But while Beijing is concerned that it may be losing some of its bargaining power in the region since it was not included in the initial ChonAn investigation, there is a deeper concern that the South Koreans — after nearly a decade of pursuing a more “independent” foreign and defense policy designed to wean Seoul away from its dependence on U.S. forces — have reversed course after the March 26 ship sinking incident. Washington will be joining Seoul in anti-submarine exercises (and a show of naval force) next month in the Yellow Sea, an area China considers critical to its security. Seoul has also announced plans to set up a surveillance network to detect submarine activity, something Beijing worries will extend to monitoring Chinese activity and be shared with Washington.Beijing’s strategic buffer causing a crisis that drives the South Koreans closer to the U.S.? Beijing can’t like that. One has to wonder when Beijing will decide that the root of the problem here is its truculent neighbor.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
DPRK providing opportunity for increased US involvement in East Asia
North Korea getting in China’s way. From stratfor (pay wall):
China shifting away from DPRK, slowly
U.S. sources say that China may be slowly shifting away from North Korea. Beyond this being another example of the deliberate speed of crisis policy making in China, there is also a generational shift going on:
China’s official views on North Korea have appeared divided, say the U.S. officials, who said they spent “hours” during their visit trying to gain China’s insights into North Korea’s recent actions and the mindset of its ailing leader, Kim Jong Il. “The Chinese seem frustrated” with Mr. Kim, said a senior U.S. official who took part in the talks.Source: Jay Solomon and Andrew Browne, “Beijing Is Shifting On Korea, U.S. Says,” WSJ, May 27 2010, p 8.
Many Chinese analysts say they believe leaders in Beijing have grown exasperated with Mr. Kim, who embarrasses them with his nuclear theatrics and has shown little inclination to copy Chinese market-led overhauls.Beijing’s differing views on the North appear to be based both upon the age of Chinese officials and their place in government. One U.S. official said older Chinese officials who dealt with Mr. Kim’s father, Kim Il Sung, remember him as largely predictable and responsive to Chinese influence. “He was more pliant,” the official said they were told. Kim Jong Il, in contrast, appears to the Chinese as unpredictable and elusive.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Diplomatic intertia
NYtimes on the Chinese approach to the DPRK:
But the opening session instead laid bare a recurring theme between Beijing and Washington: the United States came with a long wish list for China on both economic and security issues, while China mostly wants to be left alone to pursue policies that are turning it into an economic superpower without putting at risk its prized geopolitical stability.The problem, of course, is that North Korea is the one currently threatening that prized geopolitical stability. They provoked the current crisis. Yet confronting the North Koreans would mean changing China’s previous policy of maintaining the status quo on the peninsula as long as possible.
At what point does China get fed up with the DPRK, decide it isn’t worth the trouble and start considering alternatives?
Sunday, May 23, 2010
We need a story for the North Korean end-game
Solid analysis from NYTimes on China’s dearth of options for dealing with the DPRK:
China’s reluctance to censure the North is not rooted in affection for its policies. In private discussions, one American analyst said Sunday, Chinese officials express frustration will North Korea’s growing belligerence. But like their Washington counterparts, they say, they have no good option to deal with it.All of the regional powers - South Korea, Japan, China - as well as the U.S. feel stuck without any useful options. All of these powers, therefore, have an excellent incentive to findsomething they can all collaborate on to deal with the DPRK’s increasingly shrill threats to commit suicide.
The problem is that no one has a storyline for how to fix the status quo. Until we have that, we cannot coordinate action or make credible threats to the North Koreans. If we had an agreement among all the regional powers about how we would deal with a collapse of North Korea, then we would have the initiative. Currently North Korea has all the initiative and consequently we’re always reacting to the crises it starts. With a regional agreement in hand, we would have the leverage to approach them (ideally the Chinese would do this) and say: “We have a plan for dealing with your collapse. We won’t let you hold us hostage anymore. If you will change your behavior, then we’ll cooperate. If you won’t change your behavior, then we’ll wait you out and pick up the pieces once you’ve collapsed.”
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Peak dating
Inspired by this Junk Charts post, I got to thinking “That isn’t complete. It might be acceptable for you to date a larger spectrum of ages as you get older, but there are fewer available people for you to date as you age!”
So, I pulled the number of single women by age from the 1995 census (first data I could find, Table 59, pdf):
I then took the finite integral of that time series over the upper and lower bounds for acceptable dating for each age to get this:
While the acceptable range of ages you can date increases forever, the pool of single women dwindles faster, meaning that (given all these assumptions) a man’s peak dating pool occurs around age 24.
I then took the finite integral of that time series over the upper and lower bounds for acceptable dating for each age to get this:
While the acceptable range of ages you can date increases forever, the pool of single women dwindles faster, meaning that (given all these assumptions) a man’s peak dating pool occurs around age 24.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Russian air defenses in meltdown?
I don’t know how reliable Gen. Kornukov is, but if at all accurate, then this story offers an example of just how hard it can be to rebuild a defense industrial base after it shrinks. A reminder that, while some pundits use the “defense industrial base” as a prop to parry any attempt to decrease spending, there is a legitimate concern there.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
China will manage symptoms for next two years; cure left for the next guy
Stratfor [pay wall] continues to be bearish on China:
…there is a deepening anxiety over the fact that China’s 30-year economic boom is reaching a climax and that its imbalances cannot be corrected quickly enough to avert a major dislocation. Foreign markets are drying up, domestic consumption remains too underdeveloped to pick up the slack and the misallocation of resources associated with the state-dominated financial system has generated a hidden mass of bad loans, exacerbated by the recent lending spree.They assess that Chinese leadership is focused on managing the next two years (leading up to a leadership transition), rather than pursuing any major reforms that would address the structural challenges.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Get the narrative right first
Overly simplistic history of procurement over the past decade:
Nearly a decade after the United States began to focus its military training and equipment purchases almost exclusively on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. military strategists are quietly shifting gears, saying that large-scale counterinsurgency efforts cost too much and last too long.This is an overly simplistic narrative of what happened. Military training eventually came to be focused almost exclusively on OIF and OEF. Military acquisitions never became anywhere close to exclusively focused on OIF and OEF. Over the past decade we’ve procured roughly 150 next-generation fighter planes (the F-22), six new SSNs (a force that, by itself, is roughly the size of the UK’s or France’s SSN fleet), completed work on a supercarrier (CVN-76), built an entirely new supercariier (CVN-76) and started work on a new class of carrier (CVN-78).
I still haven’t done it or seen anyone attempt it, but I expect that if you went through the procurement budget over the past decade and tried to categorize all the investments as either “conventional,” “COIN” or “both,” you’d find that the plurality of money spent was in the “conventional” category. Gates made an similar assessment of the overall budget in 2009.
The history is more complicated than the either/or dichotomies that crop up in press reports, journal articles and op-eds. The DoD took a while at the start of OIF in restructure itself to respond to the irregular/COIN missions it was facing in Iraq. Then acquisitions lagged even further behind. Almost immediately, there began to be calls that we were fighting the last war (ignoring the fact that a war has to end before one can honestly call it the last war). We never fully shifted our procurement portfolio towards COIN and irregular warfare.
Granted, simplistic narratives are easier than confronting the hard questions of setting true priorities and making real choices about which ends we most want to pursue with our scarce resources. Strategy is hard.
Turning your personality into a strategic asset
Read Michael Lewis’ The Big Short. An enjoyable roll through the world of shorting the market.
In his introductory profile of one of the short sellers, Lewis makes this point:
Think of it this way: in any sufficiently complex system, there will not be any universally dominant strategies. Therefore, there will not be any rote formula that one can memorize or copy to succeed. Success will be won through the discovery of fleeting opportunities and precarious asymmetries that others don’t recognize. Which, by definition, means that you have to be thinking differently to recognize what others overlook.
It is unavoidably difficult. This is not a cry for eccentricity for eccentricity’s sake. It is a deeper point. The first assessment a strategist must make is a self-assessment: what is my comparative advantage? What about my nature is spectacularly unusual and how can I turn that into an advantage? The rest is application.
[Michael] Burry did not think investing could be reduced to a formula or learned from any one role model. The more he studied Buffett, the less he thought Buffett could be copied; the lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual. ‘If you are going to be a great investor, you have to fit the style to who you are.,’ Burry said. ‘At one point I recognized that Warren Buffett, though he had every advantage in learning from Ben Graham, did not copy Ben Graham, but rather set out on his own path, and ran money his way, by his own rules… I also immediately internalized the idea that no school could teach someone how to be a great investor. If it were true, it’d be the most popular school in the world, with an impossibly high tuition. So it must not be true.’The same holds true for strategic thinkers. One cannot copy Andy Marshall. The next Marshall won’t be anything like him. He or she will, rather, be supremely unique in a completely different way.
Think of it this way: in any sufficiently complex system, there will not be any universally dominant strategies. Therefore, there will not be any rote formula that one can memorize or copy to succeed. Success will be won through the discovery of fleeting opportunities and precarious asymmetries that others don’t recognize. Which, by definition, means that you have to be thinking differently to recognize what others overlook.
It is unavoidably difficult. This is not a cry for eccentricity for eccentricity’s sake. It is a deeper point. The first assessment a strategist must make is a self-assessment: what is my comparative advantage? What about my nature is spectacularly unusual and how can I turn that into an advantage? The rest is application.
