Robert Farley

SHARK ATTACK. Dr. Evil: You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads! Now evidently my cycloptic colleague informs me that that cannot be done. Ah, would you remind me what I pay you people for, honestly? Throw me a bone here! Earlier […]

STUPID NAMES. Like Atrios, I wish that people would stop naming foreign policies after fantastic interpretations of what one president or another was supposed to have thought. Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan set the stage for this kind of nonsense with their 1996 article “Towards a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy”, a set of recommendations so “neo” […]

DEEPWATER. Lotta stuff out on the problems with Deepwater, the Coast Guard’s expensive modernization program. Shockingly enough, the program is over-budget and under-successful. Nadezhda at American Footprints has a good discussion, but also see this long article in the NYT. The Coast Guard has taken it on the chin in both the War on Drugs […]

MORE ON PROLIFERATION ROLLBACK. Via Brad Plumer, this discussion from Jeffrey Lewis elaborates on the point I made last week regarding the British nuclear program: The debate over Trident is somewhat surreal because, frankly, the UK�s nuclear weapons are irrelevant: they don�t deter anyone, confer any status or, frankly, threaten anyone. They are not particularly […]

ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTE. I haven’t yet read Larry Kahaner’s AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War, but I reallly want to. Kahaner summarized the meaning of the AK-47 thus in a recent WaPo piece: The AK-47 has become the world’s most prolific and effective combat weapon, a device so cheap and simple that […]

SALVAGE. It would be fair to say that few are as battleship obsessed as I, so this series of articles at The New York Times may be less interesting than I think. The articles, censored during Worlds War II, discuss the salvage efforts on the battleships sunk on December 7. Interesting to me because of […]

NON-PROLIFERATION AND BRITISH NUKES. In the non-proliferation community there’s some tension between the goals of non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament. It’s often argued, not wholly unreasonably, that convincing Iran, North Korea, etc. to eschew nuclear weapons is pretty difficult when the great powers refuse to give up their own nukes. The NPT includes a formal commitment […]

FCS TRIMMED. Future Combat Systems, the integrated, high tech system that the Army has been pursuing for the last few years (sort of the eqivalent of the F-22 or the Zumwalt destroyer, and more likely to be used than either) has taken a significant hit in the latest Army funding request. Land Warrior, a system […]

HACKER ATTACKS. CNN: Hackers attacked the computer network at the Naval War College in Newport, taking down the school’s network for more than two weeks, including some e-mail services and the college’s Web site. The Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command in Norfolk, Virginia, detected the intrusion around November 16 and took the system offline, spokesman […]

OPIUM. Josh Meyer has a good article in the LA Times about resource battles between the Pentagon and the DEA over opium. I suppose that I’m of two minds on using military assets for opium eradication in Afghanistan. On the one hand, it’s clear that the Taliban is using the opium industry to fund its […]