Military

Canada warns the US (and Europe) over Arctic

Sunday, 29 January 2006, 10:47

Canada’s incoming Conservative government was supposed to forge warmer relations with Washington. But the Canadian prime minster-designate, Stephen Harper has already started making decidedly frosty noises about the United States meddling in some of the coldest places on Earth:

… on Thursday as the Prime Minister-elect used his first post-election press conference to take direct aim at David Wilkins, the US ambassador to Canada, who last week described the North-west Passage as “neutral waters”.

Mr Harper was not asked by reporters about the ambassador’s comment, but he refused to let it pass unchallenged.

“The United States defends its sovereignty, the Canadian government will defend our sovereignty,” he said. “It is the Canadian government we get our mandate from, not the ambassador of the United States.”

Some background, from the Toronto Star:

… most media hadn’t paid attention to Wilkins’ remarks, largely because they weren’t news. The United States, as well as Japan and the European Union, insist that the ice-choked passage, which winds through the archipelago of the Canadian Arctic to link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, is an international waterway.

Theoretically, Canada disagrees. But since 1945, it has signed a host of secret treaties that give American warships and submarines unimpeded access to these and other Canadian waters.

In 1988, Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney and U.S. president Ronald Reagan signed a pact whereby Washington agreed to tell Ottawa before sending non-military ships through the Northwest Passage.

In return, Ottawa agreed to never say no.

Harper wants to spend lots of Canadian dollars on underwater sensors and a new deep-water harbour in Iqaluit. But as the Star piece points out, the practical effect of all this posturing is more or less nil:

Is Harper prepared to tear up the treaties that already give the U.S. effective carte blanche in the Arctic? Would his three icebreakers attempt to ram the American fleet if it decided to steam through the Northwest Passage?

If his underwater sensors detect a U.S. submarine skulking along the coast of Ellesmere Island, would he have the Canadian Forces drop depth charges?

Still, it’s symbolically important. Asserting sovereignty over its sparcely populated but resource-rich Arctic archipeligo is of major symbolic significance for Ottawa, and has in recent years become one of Canada’s major foreign and defence policy objectives.

But it has become a bigger issue in recent years. With global warming making the Arctic region increasingly accessible, there is an increased interest in exploring for fossil fuels and trade routes. Long-dormant border disputes among the normally friendly Arctic countries suddenly have real consequences and are being re-examined.

Sometimes it is just symbolic. Canada’s maritime border with Greenland is fairly settled — with one tiny exception. Hence last summer’s kerfuffle with Denmark over barren Hans Island.

But there are also places where serious oil exploration, fishing and shipping rights are at stake. For example, there’s the small matter of the 30-year-old dispute between the United States and Canada over how Alaska’s border with Canada’s Yukon Territory extends into the Beaufort Sea. While Canada asserts that Alaska’s long straight land border along 140° west longitude should extend into the sea, the U.S. argues that the maritime border should be perpendicular to the shoreline, resulting in a triangular wedge of disputed — and potentially oil-rich — ocean territory just northeast of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The US Minerals Management Service, which oversees drilling on the United States’ continental shelf, estimates that the Beaufort Sea could contain about 7 billion barrels of oil and 32 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. In August 2004, the Minerals Management Service sold leases for oil development including a handful of tracts inside the disputed region, prompting a diplomatic protest from Ottawa. The State Department responded by reaffirming the American claim.

This is not the last we will have heard of this issue.

Comments

Al-Jazeera won’t get its memo

Tuesday, 17 January 2006, 23:20

Al-Jazeera has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Cabinet Office, asking for a transcript of the 2004 meeting between George Bush and Tony Blair during which Bush allegedly suggested bombing the station’s headquarters in Qatar.

When somebody beat them to this approach by nearly a month, the response was predictable — although the Cabinet Office admitted holding the requested information, they refused disclosure based on the section 27 (detrimental to international relations) exemption to FOIA.

But Newsnight tonight reported that a Downing Street spokesman responded to questions about al-Jazeera’s request by denying that the document contained any reference to bombing al-Jazeera.

I suspect that when it comes 19 working days from now, the formal FOIA response will look a lot like the one Steve Wood received last month (PDF).

Comments

Directed-energy weapons

Wednesday, 20 July 2005, 22:01

CNet news.com has photos of those US military’s experimental “directed energy weapons”. Is this for real, and why is this being publicised now?

Comments

Who Fights? Redux

Saturday, 29 March 2003, 20:43

The New York Times has an excellent piece today about military demographics:

A survey of the American military’s endlessly compiled and analyzed demographics paints a picture of a fighting force that is anything but a cross section of America. With minorities overrepresented and the wealthy and the underclass essentially absent, with political conservatism ascendant in the officer corps and Northeasterners fading from the ranks, America’s 1.4 million-strong military seems to resemble the makeup of a two-year commuter or trade school outside Birmingham or Biloxi far more than that of a ghetto or barrio or four-year university in Boston.

[...]

Confronted by images of the hardships of overseas deployment and by the stark reality of casualties in Iraq, some have raised questions about the composition of the fighting force and about requiring what is, in essence, a working-class military to fight and die for an affluent America.

“It’s just not fair that the people that we ask to fight our wars are people who join the military because of economic conditions, because they have fewer options,” said Representative Charles B. Rangel, a Democrat from Manhattan and a Korean War veteran who is calling for restorating the draft.

[...]

Charles C. Moskos, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University who has written extensively in support of a national draft for the armed services, domestic security and civilian service, argues that the military must represent every stratum of society.

“In World Wars I and II, the British nobility had a higher killed-in-action rate than the working class,” he said. “Our enlisted ranks resemble the British: they’re lower- to middle-class, working-class, intelligent people, who are joining for both the adventure and economic opportunity. But the officer corps today does not represent American nobility. These are not people who are going to be future congressmen or senators. The number of veterans in the Senate and the House is dropping every year. It shows you that our upper class no longer serves.”

Dr. Moskos said the pitfalls of having leaders who do not share in the casualties of war were common knowledge in Homeric times: “Agamemnon was willing to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia,” he said. Today’s military recruiters, he said, grasp what the ancient Greeks understood — “that nobody’ll accept casualties unless the elite are willing to put their own children’s lives on the line.”

“I once addressed a group of recruiters and asked them, would you prefer to have your advertising budget tripled or see Chelsea Clinton joining the Army — and they all said Chelsea Clinton joining the Army,” he said. “That would be the signal that America was serious about joining the military. Imagine Jenna Bush joining the military — that would be the signal thing saying, this is a cause worth dying for.”

Dr. Moskos says support for the Vietnam War ended when it became possible for the elite to win draft deferments. Other experts on military demographics dispute this.

James Burk, a professor of sociology at Texas A&M University, acknowledged that few wealthy citizens today choose military service. “But if you say, is the all-volunteer force not representative of the country as a whole, I’d say it’s more representative than the upper class,” he said.

It’s a good in-depth article, but I recall hearing about this some time ago.

Comments

Who fights?

Thursday, 13 March 2003, 01:26

On NPR’s “Talk of the Nation”, Northwestern University military sociologist Charles Moskos described the composition of the U.S. forces:

Well, the soldiers today in Kuwait and getting ready to perhaps go to war in Iraq are basically working-class and lower-middle-class young men and women. They are not the bottom of society by any means. They are likely to be higher minority than the general population, but not particularly heavily concentrated in the combat arms.

The most notable thing is that America’s elite, our privileged youth, are not in the military today. A recent study was done on Congress. Out of 435 congressmen and a hundred senators, only four had children in the military and only one is an enlisted person.

… So it’s the absence of the elite. That’s probably what we’ve lost in the last 30 to 40 years.

[...]

… I graduated from Princeton in 1956. Out of 750 males, 450 served. Last year at Princeton, with a class of 1,000, male and female, only three served. So you can see the change in the class background.

Moskos has long been an advocate of a scheme to lure more graduates into the armed forces, and it has now been adopted.

Wasn’t that the rationale of Rep. Charles Rangel and the other congressmen who are calling for a return to conscription? Yup. The San Jose Mercury News reports:

Their proposal would exempt the disabled, but not college students. …

Sponsors of the bill are reigniting an argument that has raged since the days of the Vietnam War, when critics complained that low-income blacks and Hispanics suffered a disproportionate share of casualties while the sons of more affluent families got deferments. Experts say that was true in the first years of the war, although casualty rates were more even by the war’s end.

Comments