The White Swan off Yemen

Civil wars are nasty and unpredictable things. The longer they go, the more the thin veneer of civilization starts to strip away for even the most advanced nations and their people. Less advanced nations devolve to Madmaxistan rather quickly.

All governmental efforts, money, and attention goes towards weapons, food, and fuel. Industries, infrastructure, and parts of civil society that do not support that get left as if frozen in aspic.

If you don't live in a nation suffering that civil war, it is easy not to pay attention to that which does not effect you.

There is one aspect of the Yemen civil war that no one should ignore - and it is at sea.

This isn't a disaster that anyone can state will be a surprise in the likely event nothing is done in time and it reaches its ultimate end. This isn't a "Black Swan" - this is a White Swan.

In a real world version of "Life After People" there is a ticking timebomb off of Yemen. Via Maritime-Executive;

Floating in the Red Sea, attached to an oil pipeline that runs nearly 300 miles to the war-torn city of Marib, the FSO Safer was established as a Yemeni oil export facility in 1988. The massive converted tanker was due to be decommissioned and replaced by a land-based terminal when the Yemen civil conflict erupted nearly eight years ago. Owned by SEPOC, a company which itself is owned by the Government of Yemen, the Safer sits off the coast of Ras Isa, an area controlled by Houthi rebels.

The vessel is still loaded with 1.14 million barrels of oil. While roughly 15,000 barrels have evaporated over the last eight years, and a thin layer has polymerized, the majority of that cargo remains liquid and liable to spill. The portion of the pipeline that runs for five miles beneath the Red Sea has an additional 17,000 barrels of liquid crude in it.  Without intervention, the Safer will either explode or corrode and spill its contents - and likely take the pipeline with it. 

Of note, Safer is a single hulled old-school tanker just rotting in the water. There is little to any margin of error left.

What could the results of inaction be?

For context, the amount of oil spilled off Mauritius (which destroyed an entire marine protected area) was 8,450 barrels. This is less than one percent of what is at stake with the Safer, and less than half of what is in the subsea pipeline. And while the Ever Given disrupted trade through the Suez Canal for six days, some projections suggest the Safer's spill could slow or stop trade through the entire Red Sea for weeks or even months, forcing ships to divert around the Cape of Good Hope to avoid spreading the oil by sailing through it.

The combined risks of a massive explosion, the blockage of international commerce, and a devastating oil spill form only part of the concern with the FSO Safer.  Add in the deaths of millions of people (already in famine) from loss of drinking water, caused by the contamination of desalination plants, and limited access to food caused by the blocking of Hodeida, and we will have a humanitarian emergency at a level the world cannot currently sustain. 

Furthermore, with the annihilation of the world’s most temperature-resistant coral system along with 10 unique species of fish, and the long-term damage to economic activities like fishing and tourism, the effects of this one vessel’s demise would be felt for generations. The potential consequences dwarf the various other maritime disasters experienced in the last few years. 

Usually when there is a cause for international action it is either military related or the disaster has already happened. 

This looks to be a space where those maritime nations who are hesitant to get involved militarily to maintain the global order, make a lot of noise about being "green," and generally make long speeches at the UN about such issues ... well ... they could take action.

The UN even has a "Go Fund Me" like pledge drive going to raise enough funds to get a cheap fix instead of an expensive clean up. I'm not sure if you get a tote-bag or not, but...I mean, really...this is embarrassing.

So much time and money spent on imaginary or exaggerated threats to the environment are flooded with billions of dollars, but a real one has to beg for scraps?

I'm pretty sure a fraction of the money spent at the latest Davos gathering by the WEF would have covered the cost, but there would be no power to be gained and the skiing in terrible in Yemen, so I guess not.

Time is ticking. 

h/t E.

Black Swan Tuesday: The China-Indonesian War of 20XX

If history tells us anything, it is that nations often find themselves in conflicts that aren't so much unimaginable, as unlikely. These wars develop out of the ether and quickly gain their own momentum.

History also teaches us that rising powers can be the most unpredictable when they get in to conflict. As with all human institutions, the international community can get used to certain patterns and rhythms. 

Falling powers in graceful decline are often given too much weight and attention, while the rising powers start to probe and affect structures, habits, and mechanisms in ways they never had before.

China is such a growing power. She has economic, historical, and ethnic grievances that have always been there, but for most of modern history she has been too weak to do anything about them.

Over at FP, Sebastian Strangio sets out a scenario for conflict China and Indonesia that had me nodding my head saying, "You know what, he's on to something."

Why Indonesia?

Indonesians of Chinese descent, who make up around 1.2 percent of the population and are traditionally one of the country’s most prosperous groups, dangerously vulnerable — and might magnify local tensions into international clashes.

In May 1998, when Indonesia’s dictator Suharto fell from power after 31 years, much of the popular anger was directed at Jakarta’s small but wealthy ethnic Chinese community. More than 1,000 people were killed in the riots, many of them Chinese; dozens of Chinese women and girls were raped. The Chinese were targeted on the assumption that they had grown fat from Suharto’s rule, even though many of the victims were small-scale traders.

As the author does again in his article, for years I have read Indonesian ethnic Chinese described as, "Indonesia's Jews" - and given the history of anti-Chinese pogroms, the comparison is not all that inaccurate.

“They are seen as a people apart,” he said, “and in their pursuit of commerce often become the victims of periodic bloodletting — pogroms, if you like.”

It is a pattern that dates to the beginning of Dutch rule in the 17th century, when Chinese merchants were granted a preferential role and helped develop Batavia (today’s Jakarta) into a flourishing entrepôt, prompting occasional eruptions of violence from other locals. These prejudices persisted after independence, and Chinese were singled out during the 1965-1966 anti-communist bloodshed that preceded Suharto’s takeover. At the time, they were seen as fifth-columnists for Communist China, then in the midst of exporting revolution throughout Southeast Asia. Since then, anti-Chinese rhetoric has tended to go hand in hand with paranoid imaginings of a renascent communism.
...
Though the Chinese reaction was muted in 1998, a far more powerful Beijing is unlikely to take such a hands-off position today. In 2006, when anti-Chinese violence tore through Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, Beijing responded immediately by evacuating 312 ethnic Chinese residents by air. The episode received extensive coverage in Chinese state media, which declared that “the government attaches great importance to the security and rights of the overseas Chinese.” Though it is hard to say just what Beijing’s reaction would be in Indonesia, Vatikiotis said that “there is every indication” that Beijing is watching closely, and would be “willing to do something to help its fellow Chinese.”

Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim nation, and is becoming more and more radicalized each year. The Chinese are mostly Christian. Combine ethic and religious differences in one package, and, well, history tells us much about that as well.

There is no land border between China & Indonesia. If China did want to do anything she would need a significant navy. That navy would need air-cover from carriers. 

Oh, and the SLOC from China to the south? They go right through the disputed South China Sea.

If you haven't already, you may want to catch up on a topic I covered back in Feb. of this year; the 500 Ship Navy ... the Chinese 500 Ship Navy.

We live in interesting times.

Black Swan Tuesday: COA-D - 12-Monkeys

One of the things that keeps 'ole Sal up at night? This simple combo.

The leaders of today's trans-national Islamic extremest movement are not poor, oppressed masses looking for a Section-8 voucher, no. They are highly educated men with a view towards bringing about the end-times as their religion sees it.

They are educated in Western universities, many getting PhD and MD. That is what gets me. You cannot classify math, and science - even when classified - eventually finds its way out.

Some things you cannot assume will be used for good or will be discovered by the charitable at heart;

A powerful new technique for generating “supercharged” genetically modified organisms that can spread rapidly in the wild has caused alarm among scientists who fear that it may be misused, accidentally or deliberately, and cause a health emergency or environmental disaster.

The development of so-called “gene drive” technology promises to revolutionise medicine and agriculture because it can in theory stop the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses, such as malaria and yellow fever, as well as eliminate crop pests and invasive species such as rats and cane toads.

However, scientists at the forefront of the development believe that in the wrong hands gene-drive technology poses a serious threat to the environment and human health if accidentally or deliberately released from a laboratory without adequate safeguards. Some believe it could even be used as a terrorist bio-weapon directed against people or livestock because gene drives – which enable GM genes to spread rapidly like a viral infection within a population – will eventually be easy and cheap to generate.
...
“Just as gene drives can make mosquitoes unfit for hosting and spreading the malaria parasite, they could conceivably be designed with gene drives carrying cargo for delivering lethal bacterial toxins to humans,” said David Gurwitz, a geneticist at Tel Aviv University in Israel.
...
...
scientists fear that the ease with which gene drives can be generated will make them a target for any malign individual or organisation with access to modern laboratory equipment.

Have a nice day!

Black Swan Tuesday: It's OK, Just Send us the Plan, We'll Build it Here

Every technological advance, from TNT to the airplane has found a military use. This is a world ruled by the aggressive use of force. Always has been, always will be. Every way to increase access to more force will be examined and adopted.

As such, each, "Hey - that is exciting!" moment we come to with significant technological advancements or improvements needs to looked at while wearing a Red Hat.

As such, this is quite exciting.

Scientists at GE Aviation’s Additive Development Center have made a working jet engine entirely from 3D-printed parts.

...The engine is about the size of an American football, ... there is the potential for 3D printing to help develop more complex designs with less waste than traditional manufacturing techniques.

Yes ... less weight, less bulk, less ability to intercept from point-a to point-b.

Yes, much potential.

A jet engine is an exceptionally advanced bit of kit. If you can make a jet engine ... what other complicated designs can you build - purpose built for one time or short duration use?

You thought 3-D guns were making people break out in flop sweat?

Yes, ponder.

Black Swan Tuesday: China's Cataclysm

There are little black swans, and then there are the big ones.

The unexpected always comes around. With all the talk of rising China, island chains, neo-Middle Kingdomism, and the Amerocentric Pacific Pivot - one must wonder? Is this just one of history's head fakes?

Peter Mattis over at TheNationalInterest sketches it out for us;

A couple of weeks ago, AEI scholar Michael Auslin published a column for the Wall Street Journal about a quiet dinner in Washington where a senior China scholar declared the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had reached the final stage before collapse. The political collapse of the world’s second-largest economy and a nuclear power is no small thing. What should Washington do?

I don't know if we should really do anything. We stumbled through the fall of the Soviet Union and didn't get that right. In a way, that isn't too bad of a model. Back up, stay out of the frag pattern, and let the internal forces "work it out."

Watch, plan, contain, adjust. That is the smart thing to do. The only thing worse than getting involved in a land war in Asia, it to involve yourself in a civil war in Asia. If you do too much directly or indirectly in such a xenophobic nation such as China, soon they will forget their internal conflict and will make you the issue.

Harris talks around a concept that the USA should have a plan to help nudge the collapse in a direction we desire. An admirable goal, but one I don't think is realistic.

If Washington is concerned that the CCP is approaching its twilight, then asserting a moral stake in China’s development requires nothing less than a substantial effort to understand China’s political landscape beyond day-to-day policy-making concerns and to influence Chinese leaders before they pull the trigger on their citizens again. Without advance preparation, U.S. and other international leaders will find the prospects of an unstable China distressing, possibly with the view that it is “too big to fail.” They may even watch from the sidelines as in 1989, not knowing the best course of action or how to influence the decisions of Chinese leaders. This may not be wrong, but such a momentous decision should not be left to ignorance, preexisting mental images or scattered information collected as a crisis breaks.

We simply do not have the track record in this area that gives one confidence, but it wouldn't hurt to put some intellectual heft around various courses of action - hopefully that has already been done.

A huge mercantile nation being run by a Communist Party can't go on forever under the stresses that are already in place. Change is coming; the question is how, to what extent, and when.

Before you get all excited about a rising China collapsing under the weight of its own internal structural defects, the second and third order effects will hit our nation nation hard. 

All those Chinese with the anchor babies and 2nd homes in South Florida and the West Coast? They're coming here.

All that USA debt held in China? It's getting sold.

All those repressed minority groups inside China? They're going to war.

So yea, interesting times ... and at a time we have plenty of our own problems to deal with.

Black Swan Tuesday

The international order will continue to degrade as the major Western power (USA) continues to disengage thorough official disinterest and faculty room theorizing, and the medium Western powers reach the end phases of disarmament and self-doubt. The growing draw of this vacuum will encourage more and more of the unstable bits in the world will start to wobble and shake.

What is now everyone's top shelf concern, the Islamic State, was just a few years ago something laughed off as a low probability and probably slightly paranoid "Black Swan."

So too, in their time, were the Syrian civil war, the Arab Spring and even the slow-rolling invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

These things are not new to our age, or limited to the usual places. Heck, one could even call the early 80s Falkland Island War a Black Swanish occurrence.

If one agrees with the opening premise to this post, then you have to agree that we should expect to see more small and large Black Swan events - but perhaps Black Swan is the wrong term to use. None of they above examples were really out of the blue. They were always seen, at least by a small cadre of people, as a possible conflict - just one that had a low probability of boiling over.  Humans are wrong and unpredictable ... and the expected results follow.

I have a half a dozen or so possible conflicts I ponder on slow days. I keep them to myself. I like to look for those things that are relatively obscure, but not so far out as to be unbelievable. What I find most interesting are those areas where we have "frozen conflicts," or known areas of disagreement that are quiet now, but are just looking for the right moment to burst in to flame. Doubly interesting are those smallish conflict that through their location or connections could easily cascade in to something much greater.

At least for this Tuesday I would like to drag out one of my shadowy cygnets to share with you in broad terms - with a point to a few branches and sequels for fun.

Let's set the table, you've got it all here; religion, ethnicity, poverty, oil, and land.

First nation is a nation of a little under 3-million to 3.2-million souls that is 95% Christian, 98% ethnically homogeneous, a fertility rate of 1.64 and a land area of 11,484 sq mi or 15,898 sq mi.

The other nation one of about 9.5-million to 9.2-million souls that is 95% Muslim, 92% ethnically homogeneous, a fertility rate of 2.0 and a land area of 29,012 sq mi or 33,436 sq mi.

They have already fought one war a quarter a century ago where the smaller nation in essence won without a peace treaty, killing 5-6 of the larger nation's soldiers for each of their's lost.

Notice in the descriptions above there is some ambiguity about the size and population of the nations? That is from the territory the smaller nation, Armenia, took from the larger one, Azerbaijan, after they started fighting each other in the final days of the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

While frozen for a generation, there are forces at work that are starting to shake things loose and make it my top "Black Swan" candidate for 2015.

Over at the NYT - we have in open source a primer to a spark;

Overshadowed by the fighting in Ukraine, another armed conflict in the former Soviet Union — between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh — has escalated with deadly ferocity in recent months, killing dozens of soldiers on each side and pushing the countries perilously close to open war.

The month of January was heavily stained by blood, with repeated gun battles and volleys of artillery and rocket fire. Two Armenian soldiers were killed and several wounded in a fierce gunfight on Jan. 23 along the conflict’s northern front. That set off a weekend of violence including grenade and mortar attacks that killed at least three Azerbaijani soldiers.

The most recent clashes prompted an unusually pointed rebuke by international mediators who met on Monday in Krakow, Poland, with the Azerbaijani foreign minister, Elmar Mammadyarov.

“The rise in violence that began last year must stop,” the mediators, from France, Russia and the United States, said in a joint statement, adding, “We called on Azerbaijan to observe its commitments to a peaceful resolution of the conflict. We also called on Armenia to take all measures to reduce tensions.”

This is not the year for either nation to start to back off.

First of all there is, as usually in this part of the world, oil. Azerbaijan has grown used to its oil boon, yet while we enjoy our gas below $2/gallon, the Azeri see their window closing to leverage the money they have earned over the last decade - money they have in a large part spent building up a military in order to have another go at the Armenians.

The Armenians?

Tensions are expected to grow even further this year as Armenia prepares to commemorate in April the 100th anniversary of the genocide against Armenians in Turkey.

No Armenian politician is going to want to look like a pushover anytime soon.

If this war goes hot, there are all sorts of players who may find themselves in the crunch. Here are the major ones;

1. Russia: there is nothing the Russians would more naturally fall in to than supporting their little brothers the Armenians. It fits in too well with Putin's Orthodox revival he is trying to put himself at the front of.

2. Iran: after Persians, what is the largest ethnic group in Iran? That's right, Azeri. There are about 15 million Azeri in Iran. Just to add flavor, of the 9+ million Azeri in Azerbaijan itself, 85% of them are Shia. Iran sees itself as the protector of Shia Islam, something easily seen today in Syria.

3. Georgia: thought a Christian nation, Russia has gobbled up two ethnic enclaves and the Armenians claim another small bit. One can argue where they would back a Russian play in a move to protect its larger interests in a deal.

4. Turkey: to say the least, they have a bad history with the Armenians and the Russians. The Azeri are also a Turkic people.

Depending on which branch and sequel you want to play out, nations as diverse as China and Greece have a play as well.

When you look at where this could go, well, it is an interesting world in which we live.