Category: Europe

The Emperor Sans Chemise

From my comments to this post at The American Interest:

“President Obama views Putin as a leader who “was operating from a position of weakness.” This is right, but only if you take the long view: This type of regime is destined to fall eventually, but for the time being Putin has an 82 percent approval rating; he hardly looks or feels weak.”

No, Russia, and Poutine (I use the French spelling, because it more closely matches the Russian pronunciation) are incredibly, tactically weak.

Why did Poutine take Crimea? Because he wanted to protect the Black Sea “Fleet,” and thought it was a valuable enough asset to cause a fuss over. Have you looked at the Black Sea “Fleet”? It’s about the size of a single US Navy carrier group – minus the carrier, of course. Mark Galeotti has said he thinks it could lose a fight against the Italians. The fact that Poutine invaded another country to be certain to hold on to such an asset that is both so valuable to him he doesn’t feel he can afford to lose it, yet so weak it has no real tactical value, says volumes. It says his other assets are even worse.

The Russians fought Chechnya — and it took years to get to a standoff. The Russians fought a virtually disarmed Georgia — and it still took a week. And that’s before we talk about Afghanistan, which provides a fine illustration in the difference between withdrawing (what the US is doing), and retreating (which the USSR was forced to do, leaving tons of matériel behind).

Poutine is an Emperor without any clothes. And the photographs to match.

The Russians Are Coming!

Daniel Drezner has a post at Foreign Policy about the (supposedly) recently discovered Russian spy ring.

He’s less than impressed.

Here’s what I just posted in a comment to him (quotes from his post are in italics):

*^*^*^*

“(I)s there anything that the Russians gathered from this enterprise that a well-trained analyst couldn’t have picked up by trolling the interwebs?”

Probably not, but that may well be the point.

That is, it’s one thing to find information on the interwebs. It’s another thing entirely to verify it.

In fact, given that 80-90% of all intel gathered is “open source intelligence” (ie, gathered from non-secret sources), I think one purpose of this group may have been to establish a control set against the images in the press and in entertainment media. The Russians may have been asking, “How real are those images?” and trying to set up “everyday” people to compare them against.

Come to think of it, that might not be so bad a project for us.

“Why were the arrests made now?”

That’s a real puzzler, as is any prosecution against spies. Standard practice is, once you ID a spy, you feed them disinformation to then pass along to their controllers. One of the few rationales I can think of (pay attention, this might be tricky):

* We have a source in Russia
* Who told us they have a source in the US
* Who’s told them we’ve discovered this ring
* So we had to blow the ring to protect our source in Russia, as prosecution is what we’d be “expected” to do.

“(T)his sounds like a low-rent, more boring version of that movie.”

* Movies are intended to look expensive — life isn’t
* Movies are intended to not be boring — life isn’t

You’re basically saying that since reality doesn’t match a movie plot scenario (see Schneier), it’s reality that must be wrong. Er, ah, no. All this points out is how crappy movie plots are vis-à-vis reality. It also points out how dangerous movie plots are when we let them set expectations as to what intel “really” is. (Which is why 24 has probably done more damage to our intel enterprise than any other single thing in the most recent ten years.)

If you wanted to make as realistic a TV series about intel as possible, it’d probably resemble Dilbert or The Thick of It more than anything else. Or it would be The Sandbaggers, which was made 30 years ago.