Romanian Communism in its last years sat uneasily athwart the intersection of brutality and parody. Portraits of the Party leader and his wife were everywhere; his praise was sung in dithyrambic terms that might have embarrassed even Stalin himself (though not perhaps North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, with whom the Romanian leader was sometimes compared). A short list of the epithets officially-approved by Ceauşescu for use in accounts of his achievements would include: The Architect; The Creed-shaper; The Wise Helmsman; The Tallest Mast; The Nimbus of Victory; The Visionary; The Titan; The Son of the Sun; A Danube of Thought; and The Genius of the Carpathians.
Tony Judt, “The End of the Old Order”, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, 2005.
August 19, 2013
QotD: “The Genius of the Carpathians”
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August 18, 2013
Rounding up the “government is spying on everyone” news
A linkapalooza of information at Zero Hedge:
- Just weeks after NSA boss Alexander said that a review of NSA spying found not even one violation, the Washington Post published an internal NSA audit showing that the agency has broken its own rules thousands of times each year
- 2 Senators on the intelligence committee said the violations revealed in the Post article were just the “tip of the iceberg”
- Glenn Greenwald notes: “One key to the WashPost story: the reports are internal, NSA audits, which means high likelihood of both under-counting & white-washing”.(Even so, the White House tried to do damage control by retroactively changing on-the-record quotes)
- The government is spying on essentially everything we do. It is not just “metadata” … although that is enough to destroy your privacy
- The government has adopted a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act which allows it to pretend that “everything” is relevant … so it spies on everyone
- NSA whistleblowers say that the NSA collects all of our conversations word-for-word
- It’s not just the NSA … Many other agencies, like the FBI and IRS – concerned only with domestic issues – spy on Americans as well
That’s just the first few items of a long list. Read the whole thing.
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The real problem facing the NSA and other intelligence organizations
Charles Stross points out that there’s been a vast change in the working world that the NSA and other acronyms didn’t see coming and haven’t prepared themselves to face:
The big government/civil service agencies are old. They’re products of the 20th century, and they are used to running their human resources and internal security processes as if they’re still living in the days of the “job for life” culture; potential spooks-to-be were tapped early (often while at school or university), vetted, then given a safe sinecure along with regular monitoring to ensure they stayed on the straight-and-narrow all the way to the gold watch and pension. Because that’s how we all used to work, at least if we were civil servants or white collar paper pushers back in the 1950s.
[…]
Here’s the problem: they’re now running into outside contractors who grew up in Generation X or Generation Y.
Let’s leave aside the prognostications of sociologists about over-broad cultural traits of an entire generation. The key facts are: Generation X’s parents expected a job for life, but with few exceptions Gen Xers never had that — they’re used to nomadic employment, hire-and-fire, right-to-work laws, the whole nine yards of organized-labour deracination. Gen Y’s parents are Gen X. Gen Y has never thought of jobs as permanent things. Gen Y will stare at you blankly if you talk about loyalty to their employer; the old feudal arrangement (“we’ll give you a job for life and look after you as long as you look out for the Organization”) is something their grandparents maybe ranted about, but it’s about as real as the divine right of kings. Employers are alien hive-mind colony intelligences who will fuck you over for the bottom line on the quarterly balance sheet. They’ll give you a laptop and tell you to hot-desk or work at home so that they can save money on office floorspace and furniture. They’ll dangle the offer of a permanent job over your head but keep you on a zero-hours contract for as long as is convenient. This is the world they grew up in: this is the world that defines their expectations.
To Gen X, a job for life with the NSA was a probably-impossible dream — it’s what their parents told them to expect, but few of their number achieved. To Gen Y the idea of a job for life is ludicrous and/or impossible.
This means the NSA and their fellow swimmers in the acronym soup of the intelligence-industrial complex are increasingly reliant on nomadic contractor employees, and increasingly subject to staff churn. There is an emerging need to security-clear vast numbers of temporary/transient workers … and workers with no intrinsic sense of loyalty to the organization. For the time being, security clearance is carried out by other contractor organizations that specialize in human resource management, but even they are subject to the same problem: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
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Down with the “nudgers”
In Reason, Baylen Linnekin discusses the so-called libertarian paternalists:
Even if I were to concede that point, there are plenty of programs that might be called soft or libertarian paternalism and that yield negative outcomes.
For example, federal farm subsidies quietly influence the choices made by farmers and consumers and lead many in both groups to believe they’re better off — a key precept of libertarian paternalism.
Subsidies influence farmers to produce some foods (like corn, soy, dairy, and sugar) to the exclusion of other foods (like arugula, bok choy, and yams). It’s no surprise that the former foods are the ones most farmers grow, and that they’re much more frequent choices among eaters.
The noodgy allure of farm subsidies is that farmers get money and certainty, while consumers get abundant and cheaper food at the grocery.
Another example of libertarian paternalism around food is menu labeling. Its proponents refer to laws mandating calorie counts on fast food and other restaurant menus as a gentle nudge that requires businesses to provide us with information the government thinks we need but still allows us to make our own choices. The hope by government is that we’ll choose items with fewer calories and be better off for exercising that choice. But studies have shown mandatory restaurant menu labeling does not work in practice. Worse, a recent study showed mandated menu labeling can actually cause consumers to choose foods with more calories.
So both farm subsidies and mandatory menu labeling present firm empirical evidence that libertarian paternalism doesn’t work, right?
You might think so. But Sunstein’s Nudge writing partner, Richard Thaler, would likely argue that these failures simply call for more testing on the part of government.
“No one knows the answers to every problem, and not every idea works, so it is vital to test,” Thaler said earlier this month.
Of course. Who else but a cadre of bureaucrats who’ve never met you could possibly through trial and error determine what’s best for you to eat?
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QotD: The unluckiest regiment in the British army
The history of the 24th Regiment (later the South Wales Borderers) is certainly one of the most interesting stories of any regiment in the British army. Throughout its long history, going back to 1689, it had been an exceptionally courageous regiment and also exceptionally unlucky. In 1694 it had taken part in the ill-fated descent on Brest. In the War of Jenkins’s Ear and the attack on Cartagena it lost more than half its number from disease in the West Indies. In 1756 it was forced to surrender to the French at Minorca. The entire regiment was captured in the American War. Forty-six per cent of the second battalion were casualties at the Battle of Talavera in the Peninsula War — more than any other British regiment engaged. In 1810 about 400 men, nearly half the regiment, were captured by the French while on troopships from South Africa bound for India.
Perhaps it is as well to outline here the story of this gallant but ill-starred regiment after the Battle of Chilianwala. The catastrophe which overtook it in the Zulu War will be described later. In World War I it was in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, and on 3 December 1917 the second battalion marched out of the lines in France with only two officers, the doctor and seventy-three men. In World War II a battalion was captured by the Germans near Tobruk and, naturally, it was part of the unfortunate expedition to Norway in 1940 — even the ship carrying them struck a rock and sank.
Byron Farwell, Queen Victoria’s Little Wars, 1972
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August 17, 2013
Delays in India’s submarine program
In the Times of India, Rajat Pandit reviews the state of the Indian Navy’s submarine fleet:
Is India’s aging fleet of conventional submarines threatening to go the MiG-21 way? The Tejas light combat aircraft (LCA), already 30 years in the making, was slated to replace the obsolete MiG-21 in the 1990s but is still at least two years away from becoming fully-operational.
Similarly, the Navy too was to induct 12 new diesel-electric submarines by last year, with another dozen to follow in the 2012-2030 timeframe. This was the 30-year submarine building plan approved by the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) way back in July, 1999. But the Navy has not inducted even one of the 24 planned submarines till now, and is forced to soldier on with just 14 aging conventional vessels.
“The Navy is steadily modernizing in the surface warship and aircraft arenas. But our aging and depleting underwater combat arm is a big worry. But it also must be kept in mind that INS Sindhurakshak‘s accident is the first such incident we have had in over four decades of operating submarines,” said a senior officer.
Sources said INS Sindhurakshak, after Wednesday’s accident, is “a clear write-off”. Of the 13 submarines left now, as many as 11 are over 20 years old. The setback comes when China and Pakistan are systematically bolstering their underwater combat capabilities, with the former being armed with over 55 submarines.
Update: MarineLink reports on the investigation into the INS Sindhurakshak explosion.
The Indian Navy diving teams have been working nonstop to reach into the compartments of the submarine since rescue operations commenced early noon of August 14. The boiling waters inside the submarine prevented any entry until noon that day. Access to the inner compartments of the submarine was made almost impossible due to jammed doors and hatches, distorted ladders, oily and muddy waters inside the submerged submarine resulting in total darkness and nil visibility within the submarine even with high power underwater lamps. Distorted and twisted metal within very restricted space due extensive internal damage caused by the explosion further worsened conditions for the divers. This resulted in very slow and labored progress. Only one diver could work at a time to clear the path to gain access. After 36 hours of continuous diving effort in these conditions, Navy divers have finally reached the second compartment behind the conning tower in the early hours of August 16.
Three bodies have been located and extricated from the submarine from this compartment. The bodies are severely disfigured and not identifiable due to severe burns. The bodies have been sent to INHS Asvini, the naval hospital, for possible DNA identification which is likely to take some more time.
The state of these two bodies and conditions within the submarine leads to firm conclusion that finding any surviving personnel within the submarine is unlikely.
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This game shows why the preseason is necessary
In a mid-game update yesterday, I said that today’s post “will be equal parts hilarity and doom-mongering”. Let’s see how the sages are reading the auspices…first, here’s ESPN’s Kevin Seifert with a quick overview of the lowlights:
The evening began with left tackle Matt Kalil getting beat for a sack by Bills defensive end Jerry Hughes, and it didn’t get much better, at least for a Vikings offense that again played without tailback Adrian Peterson. Coaches got quarterback Christian Ponder five series of work, but he took two sacks and was jumpy enough to complete only 5-of-12 passes for 53 yards. He led a 62-yard scoring drive, ending in a Blair Walsh’s 36-yard field goal, but otherwise the Vikings gained a total of 20 yards on his other possessions. (Walsh earlier missed from 49 yards.) The Bills’ rush was active, and center John Sullivan launched an early shotgun snap to scuttle one play, but all quarterbacks face adversity during the season. Ponder needed to react better and at times quicker Friday night. If you were hoping for an anxiety-relieving performance from him, this wasn’t it.
For those of you following at home, Matt Kalil’s training camp has been less than stellar according to the various reports … not terrible, but not on the pace he established in his rookie season. Blair Walsh didn’t miss very many field goal attempts last year, so even a miss at 49 yards is somewhat uncharacteristic for him (possibly he’s still adapting to his new holder Jeff Locke). John Sullivan is widely acknowledged to be one of the best centres in the league, so a bad snap from him is also uncharacteristic.
1500ESPN‘s Andrew Krammer averts his eyes from the struggling offence to find a bit of cheer on defence and special teams play:
The Vikings’ starting secondary didn’t get much of a test against the Bills’ quarterback Kevin Kolb, who threw four passes in the first quarter — the second of which was tipped by cornerback Xavier Rhodes, making his NFL debut, and intercepted by safety Jamarca Sanford.
Playing in both the base and nickel formations, cornerback Josh Robinson saw extended playing time at both outside and the slot after just six snaps in the preseason opener. Robinson jumped a route and deflected Kolb’s pass in the second quarter and if he had another step on the ball, could have turned it into a pick-six.
[…]
The Vikings only had three penalties, which puts the total at four across the first two preseason games — the fewest in the NFL so far.
No penalty was [as] inopportune as linebacker Tyrone McKenzie’s holding call after receiver Stephen Burton returned a kickoff for a touchdown.
Although he didn’t have a catch Friday, Burton has made a strong case for the 53-man roster this preseason by demonstrating his value as a run blocker, special teams man and solid fifth option at receiver.
Rookie punter Jeff Locke saw extended work with an inept offense — booting seven punts for an average of 40 yards, pinning three inside the 20-yard line with the help of cornerback Bobby Felder.
Felder played a big role in the field position game on Friday, downing two of Locke’s punts inside the 20 and taking a punt return back for 37 yards.
The Daily Norseman‘s Ted Glover wants to put in a couple of sell orders on the NFL stock market:
The first team offense, minus Rudolph: If I could use a WWII analogy, Ponder was France, the Bills were the German Wehrmacht, and the Vikings big uglies were the Maginot Line. Rudolph was the French Resistance, but everyone else? Yeah, pretty much got blitzkrieged. Ponder was running for his life, Matt Kalil perfected the “lookout block” technique, and John Sullivan demonstrated his otherworldly strength by snapping a football 30 yards behind him.
Matt Cassel: The second team offense wasn’t much better, but again, I think a lot of this goes to the Vikings and their decision to concentrate on what they waned to do as opposed to try and counter what Buffalo was doing. But yeah, Cassel threw a pick and was running around so much it looked like he was auditioning for Dancing With The Stars. Pre-season football fever, catch it!
Buy/Sell:
Buy: The new road uniforms. I like them. If I have a beef on anything about the new uniforms, it’s the weird edges on the numbers. But I like the look. Very nice balance between retro and a new look.
Sell: Not wearing the purple pants: One of the reasons I liked the uniform changes in 2006 was because they added the purple pants. I think I’m one of the few fans that actually like them, and with the new striping down the side of the leg, I think they look cool. Hope we see them from time to time.
Buy: Not game planning in the pre season. Look, this is the time where you try and get game reps and continuity with your first team, and not get anyone hurt. It wasn’t pretty to watch, but I understand the philosophy of what the Vikings did.
Sell: Not running at least one screen pass or draw play. I mean, it’s not like the Vikings don’t have screen passes or draws in the playbook, and really, how much valuable information can you glean from the Vikings first team offensive line playing Olly Olly Oxen free the whole time they were out there? Ponder’s lateral running ability, or maybe his backpedal? At least no one was hurt, so we’ll call it a night and get ready for the next game.
Buy: Rodney Smith’s nice TD catch. It was a nice outside shoulder throw by Thompson that Smith had to adjust for by doing a 180. He went up, got the ball at the highest point, and boom, our lone highlight of the evening, for the most part. Nice effort.
Sell: Joe Webb making the team. I didn’t see a noticeable drop in Joe Webb’s play, but I didn’t see any improvement, either. When you combine that with the fact that Stephen Burton has picked it up as a receiver and a special teams guy (had a TD called back on a kickoff return), and guys at the bottom of the roster coming on (Smith and Chris Summers looked good, for the most part), I’m finding it harder and harder for Webb to find a seat at the table when the music stops.
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Fracking and the environment
Matt Ridley debunks five common myths about environmental issues with fracking:
The movie Gasland showed a case of entirely natural gas contamination of water and the director knew it, but he still pretended it might have been caused by fracking. Ernest Moniz, the US Energy Secretary, said earlier this month: “I still have not seen any evidence of fracking per se contaminating groundwater.” Tens of thousands of wells drilled, two million fracking operations completed and not a single proven case of groundwater contamination. Not one. It may happen one day, of course, but there’s few industries that can claim a pollution record that good.
Next comes the claim that shale gas production results in more methane release to the atmosphere and hence could be as bad for climate change as coal. (Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but stays in the atmosphere for a shorter time and its concentration is not currently rising fast.) This claim originated with a Cornell biology professor with an axe to grind. Study after study has refuted it. As a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology put it: “It is incorrect to suggest that shale gas-related hydraulic fracturing has substantially altered the overall [greenhouse gas] intensity of natural gas production.”
Third comes the claim that fracking uses too much water. The Guardian carried a report this week implying that a town in Texas is running dry because of the water used for fracking. Yet in Texas 1% of water use is for fracking, in the United States as a whole 0.3% — less than is used by golf courses. If parts of Texas run out of water, blame farming, by far the biggest user.
Fourth, the ever-so-neutral BBC in a background briefing this week described fracking as releasing “hundreds of chemicals” into the rock. Out by an order of magnitude, Auntie. Fracking fluid is 99.51% water and sand. In the remaining 0.49% there are just 13 chemicals, all of which can be found in your kitchen, garage or bathroom: citric acid (lemon juice), hydrochloric acid (swimming pools), glutaraldehyde (disinfectant), guar (ice cream), dimethylformamide (plastics), isopropanol (deodorant), borate (hand soap); ammonium persulphate (hair dye); potassium chloride (intravenous drips), sodium carbonate (detergent), ethylene glycol (de-icer), ammonium bisulphite (cosmetics), petroleum distillate (cosmetics).
As for earthquakes, Durham University’s definitive survey of all induced earthquakes over many decades concluded that “almost all of the resultant seismic activity [from fracking] was on such a small scale that only geoscientists would be able to detect it” and that mining, geothermal activity or reservoir water storage causes more and bigger tremors.
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Molly Crabapple in conversation with Warren Ellis
Any interview introduced with the line “Somewhere, on an NSA server in Utah, there sits an email from Warren Ellis threatening to strangle me to death with my own intestines” has to be worth reading:
You’re semi-crack-addicted to information. Whenever we talk, you have a podcast, the Economist, some ambient drone music, and a reader full of links open. Dead Pig Collector was inspired by an article you read on Chinese garbage disposal. Tell me about your information consumption.
This is going to be just another way for you to insist I listen to the sounds of insects having sex and calling it music while you pollute your apartment with the strains of some idiot with a ukulele wailing about consumption and sodomy.
We call that culture. As an Englishman, you wouldn’t understand.
What would you know about culture? You come from the town that gave the world the cronut.
Cronuts are tasty. As an Englishman, you wouldn’t know what that word means.
We have a joke in this country about American food. It goes like this: “American food.”
I’m sure my information diet isn’t that special. I check the overnight email and RSS feeds in bed, read the Guardian, BBC news, and the Foreign Policy dailies, and scan Twitter over coffee and juice while listening to a couple of podcasts (I subscribe to around fifty podcasts). I have digital subscriptions to the TLS, the LRB, The Economist, National Geographic, and The Wire magazine. I try to read a Kindle Single a week, but I’m getting bad at that. I usually have a few books on the go. I watch Instagram a lot — that service was on the verge of doing some really interesting stuff, and I have a feeling it might die of Facebook disease. You know people are not only running things close to “secret brands” on there, but also selling drugs? I get maybe a dozen email newsletters, maybe less. I live on my phone: I have a bunch of news and informational apps on there.
[…]
What’s the relationship between one’s ethics and their art?
I like to say “none” because you have to be able to wear other people’s ethics in order to write personalities other than your own. But the truth, I suspect, is that your own ethics dictate how that should be done, and for which purpose. It’s probably as indelible as a fingerprint. That actually kind of bothers me. If you can’t subsume yourself into an alien ethos, then you’re being caught writing, as it were, in the same way that actors fear being caught acting. I think it’s probably quite different to painting, in terms of expression of ethics in an artform.
Also, I only threatened to strangle you that one time.
Per hour. As a writer of graphic novels, you’re known for Transmetropolitan, which follows Spider Jerusalem, a gonzo journalist living in the twisted future. At a time when journalism is radically mutating, where do you see as medium going?
Oh, ask the small ones, why don’t you …
I remember Nick Davies saying, after his phone-hacking exposes, that even other investigative journalists at his own newspaper — the independent British newspaper the Guardian — were fighting him on the investigation. Not because they or the Guardian were culpable in any way, but because they were afraid of the boat being rocked. The field’s in a pretty dismal place.
People talk about journalism having been fatally disrupted by the Internet, but, honestly, it was coughing blood long before then. The only potentially good thing about the disruption of journalism is that it’s an ongoing process, and the people who’ve made bank on that disruption today will themselves be disrupted into the ground some time tomorrow.
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August 16, 2013
Vikings at Bills round-up (just after the half)
Perhaps I dodged a bullet, not being able to watch this preseason game between the Buffalo Bills and the Minnesota Vikings:
Tonight's #Viking–#Bills game looks like a replay of the #Clowns running in and out of cars at the #BarnumandBailey circus.Brutal
— Dan Shonka (@Ourlads_Shonka) August 17, 2013
The #Vikings offensive line couldn't block me on Twitter.
— Will (@notch17) August 17, 2013
none of these people should make the team
— The Viking Age (@TheVikingAge) August 17, 2013
Don't focus on the score. That said, all the things besides the score were pretty worrisome #Vikings #Bills
— Arif Hasan (@ArifHasanDN) August 17, 2013
Oh, and Jarius Wright is reportedly out with a concussion. On that happy note, I’m going to close Janetter and ignore the game until tomorrow morning. Unless McLeod Bethel-Thompson puts in a QB performance for the ages, I’m guessing the press summary I end up putting together will be equal parts hilarity and doom-mongering.
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This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week’s collection of links is packed with posts about the current event (the Queen’s Jubilee) and some information about next week’s content release, The Queen’s Speech. There’s also the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
Update: As part of their upcoming first anniversary, ArenaNet will be offering a free trial weekend for anyone who’d like to try the game before purchasing. If you’re interested, you can sign up here – https://register.guildwars2.com/trial. The trial weekend runs from August 23 – 25, 2013. (Oh, and the game file has gotten pretty big, so allow for a relatively long download if you’re not on a fast internet connection.)
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“What is true for Walmart is true for al Qaeda”
In Foreign Affairs, Jacob Shapiro looks at the management side of the terror “business”:
But the deeper part of the answer is that the managers of terrorist organizations face the same basic challenges as the managers of any large organization. What is true for Walmart is true for al Qaeda: Managers need to keep tabs on what their people are doing and devote resources to motivate their underlings to pursue the organization’s aims. In fact, terrorist managers face a much tougher challenge. Whereas most businesses have the blunt goal of maximizing profits, terrorists’ aims are more precisely calibrated: An attack that is too violent can be just as damaging to the cause as an attack that is not violent enough. Al Qaeda in Iraq learned this lesson in Anbar Province in 2006, when the local population turned against them, partly in response to the group’s violence against civilians who disagreed with it.
Terrorist leaders also face a stubborn human resources problem: Their talent pool is inherently unstable. Terrorists are obliged to seek out recruits who are predisposed to violence — that is to say, young men with a chip on their shoulder. Unsurprisingly, these recruits are not usually disposed to following orders or recognizing authority figures. Terrorist managers can craft meticulous long-term strategies, but those are of little use if the people tasked with carrying them out want to make a name for themselves right now.
Terrorist managers are also obliged to place a premium on bureaucratic control, because they lack other channels to discipline the ranks. When Walmart managers want to deal with an unruly employee or a supplier who is defaulting on a contract, they can turn to formal legal procedures. Terrorists have no such option. David Ervine, a deceased Irish Unionist politician and onetime bomb maker for the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), neatly described this dilemma to me in 2006. “We had some very heinous and counterproductive activities being carried out that the leadership didn’t punish because they had to maintain the hearts and minds within the organization,” he said, referring to a period in the late 1980s when he and the other leaders had made a strategic calculation that the Unionist cause was best served by focusing on nonviolent political competition. In Ervine’s (admittedly self-interested) telling, the UVF’s senior leaders would have ceased violence much earlier than the eventual 1994 cease-fire, but they could not do so because the rank and file would have turned on them. For terrorist managers, the only way to combat those “counterproductive activities” is to keep a tight rein on the organization. Recruiting only the most zealous will not do the trick, because, as the alleged chief of the Palestinian group Black September wrote in his memoir, “diehard extremists are either imbeciles or traitors.”
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That figures … Bills vs. Vikings to be blacked out tonight
The second pre-season game isn’t usually all that exciting: teams are still trying to evaluate a lot of the players further down the depth chart before the first cut-down date, so you don’t expect to see too much of the starters. That being said, it’s been a long time since the last time I was able to watch the Vikings play, so I was really looking forward to tonight’s game in Buffalo. Until I saw this little piece of news:
#Bills – #Vikings tape delayed broadcast will air on Saturday night at 8:00 pm on @WKBW #Buffalo
— Jeff Russo (@JeffRussoWKBW) August 13, 2013
And as I discovered last week, even radio feeds are territory-locked, so I can’t even listen to the stream over the web. Well, it’s not like I had important plans for Saturday night…
Update: The Daily Norseman‘s Arif Hasan (who has pretty much taken over as my preferred source of detailed Vikings information from Tom Pelissero) looks at how the Bills will test the Vikings tonight.
Anyone watching the Bills may eventually get tired of hearing about the high-tempo “no-huddle” offense that teams around the league have increasingly adopted. What’s interesting is that Doug Marrone and Nathaniel Hackett have decided not just to implement some of their Syracuse playbook, but dig into the K-gun that made Jim Kelly famous and quickly allowed the Bills to join the Vikings as having four unsuccessful Super Bowl appearances.
Hey, 0-4 is better than 0-0.
But it would be lazy to describe their offense as a no-huddle. That’s not an offense, it’s a tactic.
The Bills will bring a variety of offensive formations and tactics, but will likely keep a philosophy similar to Jim Kelly’s offense in Buffalo, which is fundamentally the Run and Shoot Offense that people think died in the 1980s. Somewhat similar to the scheme run in New York under former ‘Shoot coordinator Kevin Gilbride, I wouldn’t be surprised if the modern twist on the Buffalo offense is also designed to be entirely reactive.
Given that Marrone has spent some time with a heavy ‘Shoot offense like the Saints, don’t be shocked to see similar concepts.
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The military dilemmas of a middle power
Sir Humphrey explains in detail the problems facing the Canadian Forces:
The biggest question arguably facing Canada today is how to address what is a three pronged axis of interest. As an Atlantic and Pacific power, with substantial economic interests in both areas, Canada has an inevitable interest in both regions, which have extremely different challenges. At the same time, the emerging interest in the Arctic, where global warming and climate change is seemingly allowing an opening of trade routes, means a previously neglected region suddenly takes on far more strategic role. Beyond this home position, Canada continues to play a major role overseas, providing troops, aircraft and ships to participate in operations across the globe from the Gulf to Afghanistan.
[…]
The problem which looms is that Canada has deferred expenditure for so long on so many fronts that it is rapidly reaching the point where barring a major change of budget; something is going to have to give. As a nation Canada is a superb example of the many mid-tier powers, other examples being the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Australia to name but a few, who have historically been able to afford and operate armed forces capable of working across a wide range of areas, but where future budgets may constrain this over time. All of these nations are typified by having a lot of legacy equipment in service, and a willingness to employ their militaries overseas on operations. These nations all face a similar challenge — the cost of military equipment is so great that all face a problem — what has to be sacrificed in order to keep some form of capability, and what are they no longer willing to do militarily?
[…]
Considering the Navy alone, one sees a fleet which has been hard worked for many years, and which has not seen new surface ships enter service for nearly twenty years. The destroyers are so old that it is nearly fifty years since the design was approved, and forty years since they entered service. The decision to continually defer replacements means that no military shipbuilding capability exists in Canada any more. This means any replacement will be built at far greater cost on a shipbuilding industry which will be created from scratch. This issue alone highlights the real challenge for many medium powers — the inability for domestic political reasons to consider purchasing certain from overseas. Despite there being several designs (such as the Royal Navy’s Type 26 / Global Combat Ship) entering service in the time-frame for replacement, the desire by Canada to retain a ‘made in Canada’ label on its surface warships means that the Canadian taxpayer will not get the best value for money. One only has to consider that most warship replacement programmes these days will only replace half to two thirds of the hulls in the preceding class due to cost, and it quickly becomes clear that Canada is going to be forced to establish a military shipbuilding capability for just 8-10 hulls.
Domestically there are many good reasons to build at home — creation of jobs in vulnerable constituencies, a sense of national control over a hugely visible symbol of national prestige, and an ability to support domestic industries (e.g. having far greater sovereignty over the weapons and equipment than may otherwise be the case with a foreign purchase). Additionally even with offsets, it is difficult to justify to taxpayers spending huge sums of money abroad, particularly for a capability traditionally built at home. There are several nations who have traditionally built their large warships at home, and who face a need to build replacement hulls in the next 10-15 years. It becomes increasingly difficult to see how they can afford to do this without making major cuts elsewhere to their procurement plans, or buying overseas.
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