 conceivable that the DPRK will (and maybe already has) export their knowledge and expertise to the highest bidder. This may and probably will in the future include terrorist organizations and rogue states. That alone should be enough to get most of the world on board with solving this problem.
Finally, and, as it should be, a last resort, there are a number of military options that may preclude full-scale war. Cyber attacks that cripple the nuclear infrastructure for example could be carried out. (Remember reports in 2010 that the “Stuxnet” virus crippled the Iranian nuclear centrifuges in what is thought to be a combined U.S.-Israeli operation.) Other clandestine operations are surely in the U.S. playbook.
Should conventional military force be required, a counter-force strike aimed at limiting the DPRK’s ability to do damage in South Korea could be followed by an offer to negotiate with Kim.
Another option is to specifically target Kim and the senior leadership in a decapitation strike that removes the DPRK leadership and thus limits their ability to retaliate. This seems to have the biggest chance of success. If a pre-emptive U.S. military strike could lead to a massive conflict on the peninsula and surrounding areas anyway, then go for the leadership first in the chance that the command and control abilities and the will to fight may be eliminated before the conflict spirals out of control.
While the DPRK is increasing its capabilities, so are the U.S and our regional allies. While we may not be able to locate and eliminate all of the nuclear sites and mobile launchers on the ground, using increasingly sophisticated Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) systems the U.S. can limit the impact of a strike by destroying the missiles in flight. Current systems include Ground Based Mid-Course Defense (GMD) based in California and Alaska which tested well against ICBM targets, the Navy’s Aegis destroyers and cruisers have proven adept at hitting ballistic missiles and the Army’s Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems have as well, depending on the threat and the environment. You may recall that the U.S. is presently deploying the THAAD system in South Korea, although in April President Trump inexplicably called on the Koreans to pay us one billion dollars for the system unless they terminate or renegotiate a bilateral trade agreement — “a horrible deal.” For now, the deployment continues.
It does not take a crystal ball to determine that the Trump Administration will face its toughest international challenge in North Korea. Whether in the coming months, as the DPRK accelerates its testing of missile and weapon systems, or in the coming years, one should expect action in one form or another in the near future. It will take a confident and realistic combination of diplomatic and economic measures from the international community coupled with unparalleled military readiness. What is certain is that the problem will not go away on its own.
You may be aware that the United States Air Force is investigating cheating by as many as 92 officers on proficiency exams given to Air Force missileers responsible for our nation’s Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) force. That is 92 out of approximately 500 in the force, or nearly twenty percent. This is serious business on many levels.
To be fair, there are a couple of points to be made. Secretary James was only confirmed as Secretary a little over two weeks ago. She is likely still learning the job. Additionally, as I understand it her remarks about stress and fear were directed not at the job itself (the destruction of the world can be stressful after all) but at the command atmosphere surrounding the units that they are in. In other words, the importance of the test was so high that if they did not get a perfect score — not merely passing, but a perfect score — then they feared they could be fired from the job or not recommended for promotion. Well, yeah. That’s how it’s always been, at least in my experience with the Navy. The deal with nuclear weapons is that nothing short of perfection will do. That is the basis of the “trust but verify” motto (which comes out of the Navy’s nuclear power program and not from Ronald Reagan who borrowed it).
The standards are very high — just as they should be. She is quoted as saying; “I heard repeatedly that the system can be very punitive, come down very hard in the case of even small, minor issues that crop up.” She goes on to say; “I believe that a very terrible irony in this whole situation is that these missileers didn’t cheat to pass, they cheated because they felt driven to get 100 percent. Getting 90 percent or 95 percent was considered a failure in their eyes.” I am not sure if she is saying that “good enough” is okay with nuclear weapons or not. It seems that if there is one area that everything needs to be perfect, it is with nuclear weapons. I should point out that I am not talking about mistakes during training. Training is undertaken under very controlled circumstances and never with actual weapons. I am talking about proficiency testing — the stressful but necessary certification process to make sure there are no mistakes.
Over the course of my career I saw some good officers fail for promotion because of minor mistakes in their certification process. Indeed, it sometimes seemed that the performance evaluations of the inspectors themselves depended upon how many ships they could fail in an inspection and they went at it with a vengeance. This could rightly be an area of discussion — what should the standards be or what do they need to be in order to protect the arsenal? That is a reasonable area to debate. However, once those standards are established, they must be met if we are serious about continuing a very impressive safety record in this area.
To help put it into perspective, recall that then Secretary of Defense Gates fired the Secretary of the Air Force and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force in 2007 when an Air Force B-52 flew cross-country with nuclear weapons onboard that the crew did not know were real. He obviously thought that it was a serious business and I would have thought that the rest of the force would get the picture following that incident.
I do not want to jump too quickly to any conclusions. The inquiry into the incident is just getting underway and I have no first hand knowledge of how serious the situation may have been or exactly what part of the proficiency tests were compromised. None-the-less, I keep coming back to this thought: What part of maintaining and employing our land based nuclear deterrent is not serious business?
I suppose that Secretary James was trying to make the rest of us feel better when she said; “I want to reassure everybody again that this is the failure of integrity on the part of certain airmen. It was not a failure of the mission.” Somehow, that doesn’t make me feel better. The success of the mission starts with the integrity of those carrying it out.These notes are intended as a guide for installing Ultra Monkey 2.0.1 on a Debian Woody (Stable 3.0) system.
These notes only cover software installation. For details on configuration please examine the discussion and sample configuration files in the topologies section.
And then running apt-get update to obtain the package lists. Note that the deb-src line is optional and is only used if you wish to download the source packages for Ultra Monkey. If you do not wish to use apt-get, then you can obtain the packages directly from the download directory.
In order to install the updated kernel supplied an updated version of initrd-tools is required. In particular you must have initrd-tools-0.1.32woody.3.um.3 in order to successfully install the kernels discussed below on a system that has an IDE boot disk. Your system may not boot if you do not upgrade this package.
The updated initrd-tools package be obtained using apt-get.
Alternatively the packages may be obtained directly from the download directory.
The easiest way to do this is to install one of the supplied kernel image packages on your system. They may be obtained using apt-get. By running one of the following sets of commands. The second and third commands in each set, which install the headers and pcmcia-modules respectively are optional. Alternatively the packages may be obtained directly from the download directory.
The current version of the kernel packages for Ultra Monkey 2.0.1 is 2.4.22-1-ipvs-i386, which are based on the 2.4.22-1-i386 kernels released by Debian. There is an older 2.4.20-1-ipvs-i386 release. It is recommended that you used the newer 2.4.22-1-ipvs-i386 kernels which fix a number of security issues.
If you wish to build your own kernel then please be advised that the IPVS and Hidden Interface patches are needed for Ultra Monkey. Debian packages for these may be installed using the following apt-get commands, downloaded from the download directory or obtained directly from http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/ and http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/~julian/ respectively.
From time to time updated packages are released for Ultra Monkey. Typically these are a result of security bugs. If you are using apt-get and add the apt source listed above then your system will be updated with these packages when you run "apt-get update;apt-get upgrade" or similar. However, as the kernel is the core part of the operating system, and a reboot is required to effect an upgrade, it may be desirable to exclude the kernel packages from such updates. This can be done by adding the conntents of