The industrial base of war, the energy war, 100 years of the Treaty of Lausanne & Turkish conspiracy theories, China’s pre-revolutionary elite is back, animals & Math
Interesting stuff I stumbled upon recently
This is an experiment – I'll be sharing my notes on interesting stuff I stumbled upon. I'll try to do it weekly. These notes are not meant to be a newsletter – I won't try to cover or reflect on the news of the day but rather draw attention to noteworthy subjects that are surprising, non-obvious, or just cool.
The industrial base of war
One of the reminders from the 2nd Russo-Ukrainian war is that a prolonged war between two near-peer powers requires massive industrial capacity – and that Western post-industrial (i.e. de-industrialized) economies are vulnerable.
The report by The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) points out that "Currently, the West may not have the industrial capacity to fight a large-scale war." They estimated the Russian artillery ammo consumption rate and concluded that US annual artillery production would at best only last for 10 days to two weeks of combat at such a level of intensity. In three months of fighting, Russia has burned through four times the US annual missile production. In a recent war game, UK forces exhausted national stockpiles of critical ammunition after eight days.
The report challenged the assumption that industry can be turned on and off at will. Not so – think mothballed factories and equipment, lack of skilled workforce, supply chain constraints, dependency on China... The report's conclusion:
The war in Ukraine demonstrates that war between peer or near-peer adversaries demands the existence of a technically advanced, mass scale, industrial-age production capability. For the US to act as the arsenal of democracy in defence of Ukraine, there must be a major look at the manner and the scale at which the US organises its industrial base.
The good news is that a new crop of private technology companies is rising to the challenge.
Example #1 – SpaceX's Starlink was able to build up backup Internet infrastructure for the Ukrainian military and civilian use in a matter of days. Politico reports:
“We’ve got more than 11,000 Starlink stations and they help us in our everyday fight on all the fronts,” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s vice prime minister, told POLITICO.
Just an hour before Russian troops launched their full-scale assault in the early hours of Feb. 24, the Kremlin successfully hacked Viasat, an American satellite provider whose network was used by the Ukrainian military... SpaceX... quickly positioned roughly 50 satellites ready to be used in the Eastern European country. But red tape, including official government approval needed to turn on the system, slowed down the rollout.
Then, Russia attacked. Two days after the invasion, on February 26, Fedorov — the Ukrainian vice prime minister who doubles as the country’s digital minister — tweeted directly at Musk to urgently send Starlink equipment. Two days after that, the first shipment showed up.
“They tweeted at Elon and so we turned it on,” Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, told an audience at the California Institute of Technology on March 7 in reference to Starlink’s arrival in Ukraine. “That was our permission. That was the letter from the minister. It was a tweet.”
“The invasion happened on a Thursday and by the next day, Elon had called together a meeting and said, ‘I want to get Starlink up over Ukraine,’” said Butow of the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit.
“By Sunday, the link was active. By Monday, 500 ground terminals showed up in Ukraine. By Wednesday of that week, all but 25 of those terminals were alive and providing real-time data,” he added. “That’s commercial speed. That’s amazing.”
Example #2 – Andruil. Forbes reports:
After being drummed out of Silicon Valley as a Trump-supporting hawk, the onetime VR wunderkind Palmer Luckey is feeling vindicated. His $8 billion defense tech startup, Anduril, is arming Ukraine and building the weapons of the future—before the Pentagon even knows it wants them.
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where Anduril has systems on the ground (he won’t say what precisely), some people are reaching out to apologize. They now realize “it is actually really important for the U.S. to have better weapons,” he says.
Note that Andruil's business model is a radical departure from the traditional way major US military contractors do business:
Anduril, which generated an estimated $150 million in revenue last year, develops much of its technology on its own dime, a high-stakes wager that inverts how military contractors normally operate. Rather than waiting for the Department of Defense to launch a multiyear process of defining tech requirements and inviting bids to develop prototypes, Anduril plows ahead and makes weapon and surveillance systems that it believes the government will want—as long as they work.
In January, Anduril scored its biggest validation yet: a contract to take charge of U.S. Special Operations Command’s drone defenses that could be worth almost $1 billion over 10 years. An even bigger opportunity is on the horizon. The Pentagon is eager to knit together all its surveillance and weapons systems to create a unified view of the battlefield and orchestrate them from afar, all the while resisting hacking and jamming. The program is called Joint All Domain Command and Control, or JADC2.
Andruil came up with a thorough and thoughtful "manifesto" in early June: Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy: Anduril Mission Document. It starts with a retrospective of the US military-industrial complex history and current sorry state and goes on to offer a new model. An interesting read!
The bad news is... the bureaucracy didn't get the memo that things were getting serious. Here is an Onion-worthy report:
Before Space X can launch its Starship in support of NASA, the Department of Defense, and the greater goal of bringing humanity to the stars, the FAA has required that SpaceX must (among other requirements):
Prepar[e] a historical context report (i.e., historical narrative) of the historic events and activities of the Mexican War (1846–1848) and the Civil War (1861–1865) that took place in the geographic area associated with and including the Area of Potential Effects (APE).
[P]rovide $5,000 annually to enhance the existing TPWD Tackle Loaner Program. This funding may be used to purchase fishing equipment (rods, reels, and tackle boxes with hooks, sinkers, and bobbers) for use at existing, heavily visited sites and/or allow the program to expand to new locations.
Participate in wildlife photography introduction and instruction opportunities on‐site.
[M]ake an annual contribution of $5,000 to the Friends of Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge Adopt‐an‐Ocelot Program within 3 months of the issuance of the BO and by March 1 of each year thereafter for the duration of the BO. Funds donated to the program are intended to pay for…Special events to raise awareness about the ocelot.
It’s hard to take our civilization seriously on some days.
Yep 🤷🏻♂️
The energy war
Increasingly, it looks like energy and food will play a major role in how the war in Ukraine ends. Sergey Vakulenko did a deep dive into the Russian energy embargo. Sergey is an energy industry veteran, currently an independent energy analyst based in Bonn, Germany. He points out that it's "a complicated matter with technical and economic issues closely intertwined":
What is the physical set-up of the global energy market; what is Russia's role; what are the interdependencies between Russia, Europe, and the rest of the world; what might physically happen if the embargo is introduced?
What are the possible costs and effects that Europe and the rest of the world might incur?
What would be the short- and long-term effects on Russia of the embargo?
What are the possible mechanisms, and how the energy trade war might unravel?
Would the embargo stop the war?
What might be the longer-term implications for the global energy system?
This is an illuminating long read! Here is the author's TL;DR with troubling conclusions:
EU and Russia are on a brink of a major trade war around oil and gas.
Russian energy supplies play a major role in the global market
If excluded from global markets, Russian oil and gas will be impossible to replace and substitute in the medium term (up to two years)
Over the short term Russia may be quite resilient to the loss of oil and gas sales volumes and may compensate much of it with the price growth
Already introduced sanctions have strongly diminished the value of foreign earnings to Russia
Russia is looking for a retaliation weapon for the European-imposed sanctions
Europe is compelled to make a bold move to compensate for the unwillingness to send troops to assist Ukraine
As a result of the trade war the world may face an unprecedented energy crisis, leading to a deep recession, accompanied by a food crisis
The longer-term outcome will be an acceleration of energy transition for energy security reasons, while at the same time mothballing the decarbonization measures
The sunset period for fossil fuels may have been shortened by a decade
There will be a need for emergency investments in the traditional energy sector, which might lead to a brief renaissance, but there will be a need for the governments to promise a payout for stranded assets
Türkiye: The centenary of the Republic and the Treaty of Lausanne, conspiracy theories, and NATO
Another important aspect of the war in Ukraine is the rise of the Turkish political, military, and economic role in the region. Turkey is on good terms with Ukraine and Russia, is a member of NATO, and controls the Dardanelles and Bosporus straits – and thus access to the Black and Azov seas. In 2023 it will mark the centenary of the Republic. It will also be a centenary of the Treaty of Lausanne that formalized the end of the Ottoman Empire's war with the Allies and established the new Republic's international borders.
It turns out (podcast) that there is a proliferation of conspiracy theories ahead of this date:
the Treaty of Lausanne expires and Turkey's modern borders become obsolete. In keeping with secret articles signed by Turkish and British diplomats at a Swiss lakefront resort almost a century ago, British troops will reoccupy forts along the Bosphorus, and the Greek Orthodox patriarch will resurrect a Byzantine ministate within Istanbul's city walls. On the plus side for Turkey, the country will finally be allowed to tap its vast, previously off-limits oil reserves and perhaps regain Western Thrace.
Wow!
None of this will actually happen. But these are the symptoms of lively political debates between Erdogan's supporters and opponents. And Turkish internal policy matters a lot for its neighbors as well as for NATO. The Economist reviews the state of Turkish relationships with NATO and concludes that it's complicated:
Over the past month, the Turkish president has blocked NATO enlargement, warned of a new offensive against American-backed Kurdish fighters in Syria, and stoked tensions with Greece,
Aside from a few words of condemnation at the start of the war in Ukraine, Turkey has remained on good terms with Russia throughout.
Mr Erdogan [...] lashed out against Greece, demanding that it demilitarise Greek islands hugging Turkey's western coast. He has also suggested that American bases in Greece pose a threat to Turkey (which hosts American forces itself). This might be bluster, and blow over. But obstructing Finland's and Sweden's NATO membership while war rages in Europe is bound to have consequences.
Turkey's policy w.r.t. Syria and Kurds is another area of tension. Still...
None of this spells doom for the relationship between Turkey and NATO. Western countries will try to work round Turkey's veto by providing Finland and Sweden with security guarantees. This may leave Turkey sidelined within the alliance. But its departure or eviction from NATO is still fantasy. Turkey is on the front line of the war in Syria and close to other conflicts in the Middle East; it controls access to the Black Sea, which has been central to all of Russia's recent wars; and it serves as a corridor for trade between Central Asia and Europe, especially in energy, notes Ben Hodges, a former commander of American forces in Europe. "I don't even want to think of NATO without Turkey," he says.
Especially in the wake of Russia's war in Ukraine, Turkey also has no interest in surrendering the power of deterrence that NATO membership offers.
Meanwhile in China: Researchers found that the grandchildren of China’s pre-revolutionary elite are unusually rich
After winning the civil war in 1947, the Chinese Communist Party wiped out landowners and other classes privileged by the imperial regime. The party created hereditary class labels in 1950, in part to punish the old guard. These allowed the researchers to distinguish between old elites and everyone else.
The research found that Chinese communists were
effective in homogenizing the population economically in the short run. However, the pattern of inequality that characterized the pre-revolution generation re-emerges almost half a century after the revolutions. Individuals whose grandparents belonged to the pre-revolution elite earn 12 percent more income and have completed more than 11 percent additional years of schooling than those from the rest of the population. We find evidence that human capital (such as knowledge, skills, and values) has been transmitted within the elite families. Moreover, the pre-revolution elite either move to opportunities or stay to benefit from the social capital embodied in kinship networks that have survived the revolutions. These channels allow the pre-revolution elite to rebound after the revolutions, and their socioeconomic status persists despite one of the most aggressive attempts to eliminate differences in the population.
I'd love to see a similar analysis of the effects of the Russian Bolshevik and Stalin revolutions. One important difference was the duration of the communist "experiment" - 70 years in Russia vs. 30 in China. In other words, 2+ generations vs. one.
On a lighter note...
Animals and Math
This fascinating podcast explains that
Fish can measure shoal size (sticking in a shoal reduces risk of predation)
Lions can count other pride's lions when deciding whether to attack
Probability estimates are essential for most animals
Birds, frogs, insects – they all count despite lacking cortex, use different mechanisms
Venus flytrap plant can count!
Wow, just wow!
Phew… If you made it that far, please tell me what you think about the note and the topics.
Finally, the bonus content, a cool picture - Getty Center in LA