerabilities to attack it, I’m simply looking at it as a computer network to see what vulnerabilities other people might be trying to use to exploit it because that reveals potential vulnerabilities that may be applicable in this country. Again, when we look at election systems overseas, to the extent that they even have computers, I look at them as a computer network and computer networks have all the vulnerabilities that any computer network has, whether it’s an election system or whatever. The physical security of the machines has emerged as a big issue. Long before Election Day who has access to them? And who programs these machines? And who has access to that programming? Again, just old-fashioned physical security long before Election Day. [There is a] sociological factor of decreasing transparency for some cultures as you introduce computers, I’m not going to presuppose that’s entirely relevant [in the US], but I add it for what it is worth. [You] create problems for an attacker by encrypting data...
After consulting with agency political analysts, Stigall designed a corresponding IT vulnerability model that starts “long before Election Day,” to “Election Day and afterwards”:
I divide an election process in terms of the computer’s role in that process... These don’t all occur on Election Day... [As some ‘follow the money], I follow the vote, and wherever the vote becomes an electron and touches a computer that is an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to get into the system and tamper with the vote count or make bad things happen.
Stigall’s unreleased two page presentation listed five “basic” steps. After reading his transcript verbatim, I see their constituate components as:
-
Automation/manipulation of census rolls, tax roles, prior voter registration lists, if any
-
Accuracy of random auditing of voting machines
-
Voter registration data security in the run-up to voting matches voting machine security on election day
-
Potential to defeat the paper trail, elimination of paper to electronic comparison
-
Absence of physical or emotional duress to voters
-
Authentication of voter identification at polls
-
Ensuring/sustaining privacy of the vote
-
Denial of service attacks, both conventional IT and physical kinetic denial of service that kills power to voting machines and polling places
-
Voting machine network security; removal and transport of flash drives and dismountable media
-
Capacity to transmit, protect and gather voter data; encryption of data in transit and encryption of “data at rest”
-
Ability to manipulate or channel election night media coverage, incremental, moment by moment
Electronic voter fraud expands and shifts the threat
Stigall again:
[In] a traditional voting scheme the greatest opportunity for fraud [is] at the local level. When you introduce computers into the equation, you’re moving that fraud potential upstream and you’re allowing an electronic single point failure, meaning the potential for mischief, can occur higher up the food chain electronically much faster and affect a lot more people in terms of the vote count than would be the case of fraud at an individual level where again you’re talking about the classic scenario where ballot boxes get thrown in the river or fraudulent ballots get produced; here it’s electronic...
The first question that one asks about these voting machines is, are they password protected? [Strong or weak passwords, security of storage before, during and after the election. Can] those machines can be interrogated electronically remotely on Election Day. [Are there paper ballot receipts; what is the] discrepancy at the end of the day between the machine count and the paper count...
The footprint and opportunity for voter fraud become enormous in electronic systems. Most current monitoring structures are unable to cope. "Monitoring" may well induce a false positive as it will be unable to be present through all the stages the Stigall defines.
Heroes: Churov for what he did, Stigall for what I hope he did
Stigall admiringly describes a Russian step that this analyst greatly hopes was done domestically.
A few weeks ago the head of the Russian election commission [Vladimir Churov] made an interesting proposal. He met with representatives of the Russian hacker community. And I do not know the extent to which this was a representative cross section of Russian hackers, but it was sponsored by Russian magazine, Hacker magazine, which is an interesting publication they have over there. And -- well, Vladimir Churov is my new hero, because he had a very interesting proposal for these people. He said, "In early March we're going to test a new Internet voting system in Russia. We're going to test it in five areas and I want you people to come at us, give us your best shot. We’re not interested in people who want to harm maliciously the system, but if you want to test our system trying to identify new vulnerabilities, you know, we’re going to reward you if you do this."
The US needs a public Black Hat hacking conference targeting US voting systems. There are flaws, that is certain. Better to find them before criminal or adversary state assets exploit them. Agency assets would be welcome, but it is unlikely that they would publicly disclose means and methods to states already, or contemplating, doctoring their voting processes.
Come home, Mr. Stigall, and bring your friends.
Most electronic voting isn't secure, CIA expert says
By Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Diebold Admits Audit Logs in ALL Versions of Their Software Fail to Record Ballot Deletions
Posted by Dan Gillmor
The BRAD BLOG
March 21, 2009 2:55 PM
KY Election Officials Arrested, Charged With 'Changing Votes at E-Voting Machines'
Blogged by Brad Friedman
The BRAD BLOG
3/19/2009 4:59PM
Standards Board Briefing Materials: Orlando, Florida
Standards Board Meeting, February 26-27, 2009
Doubletree at the Entrance to Universal Studios
Orlando, Florida
Standards Board Briefing Materials: Orlando, Florida
Meeting Transcripts
February 26, 2009
February 27, 2009
Standards Board of Election Assistance Commission in Re: (Computers And Elections: The Growing Potential For Cyber Vote Fraud)
SPEAKER: STEVEN STIGALL
DATE: February 27, 2009
PLACE: Double Tree Hotel
5780 Major Boulevard
Orlando, Florida 32819
JULIANA M. CARY, FPR
Court Reporter
Notary Public, State of Florida at Large
SOME PRESENTATIONS, though not Stigall’s which is likely FOUO as the meeting did not appear to have classified briefings:
A Threat Analysis on UOCAVA Voting Systems Overview
Lynne S. Rosenthal
NIST Voting Program
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Computers and Elections: The Growing Potential for Cyber Vote Fraud
Stub for Stigall's presentation
Glitches, machine breakdowns hamper voting in five states
By Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Computer expert denies knowledge of '04 vote rigging in Ohio
By Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Monday, November 3, 2008
E-voting worries linger as Election Day nears
Posted by Declan McCullagh
November 3, 2008 4:00 AM PST
Warning on voting machines reveals oversight failure
By Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Sunday, August 24, 2008
Did Washington waste millions on faulty voting machines?
By Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on August 15, 2008
GOP cyber-security expert suggests Diebold tampered with 2002 election
Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane
The Raw Story
Published: July 18, 2008
Diebold insider alleges company plagued by technical woes, Diebold defends 'sterling' record
Miriam Raftery
The Raw Story
Originally published on Tuesday December 6, 2005
Democratization and Globalization in Emerging Market Countries: An Econometric Study*
Jude C. Hays, John R. Freeman, Hans Nesseth
University of Michigan, University of Minnesota
International Studies Quarterly, Volume 47, Number 2, pp. 203‐228, June, 2003
Gordon Housworth
Cybersecurity Public InfoT 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
| | | What kitty litter clay does not have in common with platinum and indium, lithium, niobium and tantalum- Gordon Housworth [ 2/28/2009 - 19:12 ] #
Recent traffic on the limited or interruptible supplies of platinum and indium, lithium, and niobium and tantalum left me wondering how many buyers at tier were aware of the potential supply chain interruption risks, business continuity impacts and cost spikes in these materials pipelines. If they are not, and I suspect many are not, who is going to inform them - and I mean proactively inform them prior to the emergence of shortage? When will research commence on alternative materials? Have alternative designs emerged using the alternative materials? How cost ineffective is it? How much worse will it get as suppliers begin to pinch? Do buyers understand the geopolitical implications? My experience says no.
For example, when a colleague exulted over the potential for Bolivia to become a Saudi Arabia of lithium, my response was:
On the contrary. Expect Morales to be assassinated, rules shifted, a distorted infrastructure emerging. Expect the general Bolivian citizen's well-being to decline. Expect the Chinese to make a significant third world, anti-western approach to gain access control. Expect the cartels to move in as they are already in the region with sufficient force projection. Surely, you could not have forgotten Congo's coltan curse... All nations funded by primary extraction industries - energy, minerals, timber - have rising GNP coupled to sinking per capita. [private email]
Having supported purchasing organizations and buyers for more than two decades, it is my opinion that the OEM or top tier buyers are eyes-blind to many of these problems as they are too focused on immediate cost reductions, ignore costs and risks beyond the piece part cost, and have extinguished the willingness of suppliers at tier to proactively alert. This note deals with some causes for the refusal of a supplier at tier to alert the OEM or top tier.
Chain mapping to discover supply chain interrupters
We were studying value chains in earnest by 1994, including the works of Charlie Fine at MIT, many of the threads of which culminated in his 1998 book, Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage. The soon famous tier three "kitty litter" example was told to Fine by Chrysler’s executive director of platform supply, Barry Price, in 1995:
As the clockspeed of the automotive industry accelerated in the 1990s, Chrysler and [Thomas] Stallkamp led the field in applying fast-clockspeed principles to supply chain design.
Chrysler estimates that approximately five million people and 100,000 organizations are involved in the company's Extended Enterprise. And each person and organization in this network can affect in some way the customer's perception of quality... Consequently, in the early 1990s, the staff of Chrysler's Procurement and Supply organization decided to begin mapping this enormous system.
The staff began with the jeep Grand Cherokee - one of Chrysler's most important products at the time. Going one step up the chain, they examined the source of jeep's V-8 engines - obviously an important subsystem in the vehicle - which are manufactured in one of Chrysler's own plants.
At the next level of the chain, the team traced the source of a roller-lifter valve - a small but critical component in the engine. This component was supplied by Eaton Corporation, a large global automotive supplier that manufactured the lifters in large quantities.
At the chain's next level, the team visited the source of the raw metal castings that the Eaton Corporation precision-machined for the roller-lifter valves. These castings were sourced by Eaton from a small shop near the Eaton factory. After visiting this casting shop, the Chrysler team chose to go back even further to visit the company that supplied the clay for the foundry where the castings were made.
Upon visiting the clay supplier, the team made a remarkable discovery: This supplier, which provided clay of a unique chemistry needed by the casting company, had for some time lost money in its business. Without informing any other members in the chain, the company owner had decided to get out of the unprofitable casting clay business and reorient his business to processing the same raw materials into kitty litter! Imagine how the Chrysler executives must have looked at each other in horror as they quickly realized that this strategic move into kitty litter could soon shut down manufacturing of one of the most profitable product lines in the entire Chrysler Corporation.
Unfortunately, the kitty litter example is left hanging in space. While supply chain mapping is identified as worthy, the means to get reasonably complete chain data at tier is untouched. One could be excused for assuming that the data was available by request.
Known contextually at the time Clockspeed was released, Chrysler was in the flower of its Extended Enterprise cooperative with suppliers. Information was more freely shared between tier and OEM than in periods before and after. The net opinion from suppliers today is that Chrysler’s supplier relations approximate the scorched earth days of the 'Spanish Inquisition' by GM's Ignacio Lopez de Arriortua's use of the Soviet forced cost reduction negotiation approach (the Lopez effect). Getting suppliers to share more than is required is often rare.
The rubber meets the... air
In our opinion Clockspeed was responsible for more heat than light, kitty litter notwithstanding. Fine had expanded his efforts to understand the rates of evolution of various industries, coming to call them industry 'clockspeeds', a term rising from the microprocessor clock speed. Fine’s Clockspeed proposed an interesting, if limited, model with the right questions but was unable to offer solutions except in very general terms.
Clockspeed commences with the biology lesson that both binds and blinds Fine to two cyclic dimensions, two degrees of freedom; then a good Intel-Inside chapter (which was the part that most suppliers seized upon), a nice description of the integration-disintegration problem, but then descends into vagueness and high level architectural generalities.
The central message of the first six chapters is that firms oscillate between flat and hierarchical, switching back when the residual cost/benefits tail off. The latter part of the book, chapter seven and beyond, I describe as "Where the Rubber meets the Air..." Clients would read the book and say, "That's what I want," and were then left hanging for a solution.
In 1998, copies of Clockspeed were on every purchasing desk at Ford. I don’t exaggerate; it was often commented upon by visitors. It was like leaflets over Thailand. Ford was so taken with Clockspeed that the firm was trying to do an interlinear translation into Ford-specific tasks, a process which predictably could not go far given the generalities of the book’s solutions.
We knew the group driving the effort, and the individual charged with the 'translation' – my term, not theirs. Of course, this individual could not succeed but would not let on given that his superiors, with less knowledge of the mechanics, had stipulated it be done. We watched him write note after note about 'progress.' Finally we were in a position to quietly tell a senior manager that it was not doable, at least by this person.
Fine was directionally correct but supply chain tiers do more than oscillate back and forth; firms move in definable three axes according to statistically measurable criteria. Rising from collective research based on work by a colleague's father, Robbin Hough, also from MIT, we had the means to predictably define what a supplier’s structure should be given its purchasing tier, the technology, etc. We had the capability to actually evaluate the organizational capacity of an entire supply chain, to predict what the supplier’s structure should be in order to address the technical needs at tier. Based upon our earlier work at Ford, we were given an opportunity to present a solution to Clockspeed but, in retrospect, I think the solution was 'out of scope' for Purchasing beset with crushing pressure for cost reductions. We shelved it. The clock wound down on its own. Copies of Clockspeed quietly disappeared from the desks of Ford Purchasing.
Corrosive atmospheres in OEM-Tier relationships
It is difficult to get management focus, tools, supplier relations and cooperation aligned to spot kitty litter conditions. This short interchange from a cross-functional team on value chain management comprised of director level staff is all too typical:
Our logistics are a nightmare. (speaker A) [In speaking of what I called the "historical accident" of their current supply chain:] We wonder, "How did we get here?" We take individual decisions, then another, and try to make sense of it. (speaker B) Our cost of linkages between suppliers is enormous. (speaker C) We need to use [value chain analytic tools] to get 'Cost Out' of existing systems and [prevent] 'Cost Ins' from new programs. (speaker D) Our level of sophistication grows [with value chain analytic tools]; we don't look at technology [of our suppliers] today. (speaker B) [personal notes]
Mary Walton's Car: A Drama of the American Workplace laid bare the relationship between Ford and Lear. The Ford-Lear relationship was one of many that prompted Pan-industry “beggar/maker-prince/maker” initiatives in supply chains on OEMs wresting back control of the their supply chains by suppressing the kings into beggars and elevating serfs into docile princes. Intel was on a similar supplier marginalization path, bending their support of the white book/white box architecture as a means to stamp out pesky high value added sub-suppliers.
Walton sets the tension between Ford and Lear:
Seats were the first thing the customer saw on opening the car door, and the biggest... In the past, Ford engineers had designed the seats, Ford purchasing had contracted out frames, cushions, tracks, motors, and other parts to various suppliers, and Ford workers had put them all together at the assembly plants and then installed the finished seat in the car. In the case of the new Taurus and Sable, however, circumstances had dovetailed to put the entire program, with the exception of the power seat tracks, in the hands of a single supplier, Lear Seating, on whom the company was now dependent for some 600,000 units a year. Ford had no fallback position, having disbanded its internal seat-making capacity, indeed, having sold a chunk of it to Lear. You could hear the nervousness in the voice of Shabbir Kathiria, the head of the interior trim chunk team whose turf for a time included seats. "First time we have to trust the supplier; give him the responsibility and just trust him."
There were people at Lear who couldn't believe Ford had gotten itself in this position. One Lear executive [told] Wendy Dendel [that] Ford was crazy - Lear had them by the short hairs. "They can keep saying they need more money and more money, and Ford has nowhere to go"... And indeed, [Taurus programme manager Dick] Landgraff was already gearing up to do battle over Lear's request for an additional $4 million to cover unexpected engineering costs, plus an additional $70 per seat for content and labor.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Having single suppliers who developed and manufactured complex components was the direction in which not only Ford but the entire automotive industry was headed, having been persuaded by the Japanese that it was better to establish long-term, familial relationships with a few suppliers rather than play them off against each other with constant rounds of bidding. The result was supposed to be a harmonious give-and-take between supplier and supplied, not the acrimonious haggling that so far characterized the Lear-Ford union. In the Japanese model, the supplier became almost an extension of the customer's company, working closely to solve problems and reduce costs. Having a single supplier also reduced variation in the product, improved quality, and cut inventories. It was Mom and apple pie.
Not only was Ford shrinking its supply base, but it was giving more responsibility to those suppliers that remained. Ford wanted to concentrate its resources on "core businesses," ones in which it had a proprietary stake or that were critical to the success of the company... Certain other systems - seats, for example - could be farmed out. Where once Ford handed a supplier the drawings for a part and said, "Make this," now suppliers were to do the up-front design and engineering. So it was that Ford had disbanded its seating unit in body engineering and hired Lear Seating to do everything. In addition, Ford sold Lear three large Mexican plants that made seat covers, armrests, and headrests. Part of the deal was that these plants, which absorbed Ford management, would continue to make products for Ford cars... Lear was willing to design and engineer the seats, as long as they could manufacture them as well, because that was where the profits were...
OEM-supplier relationships that have a Toyota architecture but an old style tub-thumping management approach do not prosper:
The programme for the new Taurus, Ford's flagship in the US, was based on the soundest principles of modern supply management. You choose a single supplier as a partner in both developing and making what you need... Ford 'had been persuaded by the Japanese that it was better to establish long-term, familial relationships with a few suppliers rather than play them off against each other with constant rounds of bidding. The result was supposed to be a harmonious give-and-take between supplier and supplied'...
Unfortunately, the style of the Taurus programme manager, Dick Landgraff, who believed in the high decibel school of management, was inimical to the new philosophy. If cost overruns were threatened, Landgraff would say, 'Let's bring these guys in and smash them'. At meetings with suppliers, he would 'close the door and yell at them about cost overruns. Landgraff didn't care if he wasn't Mr Nice Guy.' In one sense, Mr Nasty won: the Taurus came in on time and on budget. But Ford lost...
The relationship degenerated further as Ford experienced shock at an unanticipated competitor in an essential sector:
The Taurus held on to number one in sales for several years after the 1992 Camry launch, but this was mostly because Ford continually dropped thousands of units into unprofitable fleet sales just to keep factory lines running and to keep the car artificially on top. The Taurus may have been America’s best-selling car, but as many as 60% of the units sold were to outfits like Hertz rentals. Insiders at Ford knew they had a problem: if the Taurus was not restyled as the best in its class, its future success was questionable. So, in the early-1990s, Ford’s executives authorised one of the most ambitious vehicle initiatives in the company’s history: the Taurus remake.
Initially, the Taurus redesign was intended to best Honda’s Accord, the top-selling car at the time. But when Ford team members checked out Toyota’s new Camry during the research phase, they quickly learned that they had a new car to beat. Customers were still favouring the Accord, but the Ford team knew the Camry would soon take over; the vehicle was undeniably a wonder for the price. No other car in the class came close. When Ford engineers took a Camry apart piece by piece for study, many became mesmerised and others panic-stricken by the obvious quality, suggesting it was frightening to think Toyota could make a car so good.
[C]harged with leading the Taurus restyling programme [Landgraff] wrote the project’s mission statement: "Deliver a product competitive with the Japanese on quality and function and better in styling features and value. Beat Camry.
On the issue of supplier margin, we often cautioned Tier One staffers to avoid the OEMs when the suppliers were trumpeting their quarterly numbers to the street. The displeasure and sometimes blunt language OEM staffers directed at the tiers ran high for a two week period, quarter after (good) quarter. Amid the rudeness, one could hear comments that 'they eat the scraps from our table - while we struggle to make X%, they make 3X - how dare they.' Ford managers were displeased when Lear was advertizing 10 or 11 percent.
The problem is certainly not auto-centric. At roughly the same period, a major manufacturer of power supplies, Delta Electronics, had gross margins of some 30% for what many saw as a commodity component, in comparisons to their systems manufacturer clients had gross margins in single digits. If you are a fractional % business such as PCs, the top tier ODMs/OEMs earning a few dollars per PC are not overjoyed by a 30% margin supplier.
Malevolent or negligent negotiation and competitive intelligence analysis
The OEM-supplier exchange suffers a startling cost of conflict and lack of alignment. Both buyer-seller negotiations and buyer competitive analysis-benchmarking can further sour a supplier's willingness to share information useful to superior tiers in the chain.
Of all the automotive OEMs, Toyota and Honda have best exerted control in their sector, yet they are the first to try to improve their performance. Getting the OEM's or the buyer's chimneys to align is one of the most vexing areas with which we have to deal. It's no wonder that internal program staff have no time for it, or wish to endure the political exposure to overcome it. MIT's Lawrence Susskind cites research that 5% of the price of everything you purchase can be attributed to the cost of conflict. Using Susskind's criteria, we believe that this cost is far higher in sectors such as automotive. Certain relationships within automotive, such as that between Ford and Visteon, could be especially contentious.
Susskind's Dealing With An Angry Public lists a few key points for dispute resolution; Unfortunately, the automotive buyer-seller interface is marked by an abundance of what Susskind wants to avoid (defensive responses that try to deny the concerns or points-of-view of critics) and a dearth of what he wants to encourage (take a "mutual gains" approach that brings critics into the decision making process). Susskind’s negative resolution techniques that are frequently used despite their bad results are alive and well in supplier negotiations:
-
Stonewalling, in which corporations or agencies refuse to answer questions.
-
The whitewash, in which the corporation or agency tries to minimize its responsibility for what may be upsetting.
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The smokescreen, in which criticisms are deflected by the creation of task forces and "blue ribbon" investigative committees that can be counted on to both delay the process and dilute responsibility.
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The false front, in which the corporation or agency tries to conceal its true interests behind a veneer of insincere activity for the "public good."
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The block and blame, in which a scapegoat is selected to take the blame to get the corporation or agency off-the-hook.
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The slash and burn, in which personal attacks on critics are used to divert attention from the substance of the issue.
In Supply Chain Analysis: Forensics or Fellowship I noted that:
Kenneth Thomas has observed a family of definitions of conflict, all of which incorporate three themes: interdependence of the parties, perceived incompatibility of interests, and some form of interaction. Like it or not, we have just described a supply chain. Obtaining the necessary data in this environment is as much art as science. Corporations mimic human behavior. The lower the trust between buyer and seller, the greater the likelihood that a buyer’s request is perceived as intrusive and the less likely that data will be forthcoming from the supplier. When information is gathered externally by the buyer and presented to the supplier for comment and response, the lower the trust environment the more likely the supplier interprets it as entrapment or an effort to catch them out.
Conflict management, defined as "the use of strategies and tactics to move all parties toward resolution, or at least containment of the dispute, in a manner that avoids escalation and the destruction of the relationship," is often poorly affected in buyer-supplier encounters. Of the five fundamental modes or approaches to conflict management that Thomas and Kilmann identify, competition is often used by the buyer, avoidance is employed by the seller, and compromise, accommodation, and collaboration are too rare. (NOTE: if readers cannot access Thomas and Kilmann, Aschenbrener and Siders will provide an introduction.)
Again from Supply Chain Analysis: Forensics or Fellowship:
The timing and tenor [of supply] chain analysis can either poison the buyer-supplier relationship or promote the relationship into a sustaining partnership. Frequently, buyers are oblivious to the negative impact of their CI [competitive intelligence/chain analysis] efforts on suppliers. Suppliers may fail to rigorously examine their own costing and so remain oblivious to their uncompetitive position.
When and how CI is used can have an enormous effect on the health and welfare of the supply chain relationship under study... In every industry there is a Toyota [that understands] that supply chain analysis and design is one of their core competencies and one of their greatest strategic assets. [This is in contrast to the] many who seem to forget that trust in the supplier-OEM relationship is the influencing factor of success, and that continuing to focus solely on price is counterproductive.
In the latter group, CI unwittingly acts in a forensic role that damages the long-term health of the buyer-supplier relationship and the competitiveness of the entire supply chain. In the former, the same CI capacity hones the competitiveness and responsiveness of the entire supply chain, further improving the buyer-supplier relationship...
The most successful CI capacity performs a triple role in a supply chain engagements: CI analyst, Business consultant, and Informal ambassador between buyer and seller. This author has observed a common global trait that in dealing with others, "We fill in an unknown with a negative and act to preempt."
If the CI function is reduced to a narrow analyst function, buyers will be left to their own devices in interpreting the information on offer from all sources, the apparent unwillingness or resistance of the seller and its sub-suppliers to proffer information, and will engage by default in a zero-sum game with the seller in a confrontational manner. Supply chain cooperation and responsiveness withers in such an environment.
I fear that kitty litter will be remembered longingly.
Why sustainable power is unsustainable
by Colin Barras
New Scientist
13:02 06 February 2009
In Bolivia, a Tight Grip on the Next Big Resource
By SIMON ROMERO
New York Times
February 3, 2009
For Lithium Car Batteries, Bolivia Is in the Driver's Seat
By Jean Friedman-Rudovsky / La Paz
TIME
Thursday, Jan. 22, 2009
Coltan, Gorillas and cellphones
Cellular News
Rewards Leaflets Of The Vietnam War
SGM Herbert A. Friedman (Ret.)
Psywarrior
Last modified 06 September, 2008
How Toyota Became #1: Leadership Lessons from the World's Greatest Car Company
Portfolio Hardcover (November 1, 2007)
ISBN-10: 1591841798
How Curiosity Empowers Toyota
The carmaker's determined willingness to try new ideas has allowed it to build a commercial fortress and an astonishing record of success
by Keith McFarland
Business Week
October 19, 2007, 11:15AM EST
Why Are German Employers Associations Declining?: Arguments and Evidence
Stephen J. Silvia and Wolfgang Schroeder
Comparative Political Studies 2007; 40; 1433 originally published online Sep 17, 2007; DOI: 10.1177/0010414006293444
Purpose, Teamwork and Culture: Management and the vital trio of purpose, teamwork and culture in business
Submitted by Robert Heller
Thinking Managers
Sat, 2006-07-08 21:18
"Forced" Cost Reduction - How to Respond
By Mark S. Miller
Project Magazine
2006
Managing low-to-mid intensity conflict in the health care setting - Part 2: Conflict Management
by Carol A. Aschenbrener, Cathie T. Siders
Physician Executive
Sept-Oct, 1999
Car: A Drama of the American Workplace
by Mary Walton
W. W. Norton & Company (February 1, 1999)
ISBN-10: 0393318613
Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control In The Age Of Temporary Advantage
by Charles H. Fine
Perseus Books
October 1998
Dealing with an Angry Public: The Mutual Gains Approach To Resolving Disputes
by Lawrence Susskind
Free Press; 1 edition (April 17, 1996)
ISBN-10: 0684823020
Conflict and Conflict Management: Reflections and Update
Kenneth W. Thomas
Journal of Organizational Behavior, Vol. 13, No. 3, 265-274. May, 1992
Developing a Forced-Choice Measure of Conflict-Handling Behavior: The "Mode" Instrument
Ralph H. Kilmann and Kenneth W. Thomas
Educational and Psychological Measurement, 37, 2, 309-325, Sum 1977
Gordon Housworth
InfoT Public Risk Containment and Pricing Public Strategic Risk 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
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