The German blogosphere has been active following the leak of a confidential report by a think tank of the Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces). The Future Analysis Department of the Bundeswehr Transformation Center’s report deals with the issue of peak oil, and if was probably withheld from publication due to its potentially explosive analysis.

The concept of “peak oil” refers to the point at which oil production reaches its maximum and then levels off followed by a gradual decline. Because so much of the world’s reserves are in Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis are tight-fisted with precise information on those reserves, it’s hard to calculate when the world will hit the peak oil line. There is growing concern in official circles that we are approaching that point. For example, the British government has recently labeled concerns about peak oil as being alarmist, while the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has privately been canvassing experts for opinions and advice on peak oil contingency plans.

Contingency planning is in order, if the Bundeswehr is right. The report suggests that the likely peak oil date is 2010 – right now – and that the effects of peak oil on market and prices will begin to show in ten to fifteen years. One of the reasons the effect will be delayed will be the difficulty in separating short term market ups and downs from the long-term structural tightening of supplies. Once that begins however, the Germans expect some dire results.

Reduction in International Trade: The movement of the overwhelming majority of …

About a year ago, Iman al-Hams, a 13-year-old Palestinian school girl, wandered into the security zone surrounding an Israeli camp near the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza. Israeli soldiers who saw her reported to their commander that (from the recorded radio transmission) “a little girl,” apparently lost and “scared to death,” was in the security zone and was carrying a school bag. There was always the possibility that the bag contained a bomb, but Iman was over 100 yards from the Israeli security positions, well outside of the lethal area of a bomb blast.

Soldiers opened fire. Iman dropped her school bag and tried to leave the area. The bag was hit several times by rifles fire, confirming that it did not contain a bomb. As Iman tried to leave she was hit by fire from one of the posts and fell.

At this point an Israeli officer, identified only as “Captain R,” led a detachment of soldiers out of the base into the security area, in his own words “going a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill.” He approached Iman and, according to witnesses, shot her twice in the head, turned to walk away, turned back and emptied the magazine of his assault rifle into her body. The post-mortem examination showed at least seventeen wounds. At no time in the entire incident was any hostile action taken against any Israeli soldier.

“Captain R” then transmitted the following to the troops under his command: “Anything that moves in the zone, even if it …

In a series of IED attacks in eastern and southern Afghanistan, either nineteen (New York Times) or twenty-one (Daily Telegraph) U.S. soldiers have died in the last two days. This marks one of the the bloodiest two-day period for U.S. soldiers since the war began, but is generally in line with the escalating casualties in the war.

Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, attributes the climbing NATO casualties to the increased operational tempo made possible by higher troop strength on the ground. The troop surge, Petraeus argues, has allowed NATO to hit previously secure insurgent strongholds where resistance has been high.

Britain faces daunting budget challenges. It currently runs a budget deficit worse than that of Greece and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has ordered the Ministry of Defense to cut its budget by between ten and twenty percent. Britain’s 69 billion dollar defense budget in 2009 is the third largest in the world, after second-place China (99 billion) and of course first-place United States (663 billion).

The most likely place for the axe to fall is an elimination of the Brigade of Gurkhas. The Gurkhas are an odd part of the British armed forces in any case. The recruits are Nepalese, not British subjects, and one reason (aside from tradition) for maintaining the Gurkas in the face of budget problems in the past was their lower cost. Retiring Gurkha soldiers returning to their homeland were paid a pension only about one third that paid retiring British nationals. A second reason was a shortage of British nationals willing to volunteer for the armed forces.

The cost differential changed last year when British actress Joanna Lumley spearheaded a public drive to allow retired Gurkhas to settle in the United Kingdom with a full pension. Fair’s fair, and in my view the reform was long overdue and is one more thing to like about Lumley, not that one is needed. It did make the Gurkha’s a bit less of a bargain, and the upsurge in British recruiting for the last few years has all but sealed their fate.

Even if Britain eliminates its Gurkha battalions, the …

Everyone loves to complain about their government and pick at the limitations and flaws in their constitution or charter of governance. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard lectures about how much better a multi-party parliamentary-style government on the Westminster model is than is our own two-party political system with a separate executive and legislature.

Yes, it is true that we often have one party in control of the executive while the other controls part or all of the legislature, which cannot happen in a Westminster-style parliamentary government. By definition, the leadership of the majority in parliament constitutes the executive. A Westminster-style parliament also allows for a more nuanced division of political loyalties, I have been told. Divisions within parties, such as the “Blue Dog” Democrats and the Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party, apparently don’t count.

But there is a problem with Westminster-style parliaments. What happens when no single party gets a majority? Well that’s easy. The party with the most seats forms a coalition government. But what if no one party has even a clear plurality? What if the number of seats separating the “winner” from number two is only a handful? What if there is no clear and easy coalition to form which can govern? There is a term for this outcome: Hung Parliament.

We have a Hung Parliament in Iraq right now. Even as we are withdrawing the last of our combat troops, the Iraqis are unable to form a coalition capable of governing, and so the …

The U.S. government has been pressing the Karzai government of Afghanistan to get tough on corruption, and is seriously discussing making aid conditional on cleaning up the mess. Last month Mohammed Zia Salehi, the Chief of Administration of the Afghan National Security Council was arrested on corruption charges by a U.S. and British-backed anti-corruption task force. He was caught on tape soliciting a new car for his son in return for hindering a U.S. investigation of a money laundering scheme involving Afghan government officials, drug dealers, and insurgents.

It is usually a good sign when someone that high up gets busted. That he was released from custody only a few hours later following the personal intercession of President Karzai is less encouraging.

Now several high-level U.S. officials have confirmed Salehi has been on the CIA’s payroll for quite some time, although in what capacity remains unclear. It is hard to think of an appropriate reason for a senior government official of a nation to be in the pay of the intelligence apparatus of another government, even an allied one. When we find out that members of the military or other government officials are getting paid by the intelligence services of Israel, for example, we put them in prison.

Salehi, it seems, is not the only Afghan governmental official on the CIA’s payroll. Ahmed Wali Karzai, governor of Kandahar province, brother of President Karzai, and repeatedly implicated in drug smuggling and influence peddling, is as well. Anonymous sources – dispute by the CIA – claim similar …

The Washington Post reports that Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn III has confirmed the most significant breach of U.S. military cyber security took place in 2008 when a flash drive was inserted into a DoD computer somewhere n the Middle East and a program was uploaded into the system. “That code spread undetected on both classified and unclassified systems, establishing what amounted to a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control,” he says in an up-coming article in Foreign Affairs.

This is the first confirmed on-the-record penetration of U.S. military classified computer systems by a foreign intelligence agency. The rumor, so far unconfirmed, is that Russian intelligence was behind the breach. According to Lynn, the pentagon’s response to the 2008 attack, called Operation Buckshot Yankee, constituted a turning point in U.S. cyberdefense strategy.

My first-ever column for Great History dealt with the issue of cyberdefense security. It is worth mentioning again that international law still lags behind the contemporary reality of warfare in cyberspace. Cyber conflict is viewed as an extension of espionage, which is not itself considered an act of war for the simple reason that just about everyone does it to just about everyone else. If it we responded with a declaration of war against everyone who spied on our military we would be at war with, among other people, Israel — and they with us for the same reason.

The question is at what point espionage becomes actionable hostility. If a program is inserted which …

The Russians have, for some time, tried to get the major powers to agree to banning all weaponry from space. Uncharitable individuals might attribute this to the fact that they were behind in research and development of such systems, despite having access to Soviet Cold War-era preliminary work. In any case the U.S. has rejected any such ban.

About eighteen months ago General Valentin Popovkin, a Russian deputy defense minister, announced they were going ahead with development and acquisition of an anti-satellite missile. The announcement appeared to be a diplomatic response to deployment of U.S. anti-missile missiles in eastern Europe, but work on the original anti-satellite weaponry has never really ended and was tied in to the ABM system the Soviets experimented with. Here is a link to a good summary of the work, along with progress and some nice artist renderings of the orbital interceptors.

More recently, the Russian spacecraft producer Energa has floated a conceptual design for a military satellite in the 20-ton range with an orbital life of 10-15 years and powered by a small nuclear reactor. It would have all the normal capabilities you would expect: “monitor territories and airspace, provide informational superiority – including in armed conflicts – and perform target designation and traffic control.” Of special interest, however, is the tantalizing statement that it will also have an offensive capability. What sort, and whether it is aimed at orbital control or a more ambitious capability, is unclear.