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wartakes · 1 year

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“What Should It Look Like?” Part III: The Navy (OLD ESSAY)

This essay was originally posted on April 20th, 2022, and is a continuation of the "What Should It Look Like?" series of essays.

In this entry in the series, I go after the Navy - which I think in an Armed Forces of shitshows, is by far the biggest shitshow currently. However, in modern warfare, a navy is still crucially important, so I try to wrap my head around how to make it suck less in service of a foreign policy that also sucks less.

(Full essay below the cut).

Thought I forgot about this series, didn’t you?

Well, I didn’t forget about it. But in case you hadn’t noticed, global events over the past few months had distracted me some. While the war in Ukraine is by no means over and we should still pay close attention to it, I think I at least have sufficient breathing room right now to write about something else for a bit (I don’t want to become a single-issue commentator anyway). So, now seems as good a time as any to return to imagining how I would restructure the U.S. military in a hypothetical future where it was being used to more appropriate ends (if you’re new to this, I’d suggest starting back at part one and working your way up to this).

We’ve already talked about everyone’s favorite green machine, the U.S. Army. Now it’s time to take to the waves and try to unfuck what is currently the most fucked of all the services: the U.S. Navy. Oh, don’t get me wrong: all branches of the military are fucked up, but to put an Orwellian spin on it: some are more fucked up than others (and the some in this case is the Navy). So, anchors aweigh and full speed ahead: let’s kick this pig.

The U.S. Navy: America’s Floating Disaster Factory

Oh, U.S. Navy. You’re such a glorious trainwreck of an armed service. Whether you’re driving your ships into other ships, getting embroiled in massive and now infamous corruption scandals, or engineering procurement boondoggles that would make all the other services blush by comparison, you really are leading the pack when it comes to being the problem child of the Armed Forces. Add in the fact that out of all the services, you’re the one that’s gone the longest (since the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944) without actually fighting anyone who can give you a run for your money, and you’re just a recipe for disaster (beyond the minor ones you cause just by existing).

While it may seem tempting to throw the baby out with the bathwater, in a world where wars do unfortunately need to be fought and your military needs to move vast distances in order to fight them, a Navy is essential. In the event of a large scale war, the vast majority of the military’s heavy equipment and supplies will have to be moved by ship – as does the vast majority of the world’s trade in general. While air travel may be good for rapid deploying light forces and some equipment, moving an entire force by air is highly inefficient in terms of time, energy, efficiency, and more. As long as you’re going to need to move most of your forces and supplies by sea, and most of what keeps the world running moves by sea, you’ll need forces to control the sea and do battle on and from it as needed.

With that requirement laid out pretty clearly, how do you solve a problem like the U.S. Navy? I’ll give you a bottom-line up front on that now: cutting back in some areas and doubling down on others in terms of types of ships, and adopting a completely different strategic mindset.

The Carrier is Dead; Long Live the Carrier

I’m going to tell you right now: if you’re a big fan of aircraft carriers and carrier aviation, you’re probably not going to like what I have to say next.

However, I will give anyone of that disposition some small reassurance now: I don’t think aircraft carriers are obsolete, per say. I think they still have a use case. However, I think that use case has become – and will continue to become – far more limited as new capabilities and concepts in warfare are developed (and I’ll get more into why I think that in a few paragraphs).

The aircraft carrier was a game changer when it first saw combat in World War II, after having been developed between the two World Wars. It quickly rendered the battleship – the previous capital ship of naval warfare – all but obsolete and has dominated the high seas ever since. But now, crucial developments in military technology threaten to knock the carrier off its throne.

This is not to say that carriers have always been invincible. A quick peek at all the carriers lost in combat by all participants in World War II will show you that was never the case and that the carrier has always had threats. But those threats have evolved significantly to a point where the push and pull of advantage between the carrier and its counters is shifting in the latter’s favor.

The biggest threat to the carrier – and warships in general today – are anti-ship missiles (AShMs). These aren’t exactly new and have been a threat for a long time, but to be a true threat meant getting a platform carrying them – be it a ship, an aircraft, or a land-based launcher – close enough to fire and then getting the missile past all the carrier’s defenses (such as the AEGIS Combat System or Close-In Weapons Systems gatling guns). But missiles have increased dramatically in sophistication in recent years, extending their range and their precision. When you compare the range of the U.S. Navy’s standard anti-ship missile for the past forty years – the Harpoon – to the YJ-18 of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy, the Harpoon is rapidly becoming outclassed (which is part of why the Navy has been working feverishly to deploy an anti-ship variant of the longer-ranged Tomahawk cruise missile to the fleet in recent years). There’s also the unfortunate fact that, whatever defenses you have – or are building – they could always be saturated by more missiles.

But extended range models of standard anti-ship missiles and anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs) aren’t the only worry on the high seas. Now you also have to contend with a burgeoning new class of anti-ship missile: the anti-ship ballistic missile – like China’s DF-21D with a potential range of over 1300 miles. While ASCMs like the YJ-18 and Maritime Strike Tomahawk already have generous ranges, a ASBM puts an ASCM to shame with its range. An adversary with ASBMs on mobile launchers could position them all along its coastline – or even further inland depending on how extensive its range is – and fire on targets thousands of miles out at sea. And if you deployed an ASBM onboard a surface ship or submarine – as China reportedly may be planning on? Then you’d have even fewer places to hide that were out of range.

Obviously, these weapons aren’t infallible or invincible – no weapon is. Even if you have a fancy missile with a long range, you still need to find and fix your target before you can engage it, and the oceans are vast. But technology is improving on that front as well, especially when it comes to space-based sensors. What this all adds up to is a much harder time for large surface fleets in a major war at sea. While war on the ocean’s surface isn’t going anywhere, its certainly undergoing a rethink.

The carrier requires the biggest rethink in light of these changes, seeing that for any nation that possesses them (like the United States which possesses eleven – more than any other carrier possessing country), is going to be the largest and most conspicuous target on the water. If you do lose one, you stand to lose – in the case of a Nimitz-class – upwards of over 5000 officers and crew and as many as ninety aircraft and helicopters on top of the nearly 10 billion USD carrier itself. While the carrier will still have defenses both on board and in its accompanying battle group, as mentioned before those defenses are less certain in the face of technological developments and also potentially with sheer numbers. An AEGIS missile-defense system may be good, but if you keep firing enough relatively cheap anti-ship missiles at a group of ships, sooner or later one will get through (or the defender will just potentially run out of ammo first).

Again, carriers aren’t completely obsolete. Having a mobile platform capable of launching and retrieving both fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft at sea is still useful. Not every potential adversary in the future will have the advanced anti-ship capabilities that some of the most sophisticated militaries in the world are developing or even marketing. There’s still a number of countries around the world that see value in having carriers – including China, which has a third on the way with a fourth possibly in the works. However, maybe like how most other countries in the world that have carriers only have one, two, or at most a handful, we don’t need ten or twelve. It’s an asset that is useful in some situations, but not in all situations. I can’t say for sure how many carriers we should have, but I can say we definitely don’t need as many as we have now and that the final number should ultimately be based on the scenarios we see as most likely and the carrier’s actual role in them.

The few carriers that you’ll hang onto don’t have to be as big as a massive Nimitz or Ford-class “supercarrier” either. Take for example the French Charles de Gaulle-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier – the only other currently operational conventional “flattop” carrier not in U.S. Navy service. Though at full load it is less than half the tonnage of a Nimitz class carrier, it still carries an air wing of up to 40 aircraft, including multirole fighters, support helicopters, airborne early warning and control aircraft, and more. It does all this with less than half the compliment of a Nimitz class. In a much-reduced role for carriers for the U.S. Navy, several of this size would still go a long way. And this is before we even go down the rabbit hole of STOBAR and STOL carriers – which most other countries have, but I just don’t have time to get into right now. Basically, you got proven options to go smaller and fewer with.

The bottom line for carriers is that they are not obsolete, but their application will become more limited and focused. One way or another, they’re going to have to operate in more permissive environments – either in warzones where extensive anti-ship threats are less pervasive, or in warzones where the anti-ship threat from all domains has been degraded enough to allow them to come in and support the forces that are already doing battle. Carriers still have a use, but more and bigger is not the way forward. The way forward is fewer, smaller, and more smartly used.

“Haha Missile Go ‘Woosh’”

The Navy doesn’t appear to be blind to the changing landscape in maritime warfare, which is why it’s been pushing its concept of Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO). As with most military concepts, a lot of it is pedantic and inscrutable, but the basic idea of DMO is to spread ships out further rather than concentrating them in easier to find and target groups – keeping them connected and coordinated as they do so. The idea is to create targeting problems for an enemy with a large – but not infinite – number of long-range missiles of various types; to make it harder to find and fix targets and make it more difficult for them to choose where to utilize finite resources and munitions.

This is a good first step, but the Navy is doing this while still clinging to the concept of the carrier as it continues to forge ahead with the new Ford-class to replace the Nimitz (which is just as large and has been rife with problems throughout development as all recent Navy ships have been). Meanwhile, the Navy continues to debate with itself and Congress just how many ships it should have (or how many it can really afford instead of giving us all health care and forgiving my student loans – FORGIVE MY FUCKING STUDENT LOANS, JOE).

This brings us to the second half of why fewer and smaller carriers are better – aside from them just becoming more vulnerable targets that offer an adversary a lot of gain from their destruction while offering their operator less and less utility. By having fewer and smaller carriers, you free up a vast amount of resources to put into areas where you get more bang for your naval buck (or send some of that money back to us peasants to build roads, schools, hospitals, etc. but what do I know I’m just a dumb socialist).

Basically, if modern naval warfare is a glorified missile duel, you’re going to want more missile slingers, and right now carriers are taking up resources that could not only be freed up for missile-launching ships but would get more value per ship if you chose to focus on that. You could buy a larger number of smaller ships like frigates and destroyers that present a harder to find target but still have considerable firepower. This applies not just to surface ships, but also missile submarines that could fire land-attack missiles and AShMs as well as torpedoes, and are even more difficult to find in the open ocean (I could go on a whole thing here about anti-submarine warfare but just rest assured that even under the best of conditions ASW is extremely difficult to do; oh, and seeing how ASW is hard to do, maybe if carriers weren’t sucking up so much manpower and resources you could focus on more ASW ships and aircraft)

The aircraft are another part of the equation on why cutting back on carriers gets you more, because not only do you no longer have to worry about the carrier but then also about supporting the numerous aircraft that it carries with munitions, fuel, maintenance, etc. Again, that’s resources you can divert elsewhere for more effectiveness (or again, back to actually trying to improve civil society somewhat). If your carrier is so vulnerable that moving close enough to an operational area to deploy its aircraft poses too much of a risk to the carrier, then maybe you’re better off hitting whatever you would have hit with aircraft with missiles delivered by ship, land-based launchers, or long-range bombers and other aircraft that can carry missiles to a stand-off distance and then fire them and turn right back around. Maybe the aircrews and maintenance crews might be better used in another capacity rather than sailing around on an airstrip that is only useful if it risks making itself a gigantic target.

Also, while I’m always the guy who cautions people not to make Skynet real, this is an area where unmanned vehicles could play a critical role. While I’m very much against making drones that can think and operate on their own, I think a more sensible road forward in this area for all domains is “manned-machine teaming,” where you have several unmanned vehicles that respond to the orders of a human or humans in a manned system and share information between the systems. In this case, instead of having a surface action group of three manned warships, you could have one where there’s one manned warship acting as the command ship, with a handful of unmanned ships essentially acting as floating, self-propelled missile launchers. Not only does not having to have crew on board those ships help you cut back on numerous costs and feel the potential loss of a ship less, but you could also send an unmanned ship into areas that would be more of a risk for a ship with personnel on board. I’m never in favor of creating weapons that operate without any human control, but this is an area where they can act as a force multiplier.

Putting An End to “Everywhere and Nowhere”

I don’t want anyone to be under the illusion that if you just got rid of most of the Navy’s carriers and bought a bunch of ships that just fired missiles that everything would be peachy keen with the service. While that would go a long way in pushing the Navy towards what it ought to be, it is only one part of the equation. There are obviously many other issues that the Navy – as the military as a whole – struggles with. I can’t go into all of them here, but I can go into one big issue that has led the Navy to where it is today and that’s it’s the idea at the core of how it currently operates: the obsession with presence.

At the end of the Cold War with the “peace dividend” that was bought and the cutbacks and drawdowns that ensued, the Navy was faced with a difficult choice with how it would structure itself and operate going forward in the post-Cold War world. For a myriad of reasons, the choice that it ultimately made was to prioritize a global presence above all else, rather than an actual ability to fight a war at sea. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work lays this out in a piece for the U.S. Naval Institute (and while he immediately loses credibility in my book for referencing Samuel Huntington, he does make some good points). In a more ideologically aware reading of Work’s analysis, presence was seen as critical to demonstrating the Navy’s worth in a post-Cold War world without a major adversary, preserving American influence around the world by constantly being a reminder of American military might, and also potentially even deterring wars from breaking out through the constant presence of substantial military power.

Obviously, this did not work out. Countless wars have broken out since the end of the Cold War (some of them by our own doing) that were not deterred by constant U.S. Navy presence. Likewise, the degree to which the United States holds influence over the world compared to its fleeting moment of hyperpower in the 1990s is debatable. All the Navy has to show for it in return is a service pushed to the limit. A service that, despite being among the largest and best equipped navies in the world, many times seems to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, jumping back and forth between places like a 90s sitcom character trying to be with two dates at the same restaurant. A service that, despite having several hundred thousand personnel, runs them ragged to the point they’re crashing ships into one another out of exhaustion and poor training. The U.S. Navy may not be to the point of the Russian Navy (yet), but on a long enough timeline without serious change it’s not hard to imagine it getting there.

One of my oft returned to concepts is the idea that empire is actually toxic to a military. Maintaining empire by necessity requires putting pressure and stress on a military that continuously erodes its effectiveness, professional culture, morale, equipment, and more. You see this in the case of the Navy’s focus on presence in the post-Cold War era, scattering its ships to the four corners of the globe, often with a mission no more specific than “to be there.” Now, even as it’s faced with a potentially serious challenger in the form of the ever-growing Chinese PLAN, the Navy still has this presence mindset that hinders it from returning to that original purpose of fighting a war at and from the sea. It just further reinforces that not having an imperial mindset and approach to the rest of the world is not only betters for the soul ideologically, but also sound military sense if you want a more healthy and capable force.

If you’re not constantly focused on having a ship in every single potential crisis zone or place you have an interest throughout the world, when the shit hits the fan and a crisis becomes serious enough to risk escalating into a war, you may actually have ships available with crews that might actually be well rested and know how to do their jobs that can respond to that crisis and be ready to fight. If you’re not focused on presence for the sake of influence, when an ally or partner comes under attack by an aggressor and requests help, you’ll actually have a naval force that is in good enough shape to assist them. Maybe its overly simplistic to me as someone who’s never served in uniform or taken a class at the Naval War College, but maybe also its just hard to wrap your head around these ideas when you’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid your entire career.

As much as I’m sure many on the Naval staff would love a return to the 600 ship Navy of the Cold War, that’s never going to happen even with the most generous of defense budgets under the current system – let alone under the system we’d rather have in place. Accepting that, then the Navy needs to step back from the obsession of being everywhere at once if it wants to be in one or two places when its really needed and then be able to actually engage in combat to a useful end. It needs to accept that it cannot on its own act as a deterrent and that at the end of the day its role is to fight a war when it is called upon to do so.

Semper Fortis (but for real this time)

A navy will remain a crucial component of the military even under a democratic socialist system, if we want to carry out the strategy I outlined in part one and actually military exercise solidarity with other peoples around the globe. A navy is necessary not only to keep hostile forces from the controlling the seas, but to support forces operating on land and in the air. An effective navy carrying out our strategy not only needs to divest of less useful systems and invest in more practical, efficient, and effective ones, but needs to completely reconceptualize what its purpose is. It needs to not only refocus on fighting a war at sea, but rethink the entire reason its fighting a war at sea to begin with. It needs to understand it is doing so not for the sake of its own influence or the influence of a particular country or flag, but to do so in order to play its part in protecting others that are in danger when war erupts. To ensure that the supplies necessary not only to fighting war but maintaining peace and life are able to flow freely.

For centuries, Navies have been seen by empires as critical to guarding the lifelines of capital and imperial power. For ensuring that an unbroken connection was maintained between the imperial core and its various markets and dependencies. That perception must be broken and replaced with a different concept of lifelines. That the Navy is instead responsible for guarding the lifelines that link together working peoples that are dedicated to building freer and more just societies for all who live in them. Lifelines that allow peoples and nations that are working to create a better world for themselves and others to defend one another from forces of reaction and authoritarianism. In this hypothetical better world that I imagine to keep myself from going batshit crazy, navies must play the role of helping to keep empire and fascism at bay, not working as an active agent to facilitate their spread. As with our perception of war in general as leftists, we have to flip the narrative on the Navy. We have to make sure that when warships put to sea, they’re doing so to defend others, not to facilitate their oppression.

Ok, alright, I’m dipping into the purple prose a bit too much now so I think it’s time to wrap this one up as I’m already over 4000 words (constantly setting new personal “bests” with these). In our next installment in this series, we’ll be looking at the Navy’s own private Army – the United States Marine Corps, and hoo boy I hope you’re not too attached to them because I have plans (don’t worry Marines, the plans I have for you are much like my plans for carriers; you’ll still be around, there’ll just be much, MUCH fewer of you). Also, if you thought I forget about amphibious assault ships in my rant on carriers – that’s where I’m gonna cover them. For now, though, anchors aweigh on my end. Until next time, stay safe out there, folks.

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darkempathsmiley · 2 years

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I work in the lab that Elizabeth Warren did her dna test at, so since 2019 me and a couple of my friends have been using the sample to do a Boys from Brazil

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mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog · 2 days

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Why I Believe AlphaFold 3 is a Powerful Tool for the Future of Healthcare

Insights on a groundbreaking artificial intelligence tool for health sciences research Dear science and technology readers, Thanks for subscribing to Health Science Research By Dr Mike Broadly, where I curate important public health content. A few months ago, I wrote about AlphaFold 3, a groundbreaking AI tool that helps scientists understand protein structures, which are essential for…

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morganablenewsmedia · 20 days

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Anti-Party Activities: PDP Has Summoned Wike

Anti-Party Activities: PDP Has Summoned Wike PDP Describes Minister’s Threat ‘Disappointing’ On Monday, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) has disclosed that Nyesom Wike, the Minister of Federal Capital Territory, has been summoned through a letter. Wike who is to appear before the Party’s Disciplinary Committee to address allegation and answer petitions against him over threat and anti-party…

#Bauchi State #Chief bode Goorge #Federal Capital Territory #Former Deputy National Secretary #High Chief Tom Ikimi #Jalingo #Nyesom Wike #Peples&039; Democratic Party #Rivers State Structure #Siminalayi Fubara #Taraba State

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lionheartlr · 4 months

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Exploring Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Comprehensive Travel Guide

A Brief History of Bosnia and Herzegovina Bosnia and Herzegovina, nestled in the heart of the Balkans, has a rich and tumultuous history. The region was part of the Roman Empire and later the Byzantine Empire before becoming the medieval Bosnian Kingdom in the 12th century. The Ottoman Empire took control in the 15th century, influencing the culture and religion of the region significantly. In…

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howdoesone · 9 months

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How does one assess the impact of transitional justice mechanisms in post-genocide societies?

Transitional justice mechanisms play a crucial role in post-genocide societies by addressing past atrocities, promoting accountability, and fostering reconciliation. Assessing the impact of these mechanisms is essential to understand their effectiveness in healing divided communities and preventing future conflicts. This article explores how one can assess the impact of transitional justice…

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zvaigzdelasas · 1 year

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Representative democracy *can only* express a particular "People's Will" insofar as said Will isnt contradicted by a counteracting Will *of comparable magnitude* of a different People with *equal (or greater) legitimacy* in the democratic abstraction process.

#starting from this understanding - the 'class character' of a state clearly 'falls out'#'People' here is a rough proxy for class/sub-class interests #tho id argue the real proxy is the 'democratic abstraction process' itself #bc the constitution of 'a People' is itslef sorta the primary actor here #also following from this falls out party structures as the form of representation of a 'People' itself #starting from the point of non-representativrle democracy - unless interests are per-person & completely unshared then a unity falls out #*representative #(non representative meaning basically direct democracy)

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batboyblog · 2 months

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Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #26

July 5-12 2024

The IRS announced it had managed to collect $1 billion in back taxes from high-wealth tax cheats. The program focused on persons with more than $1 million in yearly income who owned more than $250,000 in unpaid taxes. Thanks to money in Biden's 2022 Inflation Reduction Act the IRS is able to undertake more enforcement against rich tax cheats after years of Republicans cutting the agency's budget, which they hope to do again if they win power again.

The Biden administration announced a $244 million dollar investment in the federal government’s registered apprenticeship program. This marks the largest investment in the program's history with grants going out to 52 programs in 32 states. The President is focused on getting well paying blue collar opportunities to people and more people are taking part in the apprenticeship program than ever before. Republican pledge to cut it, even as employers struggle to find qualified workers.

The Department of Transportation announced the largest single project in the department's history, $11 billion dollars in grants for the The Hudson River Tunnel. Part of the $66 billion the Biden Administration has invested in our rail system the tunnel, the most complex Infrastructure project in the nation would link New York and New Jersey by rail under the Hudson. Once finished it's believed it'll impact 20% of the American economy by improving and speeding connection throughout the Northeast.

The Department of Energy announced $1.7 billion to save auto worker's jobs and convert factories to electronic vehicles. The Biden administration will used the money to save or reopen factories in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, and Virginia and retool them to make electric cars. The project will save 15,000 skilled union worker jobs, and created 2,900 new high-quality jobs.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development reached a settlement with The Appraisal Foundation over racial discrimination. TAF is the organization responsible for setting standards and qualifications for real estate appraisers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics last year found that TAF was 94.7% White and 0.6% Black, making it the least racially diverse of the 800 occupations surveyed. Black and Latino home owners are far more likely to have their houses under valued than whites. Under the settlement with HUD TAF will have to take serious steps to increase diversity and remove structural barriers to diversity.

The Department of Justice disrupted an effort by the Russian government to influence public opinion through AI bots. The DoJ shut down nearly 1,000 twitter accounts that were linked to a Russian Bot farm. The bots used AI technology to not only generate tweets but also AI image faces for profile pictures. The effort seemed focused on boosting support for Russia's war against Ukraine and spread negative stories/impressions about Ukraine.

The Department of Transportation announces $1.5 billion to help local authorities buy made in America buses. 80% of the funding will go toward zero or low-emission technology, a part of the President's goal of reaching zero emissions by 2050. This is part of the $5 billion the DOT has spent over the last 3 years replacing aging buses with new cleaner technology.

President Biden with Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau and Finnish President Alexander Stubb signed a new agreement on the arctic. The new trilateral agreement between the 3 NATO partners, known as the ICE Pact, will boost production of ice breaking ships, the 3 plan to build as many as 90 between them in the coming years. The alliance hopes to be a counter weight to China's current dominance in the ice breaker market and help western allies respond to Russia's aggressive push into the arctic waters.

The Department of Transportation announced $1.1 billion for greater rail safety. The program seeks to, where ever possible, eliminate rail crossings, thus removing the dangers and inconvenience to communities divided by rail lines. It will also help update and improve safety measures at rail crossings.

The Department of the Interior announced $120 million to help tribal communities prepare for climate disasters. This funding is part of half a billion dollars the Biden administration has spent to help tribes build climate resilience, which itself is part of a $50 billion dollar effort to build climate resilience across the nation. This funding will help support drought measures, wildland fire mitigation, community-driven relocation, managed retreat, protect-in-place efforts, and ocean and coastal management.

The USDA announced $100 million in additional funds to help feed low income kids over the summer. Known as "SUN Bucks" or "Summer EBT" the new Biden program grants the families of kids who qualify for free meals at school $120 dollars pre-child for groceries. This comes on top of the traditional SUN Meals program which offers school meals to qualifying children over the summer, as well as the new under President Biden SUN Meals To-Go program which is now offering delivery of meals to low-income children in rural areas. This grant is meant to help local governments build up the Infrastructure to support and distribute SUN Bucks. If fully implemented SUN Bucks could help 30 million kids, but many Republican governors have refused the funding.

USAID announced its giving $100 million to the UN World Food Program to deliver urgently needed food assistance in Gaza. This will bring the total humanitarian aid given by the US to the Palestinian people since the war started in October 2023 to $774 million, the single largest donor nation. President Biden at his press conference last night said that Israel and Hamas have agreed in principle to a ceasefire deal that will end the war and release the hostages. US negotiators are working to close the final gaps between the two sides and end the war.

The Senate confirmed Nancy Maldonado to serve as a Judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Maldonado is the 202nd federal Judge appointed by President Biden to be confirmed. She will the first Latino judge to ever serve on the 7th Circuit which covers Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin.

Bonus: At the NATO summit in Washington DC President Biden joined 32 allies in the Ukraine compact. Allies from Japan to Iceland confirmed their support for Ukraine and deepening their commitments to building Ukraine's forces and keeping a free and Democratic Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression. World leaders such as British Prime Minster Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, praised President Biden's experience and leadership during the NATO summit

#Joe Biden #Thanks Biden #politics #us politics #american politics #election 2024 #tax the rich #climate change #climate action #food insecurity #poverty #NATO #Ukraine #Gaza #Russia #Russian interference

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

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The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it

I'm coming to DEFCON! On FRIDAY (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

If you are even slightly plugged into the doings and goings on in this tired old world of ours, then you have heard that Google has lost its antitrust case against the DOJ Antitrust Division, and is now an official, no-foolin', convicted monopolist.

This is huge. Epochal. The DOJ, under the leadership of the fire-breathing trustbuster Jonathan Kanter, has done something that was inconceivable four years ago when he was appointed. On Kanter's first day on the job as head of the Antitrust Division, he addressed his gathered prosecutors and asked them to raise their hands if they'd never lost a case.

It was a canny trap. As the proud, victorious DOJ lawyers thrust their arms into the air, Kanter quoted James Comey, who did the same thing on his first day on the job as DA for the Southern District of New York: "You people are the chickenshit club." A federal prosecutor who never loses a case is a prosecutor who only goes after easy targets, and leave the worst offenders (who can mount a serious defense) unscathed.

Under Kanter, the Antitrust Division has been anything but a Chickenshit Club. They've gone after the biggest game, the hardest targets, and with Google, they bagged the hardest target of all.

Again: this is huge:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-judge-rules-google-is-a-monopolist

But also: this is just the start.

Now that Google is convicted, the court needs to decide what to do about it. Courts have lots of leeway when it comes to addressing a finding of lawbreaking. They can impose "conduct remedies" ("don't do that anymore"). These are generally considered weaksauce, because they're hard to administer. When you tell a company like Google to stop doing something, you need to expend a lot of energy to make sure they're following orders. Conduct remedies are as much a punishment for the government (which has to spend millions closely observing the company to ensure compliance) as they are for the firms involved.

But the court could also order Google to stop doing certain things. For example, since the ruling finds that Google illegally maintained its monopoly by paying other entities – Apple, Mozilla, Samsung, AT&T, etc – to be the default search, the court could order them to stop doing that. At the very least, that's a lot easier to monitor.

The big guns, though are the structural remedies. The court could order Google to sell off parts of its business, like its ad-tech stack, through which it represents both buyers and sellers in a marketplace it owns, and with whom it competes as a buyer and a seller. There's already proposed, bipartisan legislation to do this (how bipartisan? Its two main co-sponsors are Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren!):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/25/structural-separation/#america-act

All of these things, and more, are on the table:

https://www.wired.com/story/google-search-monopoly-judge-amit-mehta-options/

We'll get a better sense of what the judge is likely to order in the fall, but the case could drag out for quite some time, as Google appeals the verdict, then tries for the Supreme Court, then appeals the remedy, and so on and so on. Dragging things out in the hopes of running out the clock is a time-honored tradition in tech antitrust. IBM dragged out its antitrust appeals for 12 years, from 1970 to 1982 (they called it "Antitrust's Vietnam"). This is an expensive gambit: IBM outspent the entire DOJ Antitrust Division for 12 consecutive years, hiring more lawyers to fight the DOJ than the DOJ employed to run all of its antitrust enforcement, nationwide. But it worked. IBM hung in there until Reagan got elected and ordered his AG to drop the case.

This is the same trick Microsoft pulled in the nineties. The case went to trial in 1998, and Microsoft lost in 1999. They appealed, and dragged out the proceedings until GW Bush stole the presidency in 2000 and dropped the case in 2001.

I am 100% certain that there are lawyers at Google thinking about this: "OK, say we put a few hundred million behind Trump-affiliated PACs, wait until he's president, have a little meeting with Attorney General Andrew Tate, and convince him to drop the case. Worked for IBM, worked for Microsoft, it'll work for us. And it'll be a bargain."

That's one way things could go wrong, but it's hardly the only way. In his ruling, Judge Mehta rejected the DOJ's argument that in illegally creating and maintaining its monopoly, Google harmed its users' privacy by foreclosing on the possibility of a rival that didn't rely on commercial surveillance.

The judge repeats some of the most cherished and absurd canards of the marketing industry, like the idea that people actually like advertisements, provided that they're relevant, so spying on people is actually doing them a favor by making it easier to target the right ads to them.

First of all, this is just obvious self-serving rubbish that the advertising industry has been repeating since the days when it was waging a massive campaign against the TV remote on the grounds that people would "steal" TV by changing the channel when the ads came on. If "relevant" advertising was so great, then no one would reach for the remote – or better still, they'd change the channel when the show came back on, looking for more ads. People don't like advertising. And they hate "relevant" advertising that targets their private behaviors and views. They find it creepy.

Remember when Apple offered users a one-click opt-out from Facebook spying, the most sophisticated commercial surveillance system in human history, whose entire purpose was to deliver "relevant" advertising? More than 96% of Apple's customers opted out of surveillance. Even the most Hayek-pilled economist has to admit that this is a a hell of a "revealed preference." People don't want "relevant" advertising. Period.

The judge's credulous repetition of this obvious nonsense is doubly disturbing in light of the nature of the monopoly charge against Google – that the company had monopolized the advertising market.

Don't get me wrong: Google has monopolized the advertising market. They operate a "full stack" ad-tech shop. By controlling the tools that sellers and buyers use, and the marketplace where they use them, Google steals billions from advertisers and publishers. And that's before you factor in Jedi Blue, the illegal collusive arrangement the company has with Facebook, by which they carved up the market to increase their profits, gouge advertisers, starve publishers, and keep out smaller rivals:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

One effect of Google's monopoly power is a global privacy crisis. In regions with strong privacy laws (like the EU), Google uses flags of convenience (looking at you, Ireland) to break the law with impunity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

In the rest of the world, Google works with other members of the surveillance cartel to prevent the passage of privacy laws. That's why the USA hasn't had a new federal privacy law since 1988, when Congress acted to ban video-store clerks from telling newspaper reporters about the VHS cassettes you took home:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

The lack of privacy law and privacy enforcement means that Google can inflict untold privacy harms on billions of people around the world. Everything we do, everywhere we go online and offline, every relationship we have, everything we buy and say and do – it's all collected and stored and mined and used against us. The immediate harm here is the haunting sense that you are always under observation, a violation of your fundamental human rights that prevents you from ever being your authentic self:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/jun/14/nsa-prism

The harms of surveillance aren't merely spiritual and psychological – they're material and immediate. The commercial surveillance industry provides the raw feedstock for a parade of horribles, from stalkers and bounty hunters turning up on their targets' front doors to cops rounding up demonstrators with location data from their phones to identity thieves tricking their marks by using leaked or purchased private information as convincers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

The problem with Google's monopolization of the surveillance business model is that they're spying on us. But for a certain kind of competition wonk, the problem is that Google is monopolizing the violation of our human rights, and we need to use competition law to "democratize" commercial surveillance.

This is deeply perverse, but it represents a central split in competition theory. Some trustbusters fetishize competition for its own sake, on the theory that it makes companies better and more efficient. But there are some things we don't want companies to be better at, like violating our human rights. We want to ban human rights violations, not improve them.

For other trustbusters – like me – the point of competition enforcement isn't merely to make companies offer better products, it's to make companies small enough to hold account through the enforcement of democratic laws. I want to break – and break up – Google because I want to end its ability to bigfoot privacy law so that we can finally root out the cancer of commercial surveillance. I don't want to make Google smaller so that other surveillance companies can get in on the game.

There is a real danger that this could emerge from this decision, and that's a danger we need to guard against. Last month, Google shocked the technical world by announcing that it would not follow through on its years-long promise to kill third-party cookies, one of the most pernicious and dangerous tools of commercial surveillance. The reason for this volte-face appears to be concern that the EU would view killing third-party cookies as anticompetitive, since Google intended to maintain commercial surveillance using its Orwellian "Privacy Sandbox" technology in Chrome, with the effect that everyone except Google would find it harder to spy on us as we used the internet:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/googles-trail-of-crumbs

It's true! This is anticompetitive. But the answer isn't to preserve the universal power of tech companies large and small to violate our human rights – it's to ban everyone, especially Google, from spying on us!

This current in competition law is still on the fringe, but the Google case – which finds the company illegally dominating surveillance advertising, but rejects the idea that surveillance is itself a harm – offers an opportunity for this bad idea to go from the fringe to the center.

If that happens, look out.

Take "attribution," an obscure bit of ad-tech jargon disguising a jaw-droppingly terrible practice. "Attribution" is when an ad-tech company shows you an ad, and then follows you everywhere you go, monitoring everything you do, to determine whether the ad convinced you to buy something. I mean that literally: they're combining location data generated by your phone and captured by Bluetooth and wifi receivers with data from your credit card to follow you everywhere and log everything, so that they can prove to a merchant that you bought something.

This is unspeakably grotesque. It should be illegal. In many parts of the world, it is illegal, but it is so lucrative that monopolists like Google can buy off the enforcers and get away with it. What's more, only the very largest corporations have the resources to surveil you so closely and invasively that they can perform this "service."

But again, some competition wonks look at this situation and say, "Well, that's not right, we need to make sure that everyone can do attribution." This was a (completely mad) premise in the (otherwise very good) 2020 Competition and Markets Authority market-study on "Online platforms and digital advertising":

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5fa557668fa8f5788db46efc/Final_report_Digital_ALT_TEXT.pdf

This (again, otherwise sensible) document veers completely off the rails whenever the subject of attribution comes up. At one point, the authors propose that the law should allow corporations to spy on people who opt out of commercial surveillance, provided that this spying is undertaken for the sole purpose of attribution.

But it gets even worse: by the end of the document, the authors propose a "user ID intervention" to give every Briton a permanent, government-issued advertising identifier to make it easier for smaller companies to do attribution.

Look, I understand why advertisers like attribution and are willing to preferentially take their business to companies that can perform it. But the fact that merchants want to be able to peer into every corner of our lives to figure out how well their ads are performing is no basis for permitting them to do so – much less intervening in the market to make it even easier so more commercial snoops can get their noses in our business!

This is an idea that keeps popping up, like in this editorial by a UK lawyer, where he proposes fixing "Google's dominance of online advertising" by making it possible for everyone to track us using the commercial surveillance identifiers created and monopolized by the ad-tech duopoly and the mobile tech duopoly:

https://www.thesling.org/what-to-do-about-googles-dominance-of-online-advertising/

Those companies are doing something rotten. In dominating ads, they have stolen billions from publishers and advertisers. Then they used those billions to capture our democratic process and ensure that our human rights weren't being defended as they plundered our private data and put us in harm's way.

Advertising will adapt. The marketing bros know this is coming. They're already discussing how to live in a world where you can't measure clicks and you can't attribute actions (e.g. the world from the first advertisements up until the early 2000s):

https://sparktoro.com/blog/attribution-is-dying-clicks-are-dying-marketing-is-going-back-to-the-20th-century/

An equitable solution to Google's monopoly will not run though our right to privacy. We don't solve the Google monopoly by creating competition in surveillance. The reason to get rid of Google's monopoly is to make it easier to end surveillance.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

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#pluralistic #google #antitrust #monopolies #remedies #ad-tech #competition #power #doj v google #attribution

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