Category Archives: History

Book Ends

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The last two nonfiction books I’ve read are Black Hawk Down and  In a Time of War. The two nonfiction books have both dealt with wars that have happened since I became an adult.  In a Time of War chronicles some of the members of West Point’s class of 2002 as they progressed through the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, mostly Iraq.  Black Hawk Down retells the events of the Battle of Mogadishu in October of 1993.  Both these books strike close to home for me.  They present a set of delimiters around a pattern within the  U.S. military involvement overseas.

In October of 1993, I was in my final month of the Infantry Officer’s Basic Course at Fort Benning Georgia.  Within the year I would  arrive at my first Regular Army unit, the 25th Infantry Division.  The Ranger platoon leaders in Somalia were class of 1990 grads, the seniors when I was a Plebe.  The soldiers to my left and right at Rangers school, the ones from Ranger regiment, would go and serve with the men that fought in Somalia.

Mike Palaza, a 1991 West Point grad and fellow Alumnus of Stoughton High School stated that he wasn’t going to marry his girlfriend if he was headed to Somalia:  he was headed to the 10th Mountain and knew that he’d be deployed.  He was being melodramatic when he said that he wasn’t going to get married before going to Somalia. “I won’t make her a Widow.”  But they got married and he deployed there anyway.  He is still alive and well.

SSG Franklin was my senior squad leader when I got to my Platoon in Hawaii.  He had a Combat Infantryman’s Badge from his deployment to Somalia.  He claimed he hadn’t really earned it, just had done a lot of Cordon and Searches in houses looking for weapons.  When I went to Haiti, I had a team leader in my platoon who said comparable things.  It seems that for most of the deployment in Somalia, the US forces were considered a neutral force, just there to help distribute food.  It wasn’t until we decided that Aidid was the bad guy that things went south. It is hard to hear these two points of view and then read the chaos and hell that was Mogadishu during the events told Black Hawk Down.

If you look at the chain of events from the time I graduated High School up to the present situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a continuing narrative.  With the fall of the Soviet Union, we stopped paying attention to the Mujhadeen in Afghanistan, and we lost interest in the Iran/Iraq war and it’s effect on those countries and the region.  Saddam Hussein didn’t get the message that we wouldn’t tolerate an invasion of Kuwait.  By responding, we put American troops on the Arabian Peninsula. The mujahideen fighters, trained and equipped by the United States, now turned their enmity against us.  We were already questionable allies due to our support of Israel, so it wasn’t too hard to make us the bad guys. Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for inciting much of the violence in Mogadishu in 1993.  It was these actions that lead the US to drive Osama bin Laden out of the Sudan (a short jaunt away across Ethiopia) where he was then building the terrorist network that later attacked American 2001.  He claimed that they learned the US could be chased from a country by making it take casualties.

What was clear from reading the book and from what little I’ve studied is that we misread the situation.  Aidid was willing to let the United Nations help, but he was the real power in Mogadishu.  In the news they called him a “Warlord.”  He was the single most powerful leader to come out of the Somalia Civili war.  Not that he was undisputed, there were many such powerful men, but he had a larger power base than the others.  When the US decided that he was not to be allowed to participate in the future government, they turned a potential ally into an enemy.  Yes, he was a vicious man, but the country was known for brutality, he was just more successful.  Yes, he killed UN peace keepers.  But the story there is fairly murky, at least from what little I’ve seen. The facts of Somalia are such that no one with any degree of power got there without blood on their hands.

What is the difference between a warlord, a tribal leader, a sheik, a community leader, a mayor, a governor?  The power to rule must be granted at least in a portion by the people who are ruled, if only because they think the alternative is worse.  Here in the United States, we were unusual when we said that the military leadership you be subservient to the civilian leadership.  This new fangled idea is not the norm in much of the world:  it is still catching on.  I acknowledge the difference between a person who has seized power and one who has been selected by his community.  We in the United States often forget that places without traditions of elections have more primitive methods for selecting leaders that  nevertheless still have the support of the community.  We may not like these men:  we certainly decided that we didn’t like Aidid.

In a time of War shows a later next stage in the evolution of America’s foreign policy through force.  The West Point class of 2002 deploys to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan and  suffers casualties. Nine years after I graduated from West Point, a year after I had removed myself from the roles of the Army Reserves, these kids were graduated into a very different Army than I had experienced.  But things don’t change much at West Point.: Their experiences had been similar enough to mine.  The soldiers upon which  the book focused were from company D-1, the Company next to mine for my final two years at the Academy.

I often wonder what would have happened if President Bush senior hadn’t listened to the advisors who told him to stop before heading the troops up to Baghdad.  If what happened in Iraq since 2003 is any indication, we would have certainly been involved in some serious fighting come 1993.  I suspect that my generation of classmates would have been placed in much the same situation as the class of 2002 and later classes.

I cried a couple of times during the book.  Both times it was during the notification scenes.  I can’t imagine a worse thing to do to someone you love than to make them suffer through the fear and dread of deployment to a war zone, except to die on them.

The war in Iraq was going poorly when the book was published.  Since that time, we have lived through “The Surge”, “The Anbar Awakening” and a change in the outlook for Iraq in the long term.  A big part of that change is that the American strategy changed.  Gen Petraus, the Armies chief counter-insurgency expert, gets a lot of credit for his role in getting Army commanders to understand the real situation on the ground, and to work with the people in their locales.  With his current position in CENTCOM, he will be able to affect the operations in the Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as monitor the evolving relationship between Iran and the United States.  I am cautiously optimistic that we will carve a decent situation out of these conflicts.

Returning to thinking about Somalia in the light of the current conflicts really drove home how lucky I have been personally, how much some of our soldiers have given, and how complex American foriegn policy really is.

Computers and Me

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The defining question of geek culture before the .com boom was, ‘What computer did you program on first.’ Before Microsoft became ubiquitous, there a period where many different systems, all incompatible, became available within the price range of the average family. Brian Graber worked on his Dad’s IBM PC, Cristin Herlihy had an Apple II, the O’Neil’s had an Atari computer (they had the game console, too). My cousins from New York lent us a Commodore VIC20 with a two volume set on teach yourself BASIC. My cousin Christopher came to visit for a week, and ended up staying for the summer. I read out loud out of the books and he typed. By the end of the summer, we were able to program our own text based adventure game.

Even more impressive, we could perform such amazing feats as turning the background and foreground color to black, making text entry difficult. This minor bit of wizardry was performed by using the the arcane command poke. The format was poke memory address, value. It allowed you to program at an incredibly simple level. Note I said simple, not easy. You could set any memory address on the machine to any value you wanted. Once you knew where the memory location was that controlled the text color, or the background, you could produce magic.

The VIC 20 returned to New York at the end of the Summer, but the Holidays brought along a Commodore 64 and a subscription to Computes’ Gazette. A month or two later, I talked my mom into subscribing for the Disk that accompanied the magazine. Now, you may accuse me of being lazy, but most of the programs they release were nothing more than a long string of poke instructions to be typed in. They even released a checksum program, to make sure that the numbers added up to the expected values, but I never go the Canyon Crawler program to run correctly. The Gazette, in addition to a word processing program and a slew of video games, published two tools that were very instructive. One was a font editor, and the other a sprite graphics editor. With these simple tools, you could make video games that were arcade quality (1985 arcade quality, that is). My first video game was a spy game, where you had to parachute down between two roving searchlights. If either touched you, you fell to your doom. Programming this required using the other most arcane of instructions, peek. Peek told you the value of a memory location. Armed with the peek command and the address of the joystick port, I could move the parachute left and right, while it drifted ever downward.

In retrospect I should have stayed with the Parachute idea. On the next screen you might have had to parachute onto a moving boat, or a bouncing trampoline, or perhaps avoid a flock of geese. However, I wanted to make a game that scrolled. I had a vague idea that maybe I could reset the CPU to look at any memory location for its character map, and coupled with a really cool font set you could wander through a maze of building looking to steal secret codes. What I didn’t know was that this type of machine was based on memory mapped IO. Certain fixed memory locations were actually just links for other processors, or input and output devices. There was no way to change where the CPU looked for the character map, as it was the result of the underlying electronics.

I was frustrated by the limitations of BASIC. I wanted to know what all those peeks and pokes were doing. Once I started reading about assembly language programming, I realized that the coders at Compute were distributing, not source code as they would for a program written in basic, but a sort of executable. The C64 only knew how to load and run basic programs. These long listings of pokes were actually copying instructions into memory. Not just color codes for the background or bitmaps for sprites, but instructions like, ‘Load the value from this memory location into the X register.’ I had no idea what a register was, but still, this was pretty cool. The only problem was that I never found an Assembler for the Commodore, so my hacking was limited to converting instructions into numeric codes, and loading them in by hand: my learning mostly theoretical.

I mentioned Cristin Herlihy had an Apple II. This became significant during my senior year of high school when I took a structured programming course in Pascal. I spent long hours over at the Herlihy’s debugging programs to do simple text based operations. The cool thing about Pascal over both Basic and Assembly was, get this, you didn’t need line numbers. GOTO, the standby command for BASIC programming, was forbidden by our teacher. I had learned subroutines and looping before, but you got to call everything by a friendly name like ‘do_something’ as opposed to calling with the cryptic GOSUB 65000. Also, we had floating point numbers. But where were the graphics? I never learned that, as it wasn’t on the AP exam. Programming became more practical, but more removed from the reality of the underlying hardware. It must have been a good course, though: I managed to get a 5 out of 5 on the Advanced Placement test.

After toying with the idea of going into music (I was a fairly serious Jazz Saxophone player in high school), I ended up going the opposite extreme: The United States Military Academy at West Point, or, as I tend to call it, Uncle Sam’s schools for delinquent children. The 5 on the AP test got me out of the first two levels of Computer Science, and into the Data Structures and Algorithms. Now instead of working with floats and strings, we were working with linked lists, arrays, stacks, and heaps. We learned how to sort and search, but more importantly, we learned how to analyze algorithms. I took the the standard set of courses: Language Theory, numerical analysis, discrete mathematics, operating systems, software engineering, and so forth. By having opted out of the first two classes, it opened up more electives at the latter part of the program. I got to take compilers, graphics, artificial intelligence, and databases. I was well armed to enter the workforce as a programmer.

Except that I entered the Army as an Infantry Officer. For the next several years my interaction with a computer was primarily via Calendar Creator and Microsoft Office. One time, I needed to copy a file from one computer to another, and it was too big to fit on a single floppy, so I wrote a short Pascal program that cut the file in half, byte by byte, and another that put it back together. I eventually got an America Online Account, as I hadn’t had email since graduation. Information systems at the lowest levels of the Army were still based on the time honored tradition of filling out a form and putting it in the inbox. The primitive systems worked, to a point. I learned what it really meant to be an end user. Using the applications at our disposal, we built better systems, planning training and tracking soldiers administrative needs in home built systems. We did unspeakable things with Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations. Division Headquarters had a scanner, and I showed out operations officer how we could scan in the maps and draw operational graphics on them electronically.

My first job out of the Army was at Walker Interactive Systems, a company that built accounting software that ran on IBM mainframes. The group I worked in built applications that ran on Windows machines that ran the transactions on the mainframe. My team supported the infrastructure that made communication between the two worlds possible. The mainframe stored its letters using a mapping called EPCIDIC, the Windows machines used ASCII. Even more confusing was the way the two systems stored numbers. Back on the Commodore 64, I only had to worry about a single byte of data. But Systems had grown so that a number was stored across four bytes. For historical reasons, Microsoft decided to store the least significant part of the number in the first byte, and the most significant part of the number in the last byte. IBM chose to store it the other way around. To avoid having to deal with these problems in the buffers we were sending, the architects had decided that all numbers would be sent in their string representations. While we might send a positive or negative sign, we never sent around decimal points. A certain field was just defined as 10 digits long, with the decimal point assumed to be between the eight and ninth digit. Dates had four different formats: Julian, Year Month Day, Day Month year, and that barbaric American format Month Day Year. The system was designed so that we would package up a large amount of data, write it into a buffer, and send it across the network to the mainframe. The Mainframe would plug and chug and send back the data in another buffer. This type of transaction mapped to another technology that was justing make inroads; the Hypertext Transport Protocol, the underlying workhorse of the World Wide Web.

One thing about developing code is that sometimes you are so busy you don’t know how you are going to get things done, while at other times you are just waiting for someone else to finish, or just waiting. During a long period of downtime, I got hooked on web comics. One of them, Userfriendly.org, touted the virtues of Open Source software and the Operating System built around the Linux Kernel. Intrigued, I found an old Pentium 100 and purchased a Copy of Red Hat 6. While the knowing out there might scoff at me paying for free software, it proved to be a great investment. This was my entry into the world of Free software. When I had booted that Commodore 64, instructions that had been burnt into read only memory would execute, making it impossible to tell the computer to do other things. With Linux, I had access to this same type of code, but now with the ability to look through it and change it. I learned how to compile my own Linux Kernel. Because the Ethernet Card that came with the machine was not supported by Red Hat, I had to get code from the source and compile it in myself.

In this case, the source was a guy named Don Becker, who worked for NASA. His project was making a Supercomputer by linking together lots of little computers. In a nod to his Nordic ancestry, he named it after one of the heros of Germanic legend: Beowulf. Because his Beowulf was built more like Frankenstein’s monster, sewn together from many different pieces of available hardware, he needed to be able to use all the various types of hardware he found. The Linux Kernel allowed him that flexibility. The price for the use of Linux was that, if he distributed the executable, he had to distribute the source code as well. Don became the Guru of Ethernet device drivers for Linux. This is what is known, in business speak as Win-Win. Linux and its community won because it got good drivers. Don won because he was able to build his supercomputers and spin them off into a company that specialized in Beowulf clusters. More on that in a bit.

Just before leaving Walker, I looked into rewriting the Client side of our code using a language that was really getting popular: Java. Java was yet another step away from the hardware. As a language, it was not designed to be compiled to the instruction set executed by the CPU of the machine it ran on. Instead, it was converted to a very simple set of instructions that were interpreted at runtime into the CPUs instruction set. This final step is what made Java so portable. Now your code, once compiled, could run on any machine that had a Java Virtual Machine installed. There were limitations, of course. It ran slower than code compiled for a specific CPU. The graphical user interface layer, called Swing, was especially slow. So it never really caught on for client applications (although right now I am using Open Office Writer, a Swing based word processor to type this). It was, however, a perfect fit for business logic processing, especially web site development.

So I, along with the rest of the San Francisco Bay Area, learned to develop websites. The first was Tavolo, the second incarnation of what was originally digital chef. Tavolo was a specialty food and cookware website developed by the Culinary Institute of America, or as they like to be called, the CIA. We wrote their new website using a product called Dynamo, from the Art Technology Group. Dynamo was an application server. It was a program designed to run other programs, and many of them at once. Dynamo had components for personalizing a website based on the person who used it, and a significant amount of support for ECommerce. Many of the solutions to these problems ATG put into Dynamo were parallel to, but different from, the solutions that eventually became the standards put out by Sun for Java enterprise computing. Since the marketing people at Sun decided that Java need a second version this became Java 2 Enterprise Edition, or J2EE. Maybe they thought is sounded better than JEE.

As these standards got better and better developed, various people started implementing them. Some were companies trying to sell their implementations. But many people who were doing Java programming released their code under various open source licenses. The most popular, the Tomcat Web Server was developed under the auspices of the Apache organization, the same folk who made the Apache web server. JBoss, (renamed from EJBoss due to Copyright Issues with Sun) was the transaction server and database wrapper. These performed the same job as Dynamo, but were free. Additional packages existed for various stages of website development, database access, document generatation and more. I now had open source code for an operating system, and for all the software I needed to build Enterprise Software. As the dot-com bubble burst, I headed to a small company that needed a website built. Using this stack of open source software, we brought up the website in a few weeks, and grew it over the course of the following year. All of my follow on projects have used this mix of Java and open source software.

The secret to Java’s success is also one of its shortcomings. Java comes from a long line of programming languages that try to make it hard for the programmer to do the Wrong Thing. In particular, Java allows you to use memory without having to clean up after yourself. Once an object is no longer referenced anywhere in the system, it is eligible for garbage collection. While there are numerous other features that make Java a good language in which to work, this is the one that most contributes to productivity. The drawback is that sometimes you need to know exactly where memory comes from, how long it can be used, and when it can be reclaimed. In Java, memory is difficult, if not impossible, to access directly. Probably most telling is the fact that Java is not programmed in Java, it is programmed in C and C++. Because something as critical as the Virtual Machine that Java runs on has to be fast, or all programs are slow. Where Java takes the position that programs should check for and report errors to speed development, C requires a much more dedicated quality assurance process to make sure the programs don’t have an unacceptable amount of bugs. Not that you can’t write fast code in Java, and not that you can’t quickly write bug free code in C, It is just that each language makes it easier to do its own thing.

So I made the effort to break out of the very successful track I was in, take a cut in pay, and get in to Linux Kernel development. In a sense, this was a return to my roots, being able to go right to the hardware. I spent quite a long while looking, when opportunity found me. A recruiter called me from Penguin Computing. Penguin is a hardware company, they sell Linux Servers. Cool. About a year ago, they bought Scyld. Scyld was the company spun off from Nasa’s Beowulf project, lead by Don Becker. Itold you there would be more later. The geek value was immense. I was hooked and convinced them to hire me.

Why was I drawn to computer science? I like patterns. I like being able to hear the chords of “Always look on the Bright Side of Life” and realizing they are the same as “I got Rhythm” just with the Chorus and verses reversed. I like trying to tell which of my nephew’s personality traits came from his mother and which came from his father. When it comes to programming, I like taking a solution, and extracting the generic part so I can extend it to solve a new problem. Design Patterns work for me. I’ve been interested in many portions of computer science, and enjoy learning the commonalities between tuples flowing through portions of a query, packets flowing through a network, and events flowing through a graphical interface.

The one topic in my course on Artificial Intelligence that really piqued my interest was neural networks. After several decades of trying to do it the hard way, scientists decided to try to build a processing model based on the brains of living organisms. Animal brains do two things really well. First, they process a huge amount of information in parallel. Second, they adapt. Traditional neural networks (funny to be calling such a young science traditional) are based on matrix algebra as a simplification of the model. One vector is the input set, multiplied times a matrix gives you an interim result, and then multiplied by a second matrix gives you an output set. The matrices represent the connections of neurons in the brain. At the start of the 1970s, scientists were convinced that Neural Networks were the big thing that was going to get us Artificial Intelligence. But traditional neural networks learn poorly and do little that can be called parallel processing. After a brief time in the sun, they were relegated to short chapters in books on AI. They are still used, but people no longer expect them to perform miracles.

If you believe that upstart Darwin, real intelligence is the result of millions (or some greater illion) years of evolution. Expecting a cheap imitation to learn to perform a difficult pattern analysis with a short amount if training is either a case of hubris or extreme optimisim. If I had to guess, I would say both. Around us are a vast (albeit dwindling) variety of animals that all have wonderful examples of neural networks. We are lucky in that we have such great models to work from, we should learn from them. I would like to use a neural network model as a starting point for a processor that learns and moves like a living creature. Recent work with hardware based neural networks have performed superbly at voice recognition. The focus on the timing between the neurons, an aspect not accounted for in the simplified model, was a key differentiator. The animal brain is superb at cycles such as the motion of the legs while running. Once the basic cycle is learned, the system will be taught to adjust for rough terrain, different speeds, and quick changes of direction. If the behavior of a single muscle is analyzed, we see it has a pattern of contracting and releasing timed with the activity it is performing. The brain controls all the muscles in parallel, as well as absorbing input from the various senses. This cycle can be seen as a continuously adapting system built out of: 1) a desired process (running), 2) the state of the muscles and other organ systems, 3) a prerecorded expectation of the flow odf the process, 4) and the inputs to the senses. In order for a cycle to progress, some aspect of the output must be fed back in as input. Additionally, a portion of the system must remain aloof and compare the actual end result with the desired end result, using that to tune the behavior of the system. The best result will come from an interdisciplinary approach: the system should be engineered as a mix of software and hardware, traditional engineering techniques and genetic algorithms, using everything learned from biology, especially animal physiology. The latest advancements in materials science will be needed for making motive systems that get maximal energy for minimal weight. Currently, we can program a robot that can walk. I want to develop a robot that can learn to run.

And to run it will take great advances in Operating Systems. An animal receives and processes a vast amount of information from all its senses at the same time. Layers upon layers of transformations turn this information into action. Future events are predicted in space-time with a high degree of accuracy and an even higher degree of fault tolerance. Some of this is reflected in the way that current robotic systems work, but we have much to learn. We need to develop systems where parallelism moves from being a difficult concept to handle to the primary tool of development.

National Security

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For years, our distance from other countries provided us with security.  We were an Island Nation.  Once our manifest destiny was completed, there was no significant threat left in our hemisphere, and we were too far from the nations of the old world for them to threaten us.  Even the attack on Pearl Harbor was far away:  Hawaii was not a state, just an island protectorate in the middle of the Pacific.  Since WWII, we have grown more and more used to the concept of global threat.  We were in a staring contest with Russia, half a world away.  The threat of ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads made the end of the world seem plausible, but it was abstract.  Mutually Assured Destruction was the word of the day:  If they try to take us out, they will take themselves out, and they are not going to do that.  We fought proxy wars and ran tank maneuvers at NTC and in Germany.

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Leaving Haiti

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Cover of the Koran

Cover of the Koran

I realize that last post left out the details of the QRF mission to the old Police Station, so I will start with that. As I stated, I had no idea why we went there. There was no riot, not problem, no emergency that justified commiting the QRF, unlike the numerous times we went to the POwer station. But, we went, we cordoned off the area, we searched it (it was abandoned) and then we cleaned it up. Yep. Soldiers from our Army went through, shoveled out the accumulated debris of decades and pulled out all of the contraband: there was none to speak of. One soldier went into MOPP Level Haiti: Rain Suite and Protective Mask. He was lowered into what must have been a sewer or something. We found lots of trivially interesting items like spent round casings and so on, but nothing that justified the search and cleanup efforts. Once we had the place ready for move in, we emplaced some more concertina wire and shuttled back to the main base in trucks. I queried the Battalion Commander about this and he stated that we had basically De-voodooed the big bad police building.

One measure of success for the United States was the ability to turn the mess over to the United Nations. After a couple months on Island we got word that this would happen relatively soon. The tented area on the far side of the Airfield had been populated by Guatemalan and Caribbean-Command soldiers. It was vacated, and soon a Battalion from Pakistan under the UN flag came to Cap Hatien. These were battle hardened soldiers from the Kashmir Region. As I mentioned, we were not carrying SAWs, never mind heavy machine guns. That was why it was strange to see them uncrate heavy machine guns and recoilless rifles.

My first opportunity to get to know our new neighbors came when a power surge fried the power supply on one of the computers in the Pakistani Battalion headquarters. Someone at Battalion asked me to go over and take a look at it, I guess since I was a Computer Science major at School. I was fairly sure there was nothing I could do. I’m not sure why the Battalion Signal Officer didn’t go over instead. Sure enough, the magic smoke had escaped the power supply and the machine was dead. There was a computer store in Cap Hatien, a fact that surprised me greatly. They were able to buy a new power supply off the economy and get the machine back up and running.

The better aspect of this trip was that I got a chance to talk to the Pakistani officers, see their quarters, and get a feel for them as a replacement unit. To this day I am grateful for the opportunity to put a set of faces, feelings, images and smell alongside the word Pakistan, even though I have never been to the country. Probably the most vivid mental picture I have is of the tents. The Pakistani soldiers slept on mats on the ground, really nothing more than insulation. Compared with our cots and the poly-pads we take with us to the field, it was spartan. I got the impression that this sleeping arrangement was the norm, not just in the field.

The officers from the Pakistani Battalion hosted the officers from our Battalion to dinner in their base camp.  After two months of Brown and Root, any thing would have tasted good, but I suspect that the meal we were fed would have competed with any India/Pakistan/Afghani food served in the States.  I’d never really understood the term feast before.  This was a Feast.  I remember most clearly the spiced lamb, but all of the food was superb.

I am nominally Jewish.  While in the Army, I was more observant than in the rest of my life, and have never really kept the fact secret.  The men from Kashmir were the first moslems I had encountered in my life, and I must say they made a stellar impression on me.  Beyond their fierce demeanor was a hosptiality and understanding I was not expecting.  When the matter of religion came up, I expressed my ignorance of Isalm and interest in learning more about it.  Capt Safraz Ali responded with a gift that means more to me than just about any other I have received in my life:  his personal copy of the Koran, pictured at the top of this post.  Here is his inscription:

Koran Inscription

Koran Inscription

People that might find it offensive to write in a holy book should remember that a true Koran is only in Arabic.  This version has translation into English, which makes it less than a pure Koran.  Thus it is acceptable under Islam to write in it.

The American forces were under very strict weapons control.  Before entering the base camp, we cleared our weapons, and then dry fired them into a barrel filled with sand.  It was understood that an accidental discharge of your weapon, even into the clearing barrel, and would get you into serious trouble.  The commander of the Pakistani battalion had an accidental discharge within the first week, a point that made some of the American officers snicker.  Personally, I suspect that they were just much more comfortable carrying weapons around, and didn’t take our over caution seriously.   Most of them had been in combat.  Very few of our soldiers had.

My last tour of tower duty had me checking on a tower inside the base camp, across from a mud-hut village that was fast encroaching on our space.  A woman on the outside was chatting up the tower guard.  When she saw me, she said, “Lieutenant, when you go back to America, take me with you.  Pakistani soldier mean.”  I guess we had done a decent job winning their hearts and their minds.

Not long after, we flew back to the states.  I remember pluggin MARC cards into the readers to create a manifest, a brief view of the airfield in Port au Prince, and that the flight crew on Tower Air were some of the same people I had seen on previous charter trips.  After a long flight home,  we disembarked at the Air Force Base alongside Pearl Harbor and took buses back to Schofield Barracks.   At Schofiled we had the Kiss-Ex: Ex being short for exercise, basically the reunion of the soldiers with their families.

Edjamacation

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Massachusetts has one of the best public school systems in the country. It has been top in the country before, and was rated fourth last I checked. California, which has one of the largest economies in the world, is ranked in the bottom quintile.  I was lucky that my parents moved from California back to Massachusetts before I was born.  My wife and I made the same decision shortly after our son was born. Education, and public education are important to us.

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Musings

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Don’t hit publish on the blog when you just want to save a draft.

Big Builds are Bad. Software should be developed and distributed in small packages. Linux is successful due to things like apt, yum, and yast.

Interface Specifications need to be more specific.  Just saying that something is a string is not really helpful if that something needs to conform to a pattern.

Programming and blogging requires sugar in the brain.

Interviews are tricky…on both sides of the table. Career fairs are worse.

C++ Has a lot of magic in it. Can we make type level programming more transparent?

Microsoft purchasing Yahoo would be good for Google, but bad for just about everyone else.

Being a Dad is really cool. Even when it sucks, it is great. Sometimes kids refuse to go to sleep. This leads to sleep deprivation, but also leads to really wonderful moments in rocking chair in the middle of the night.

Pool is a great Geek game. Lower left-hand English is neat.

Snowshoes are good off the trail. Not so good on the trail. If your going on the trail, take the cross country skis. Snowmobiles smell funny.

New Hampshire winter weather is still as brutal today as it was when I left the area in the early ’90s.

It is hard to sing a Jazzy version of Old MacDonald had a Farm.  It is harder to do after the tenth repetition while trying to get a child to fall asleep.
If you listen to Children’s CDs long enough, you will develop favorite children’s songs. I like the hippo song.

Is there really a difference between the Ethernet and SCSI protocols? I don’t know, but it would be fun to find out.

The compiler is your friend. Let it check your work for you.

Why write code on a white board if you have a computer available? Especially if you have an overhead projector?

Where do the local peregrine falcons sleep? Where would they be sleeping if we hadn’t built up the whole area?

If I could have a redo on which language to take as a Sophomore, I would probably would have liked to take Chinese. Russian and Arabic would also do. German was not a good choice for me.

If Bush Senior had insisted on pushing to Baghdad, it would have been my generation in this mess as opposed to the current set of junior officers. Instead of Haiti, I would have gone to Basra or something.

There are too many interesting topics in the world to pursue them all, or even a small fraction of them.

Every philosopher I’ve read, especially the ones I disagree with, ave said something that is valuable and true.

No matter how old you are, when you get together with your parents, you revert to teenager status.

This list should never see the light of day.

Layout of the oil situation in Iraq

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Not sure if I should post this or not.  So many people are in a better position to really understand the situation than I am.  Really, what I want is for people to respond to this to expand, clarify, correct and elucidate me.

Maybe we won’t be in Iraq forever. Maybe the real yardstick we need for success is the amount of oil flowing out of the country. Iraq is producing a small fraction of it’s capacity. If it ramped up to several times it’s prewar amount, it could be the largest producer in the world. Considering the current cost of oil is $3.00/gal at the pumps in Massachusetts, It is possible that there could be a healthy dose of currency flowing into Iraq that is not coming out of the US Treasury. There are several factors at play:

Sunni-Shiite-Kurd political contention. If any one of these groups gains power over the majority of the Oil revenue, it will be significantly threatening to the other two.

OPEC. The nearest nations to Iraq are the ones with the most to lose from a large capacity, non-OPEC nation in their midst. Iraq is a founding member of OPEC, but it may not be perceived as an independent entity by the others, and more as a puppet of the US. Any move to substantially increase oil production will bring up the global supply, drop the price, and decrease profits across the board.

China and India: These two nations are growing fast, and demand for Oil from these nations has kept the cost of oil high. Both have a vested interest in increasing global supply to decrease price.

France: Much of Iraq’s pre-war debt was owned by France. The US invasion changed France’s relationship to Iraq from insider to outsider. They have their own problems with Muslims both at home and across the Mediterranean in Algeria.

Australia: Currently planning on pulling out of Iraq. Fewer troops to patrol means a higher possibility of successful insurgent attacks.

Russia: Russia is now a huge supplier of Oil to Europe. While Russia is not a part of OPEC, it still has a lot on the line in terms of Oil Revenue.

Turkey: Oil revenue to the Kurds means more money that can flow over the border to Kurd separatists in Turkey. However, stability on Turkey’s southern border will be beneficial to Turkey overall. Mosul, in Northern Iraq, is one of the most violent locations, with a major operation underway even as I type this. Turkey has performed operations across the border into Norther Iraq targeted at Kurdish fighters.

US Economy: The cost of maintaining troops in Iraq may prove too high. The US may have to withdraw before a critical mass of oil extraction infrastructure is in place. The US is anticipating the oil influx. Most of the companies that will benefit from Iraq oil are based in the US or Britain, and thus have a lot to gain. The US President and many in his administration are primarily oil-men, but with the election coming up, that may change.

Middle East Nations: Saudi Arabia and Iran both have a vested interest in supporting their allies in the Iraqi Government. If A Sunni Majority again emerged, it would be more closely allied with Saudi Arabia. A Shiite Majority would be allied with Iran. Either case would lead to increased domestic strife and a decrease in oil production. With a Sunni majority, Iran would have the “moral high-ground” of supporting Shiites against their oppressors. The reverse would be true with a Shiite majority and Saudi Arabia supporting their side. I realize that this is a vast oversimplification, but the a part of the broad trends.

The path forward needs to walk a tight rope of a balance of power that will lead to stability. Both sides need to believe that they have more to gain from getting oil set up than they will lose in relative power and status. But even if Iraq is able to produce a substantial quantity of oil, it won’t necessarily work wonders for Iraqi society. Typically, Oil is run by a few companies. It may be possible that an Iraqi Wildcatting culture will grow up, but that can’t happen until there is a long term education amongst Iraqis in oil extraction. Oil has several offshoot industries. So there should be growth of the competitive/cooperative spirit that is the product of a healthy capitalist system. But it will still be centered around a single industry with major fluctuations based on global events. If we look to Saudi Arabia, we see that oil wealth does not necessarily carry with it human rights.

Here is a dark scenario. Iraq will get enough of its oil infrastructure up and running to make US involvement essential, but not stabilize enough that we can pull out. We will have a force in Iraq in perpetuity, drawing fire and making enemies. That force will be essential to defending the Oil extraction facilitated in Iraq.

I don’t know what will really happen. I certainly don’t have the perspective to see that clearly. Just trying to layout the situation based on the limited info that I have.

War, Politics, and the Army

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I’ve chosen not to make this a political or military blog. There are enough people out there with more experience and more firsthand knowledge on both sides, that I feel like I would be talking out of the wrong orifice.

This is more a rumination, an attempt to place my current wash of thoughts into a coherent structure than a policy statement. I really feel the weight of Socrates advice to admit that I am not wise.  I won’t make many of these.

I think that going into Afghanistan was the right call. Yes, I know that this is not really a surprise, not is it even that controversial a statement. The Taliban government was still in process of taking control of the whole country, and thus had questionable legitimacy at best. Since the government decided to protect the organization claimed responsible for attacking the US on September 11, 2001, I feel we were justified in returning fire.
The war in Iraq is hurting this country. I won’t go through my initial views on the war or my background as an Army officer. Instead, let me state I think the economic burden to this country is more than we can continue to bear. It breaks my heart to say this, because I think it means we are going to do to the Iraqi people what we did to the Montagnards in Viet Nam: pull out and leave them to be massacred. We left Viet Nam because the long term cost was wearing down our Nation. Iraq is less bloody than Viet Nam, but war is far more expensive than it was even forty years ago. If we continue this way, and other nations continue to buy up our debt, we risk losing control of our own country. It seems like General Petraeus and his staff have done an outstanding job this past year in reducing the violence in Iraq. I know that the people on the ground are good soldiers.  Probably better soldiers than I ever was. They may hate being in Iraq, but they want to win the fight.

I remember meeting Viet Nam vets from the VA when I was in high school. These guys were obviously emotionally troubled by what they had seen. One guy said that he still wanted to go back and finish the job. This was 15 years after the last troops had left country. Very few people think that it was in either America’s or Viet Nam’s interest for us to prolong the conflict. But a soldier who has fought, killed, and watched his buddies die for a cause can’t help but either shut down or give his heart to the effort. I think the same is true of our guys in country right now. They want to win in Iraq. They want the Iraqi people to live free of fear, free to raise their kids, and free to rejoin the international community. I want that, too. But I think the overall conflict is much more difficult than that. We have stirred up vast swaths of resentment by being a foreign invader. We have resurrected the ghosts of the Crusades and colonization that bring forth the resistance fighters. Iraq was barely pacified under Hussein. It is going to take a lot more than a Band Aid to fix this sucking chest wound. It would be helpful if we could have truly pulled in an international effort to rebuild Iraq, but we lost that opportunity.

The recent news from Pakistan is troubling.   I think we blew it in Afghanistan by being so quick to rush to war in Iraq.  If the funding that went to the war effort instead went to building infrastructure in Afghanistan (“Thank you for helping us defeat the Soviet Union, here is your pay back.”) we would not be fighting the battles there that we are now. I think the real cost was much higher than anticipated, and I wonder now if we can truly afford it.

One thing that bothers me is that we no longer declare war. The way the constitution was written, it was up to congress to declare war. Not to grant to the President the authority to do so. Deploying troops into a firefight means we are at war. Until World War II, it was expected practice. Yes, we fought the Native Americans, and rebels in many third world countries without such a declaration during this countries history. But if we are going to remove a government from power, we need to state it in no uncertain terms. International Law expects this. I think we have removed one of the checks from the separation of powers in the National Government. Perhaps the language of the constitution should be more a long the lines of: Any deployed forces are allowed to defend themselves. To do anything more than this requires explicit approval from congress. This approval can not be granted a-priori.  But I think the constitution states this, just in the language of 1780.

To the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan: Thank you. Especially the burnt out privates that are just looking to get home, and the fathers and mothers that just want to see their kids again. May the remainders of your tours be boring and may you come home whole.

To those that have lost limbs, eyesight, faculties, or to the survivors that have lost loved ones…I don’t have the words to say that will not trivialize your loss. These losses will be remembered and honored.