| 28 July 2006 Little Kate I hate to say it, but Don Rumsfeld was right. He has been much maligned of late, but he has been absolutely correct. Not about what you would think immediately. I am thinking about what Thomas Pynchon called the rainbow of gravity in his marvelous and troubling novel that treated the legacy of Dr. von Braun, and the rockets that he built with solid German precision. They were called “terror weapons” then, and that is what they remain, for all their subsequent accuracy. First Dr. Von Braun built the rockets for Chancellor Hitler, and then for us down in Huntsville, Alabama. His comrades who were not so lucky as to be interned by the Americans did similar work in the closed cities of Siberia. The Doctor brought us a new world; two thousand pounds of high explosive warhead arriving in England from Peenmunde long before the faint echo of the rocket engine that propelled it in the graceful and deadly arc of flight. I mention the rainbow this morning because Hezballah is demonstrating a new rocket capability, one that is starting to verge into the realm of gravities elegant rainbow. They are shooting them now at ranges of thirty miles, or approaching what the great railway-mounted artillery fired in World War One. Those were the purview of the nation-states, and with the growing democratization of the age, the Katyusha is now available to irritated young men who have nothing to lose, and Paradise to gain. “Katyusha” is the dimunitive for the Russian name “Ekaterina,” and it was appended by the troops to a terror weapon used against the Germans. Little Kate has been the mainstay of the Hezballah offensive against northern Israel. In its first incarnation on the East Front in WWII, it was mounted in racks of up to forty-eight missiles on Studebaker tracks delivered to Russia by America under the provisions of the Lend-Lease program. None were returned, as far as I can determine, but the launchers were nick-named “Stalin's Organs” buy the Germans for their distinctive appearance, and the horrendous scream they made when fired in salvo. Though the Little Kate can fire further now, the originals could fly a low trajectory of only about four miles. They have been improved since then, of course, and the further away they can fire the rockets, the more problematic it is for the Israelis. The deeper into Lebanon from which they are launched, the more ruthless and provocative they will have to be to root them out. A Power-point presentation from one of the aggrieved parties arrived in my in-basket this week, showing the results of the ball-bearing shrapnel that is packed on the top of the Little Kates. It is impressive, much more destructive than the smaller payloads of death that the belt-bombers carry to buses and pizza restaurants. Hezballah has thousands of them, but they are relatively short range, and expose the shooters to some personal risk. I regret that Secretary Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney seem to be plagued by the ghost of Mr. Nixon, and ancient battles of a war lost a long time ago. They are smart guys, the Secretary and the Vice President, but they have some issues to work through and I am sorry that you and I happen to be in their way. I do agree with the Secretary of Defense on many things. His department is an ossified beast, and is overdue for drastic reform. “Transformation” is a difficult thing when you are in a war, or an occupation, and I think it is pretty apparent now that the basic planning factors that went into the adventure in Iraq were just flat wrong, and I was uneasy at the time. I have been wrong about many things in my life. I was certainly wrong about the number of body-bags we were going to need in DESERT STORM, too, and things turned out much better than we could ever have hoped back then. So I am under no illusions of infallibility as are some others who have gambled once, big, and assume that the dice always roll that way. But of course in the first big gamble in the desert we did not finish the job and go to Baghdad, and the Kuwaitis were happy enough to have their country back, and to have Saddam's terror SCUDs stop falling. That is where Rumsfeld was right. In the eighteen months before he became the Secretary of Defense, one of the handful of the most powerful officials on the planet, he had chaired a commission that bore his name. It was about the problem of rockets. By way of background, Mr. Rumsfeld's task force was called the “COMMISSION TO ASSESS THE BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES.” His charter flowed from controversy over the 1996 Defense Authorization bill in the very flower of the Clinton Administration that I recall so fondly now. The problems were so small then, though they seemed grave at the time. In fact, a National Intelligence Estimate issued in 1995 stated that was “extremely unlikely” that nations would sell missiles capable of inter-continental flight to one another, and any threat aside from the ones from Russia and China and France and Great Britain, were likely to emerge in the next fifteen years. I'll grant you that I do not spend a lot of time worrying about the threat from London or Paris, but I had a passing twinge the other two. The Russians had thirty-two thousand nuclear weapons when the Wall came down, and I was not at all confident that they knew where they all were. But no matter. The internal conflict over Star Wars was about perceptions, and it was the fancy of the Clinton Administration that the ballistic missile defense shield was not an immediate problem. That, in political calculus meant that funds allocated to the Star Wars missile defense program could be usefully diverted to other priorities. The Rumsfeld Commission was not so sanguine, and it emerged in the run-up to the disputed presidential election of 2000, and the eerie eight months that crossed over the summer and into hell. So, with the North Koreans exploring the trajectory of the heavens, and with the Iranians providing longer range rockets to Hezballah, we need to take a step back, and realize that gravity and rainbows have their own imperatives. For the record, I will stipulate that the threat is mutable. If it is not one thing, against which you gain a certain advantage, than it rapidly changes to become another. That is the ju-jitsu of tactics and technology. But for now, we should be concentrating on a method to stop rainbows from completing their graceful arcs, wherever they come from. Whatever his other issues, Don Rumsfeld was right about that. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |