Tag: Mike Corgan

Systems so perfect

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Mike Corgan

“dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”

Man frightened by specter of national spying.
Image by Carlos Latuff, copyright free. (FRA refers to Swedish wiretapping law).

C.S. Lewis wrote those words for his verse play The Rock, but they could just as well apply to U.S. foreign policy and security affairs. (Witness the current daily National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdropping bombshells.)

We have always been dazzled by our technological prowess when it comes to security. In the American Revolution, the British had muskets, but we had rifles. The Civil War had aerial observation, repeating rifles, railroads, and steam-powered warships. In World War I, every machine gun on all sides had at least one American patent; in World War II, we had long-range bombers that could deliver the atomic bomb.

Nowadays we can listen to everyone everywhere.

Maybe we should take a lesson from our use of the atomic bomb. It took awhile, but many of us finally realized that this was something awesomely and terribly different. In spite of some impassioned calls to do so, neither the U.S. nor any other nation has used nuclear weapons since World War II ended in 1945. In my Navy days we used to deride “capabilities in search of a mission.”

Perhaps we can learn that our ability to eavesdrop on everyone, like our ability to deploy nuclear weapons, has a serious downside. We ought not to use this “system so perfect” everywhere without clear and agreed-upon restraints. Yes, terrorists do present a serious threat to our society–but so does the breakdown of trust between citizens and government and among those who should be our allies and partners in fighting this scourge.

We have incredibly effective, near-perfect systems, like “smart” weapons, drones, electronic intercept equipment, and so on. We humans need to be good and smart, too.

Home to a safer land?

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Dr. Mike Corgan

We have now passed the 2,000th U.S. fatality in Afghanistan, but that war is winding down and we are bringing the troops home to a safer environment.

Or so we are supposed to think.

Rifle range
Photo by Camp Minsi-BSA, used under CC Attribution-Share Alike Unported 3.0 license.

The U.S. today is seeing a huge spike in gun sales stoked by fear of mass shooters and the possibility of more restrictive gun laws. The NRA has never been more active.

I was an NRA member when I was young. Boy Scout camp offered target shooting and I was proud of the skills that earned me “Expert Rifleman” qualification, so I stayed with the NRA after scouting.

But the era that responded to urbanization and loss of outdoor skills by spawning the NRA–and, for that matter, the Boy Scouts–has long passed.

Now the NRA is more about our rights to carry concealed handguns and to stockpile military-style weapons than it is about target shooting and hunting. It’s all about power politics and gun laws.

One of the so-called “third rail” issues that politicians dare not address head-on is gun control. A federal law restricting assault rifles has lapsed, and background checks on would-be owners vary widely. This year neither presidential candidate will go near the issue except to reaffirm that they will do nothing.

In a recent interview a mother maintained that she was teaching her teenage son and daughter how to use pistols and was planning to buy them each one “so they wouldn’t have to go into a theater unarmed.”

Can you imagine the chaos in that Colorado theater if members of the audience had had pistols? And then a gunman, dressed like a police SWAT team member, had started shooting? And the larger-than-life screen and blaring soundtrack had been filled with shootings and the sounds of shooting? Who would fire at whom?

Yes, we are bringing troops home from two of our longest wars. But are they coming home to a safer land?

Michael T. Corgan, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of International Relations, Boston University

Mass shooter in action

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Dr. Mike Corgan

“Run, Hide, Fight” is a new reality police video promulgated by the Boston University Police for the BU community.

The film, featured on some local news programs, is a powerfully realistic depiction of what could happen if a mass shooter went into action on the campus.

The instructions are clear and disturbing. Learn escape routes from your office. If you sense that an incident like the Aurora theater shooting is occurring. run away, even if others  are too scared to do so. If running isn’t possible, hide or barricade yourself into a secure and presumably bulletproof  area. Finally, be prepared to fight as best you can if trapped.

Is this the stuff of some latter-day paranoid McCarthyite fantasy? Alas, as recent events have all too graphically shown, mass shootings can and do occur anywhere.

Unfortunately, we as a citizenry can’t do much in advance about gunmen intent on violently settling grievances, then adding random killings to their spree.

But we can do something about the amount of killing taking place. So can the National Rifle Association (NRA).

The Second Amendment protects the right to “keep and bear arms” but like others in the Bill of Rights, this right is not absolute. You can’t own a machine gun or many other military grade weapons. Problem is the NRA tries to keep the prohibited list as small as possible and even shrink it.

It is the military grade weaponry (e.g., 100-round magazines for semi-automatic assault-type rifles easily  converted to full automatic firing) that make the mass killings possible. Without abrogating the Second Amendment, we can do something about that.

The NRA is fond of using the “slippery slope” metaphor to argue that any restriction on gun ownership is a step to confiscation.

That argument works the other way, too. The continued loosening of gun laws can also lead–and has certainly already led–to mass killings that have become far too abundant.

Michael T. Corgan, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of International Relations, Boston University

In need of a moral compass (Drone warfare, Part 2)

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Dr. Mike Corgan

On War by Carl von ClausewitzAll our legal and moral strictures about ethics and laws in war presume that war is, in a Clausewitzian sense, a state to state activity. Both Scott Shane and Tom Junod do not fully come to grips with this reality.

What happens when a state, like the US, faces a non-state adversary, like al Qaeda? With whom are we “at war”? Where is what we might call a “war zone”? Who is a “soldier”‘ and thus liable to violent action?

The dilemma is one of our own making. The US has become so militarily powerful that few will try to challenge us in a conventional military way through conventional state actions.

Non-state actors like al Qaeda present threats less than conventional military force but well beyond the current capabilities of domestic police forces. Modern communications and technology have enabled such groups to be as deadly as smaller states once were. Perhaps even more so.

Identifying how to deal with  non-state actors who can do a country great harm is not a new dilemma. Even Carl von Clausewitz himself saw this with the Spanish guerrillas in the Napoleonic Wars. And he had no answer.

However, the time is now at hand to confront the issue before drone warfare is more widely available. We must learn how to preserve the security of a country’s people without undoing security altogether by the methods used.

These are uncharted waters and a moral compass is badly needed.

Michael T. Corgan, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of International Relations, Boston University