It's Been A Strange Week
Jul. 22nd, 2005 10:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynIt's been horridly busy this week-sort of. But not much got done. One of those sorts of weeks; I'm sure we all have had one before.
Reality is becoming a hazy dream. I'm having a hard time remembering that there are people out there who don't know how many flavors of quarks there are, and who don't spend their time talking about fiducial volume cuts on electroweak interactions. But then every once in a while I stumble onto the religious right on the internet and get smacked right in the face.
I'm still waiting to hear a magnet quench. It's supposed to sound like a bomb.
I also am avoiding a discussion on the London, Baghdad and Egyptian bombings until I get my facts together.
Hence you get the following interesting thoughts:
We were reviewing some of the physics for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and came up with some interesting results. For instance the beam is made mostly of protons traveling at some incredible speed. There are a lot of them (something like 10^18 of the blighters), but that's much less than a gram (actually it's about a microgram more or less if you do the actual math). So this thing weights so little that is has equivalent mass to one one-millionth of a gram. That's nothing compared to a potato chip, which masses about two grams a chip (according to the back of my bag). It also has 700MJ of energy.
At Fermilab we have a lot of buffalo. This is because we raise buffalo on a small farm here as part of a conservancy project. An adult buffalo can weigh as much as a thousand kilograms. A little high school physics will tell you that if we flew a buffalo from Fermi to CERN, and it accidentally wandered into the beam and got hit by a standard burst, it would be a hell of a barbecue. If it actually managed to absorb all of that energy, the bison would be flung out of the beam tunnel at about 1200 m/sec. That's about Mach 3.5.
Today's lesson. Do not stand in front of the beam. Even when you take into account the fact that you've just got this puny little punch of protons whizzing around the track, the radiation from the beam can burn a hole through stainless steel. It's a far cry from your dentist's X-Ray machine.
And now for some politics:
Operation Thunder Storm went off earlier this week without a hitch from the operational standpoint, but raising more questions than it was able to answer from a strategic point of view. This is made even worse by the fact that details regarding it are so scarce to find in the west.
Here's what I can reconstruct.
Some time on or around July 20th, a detachment of troops, some 1,200 strong, were deployed to enforce a deadline delivered to insurgents some days ago, just after previous operations in the same area. This was mostly seen as a followup to operations Falcon Sweep and Iron Fist, carried out earlier in the month. The troops covered an area of about 70 by 30 kilometers around the village of Miranda. The insurgents, being forewarned or possibly having evacuated the region after combat in operations beginning on July 4th, were no longer present at the village. After confirming that neither people nor ammunition remained at the village, troops burned somewhere between 120 and 150 huts, destroying an insurgent base of operations, and then withdrew. Locals are possibly afraid of reprisals, as expected troops from the government sent to secure the area are late in arriving, and the insurgents and rebels may have retreated by as little as 5km.
That's not exactly big news these days, but I thought in context it would create a significantly bigger splash than it did. But it didn't, probably because it did not happen in Iraq.
The troops involved in the raid were members of the Ituri Brigade. If you think you're up on international politics, don't feel too bad for not knowing who the Ituri Brigade is either. I certainly had to look it up.
The Ituri Brigade is a military unit attached to MONUC: the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They've been assigned some of the most troublesome territory in the Nation Formerly Known As Zaire to deal with, the Ituri region. The Ituri region has been a site of struggle between two similar ethnicities for some time, but the aftermath of the Second Congo War has pushed things over the edge. It's not a sudden disaster, like the war in Iraq, but rather a continual sinkhole that just keeps getting worse. To combat this the Ituri Brigade was formed.
MONUC itself claims to have 15,562 troops in the field, under the command of Lieutenant General Babacar Gaye of Senegal. Of those troops, 4,500 to 4,800 of them are currently assigned to the four battalions of the Ituri Brigade. More than a thousand of those troops belong to a Pakistani battalion, which apparently played a large part in the operations this month. The primary task of the brigade has been to secure territory around the city of Bunia, and to prevent a recurrence of massacres from earlier times.
The insurgents, on the other hand, were members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, the FDLR. The FDLR is not well liked in the international community; their main claim to fame seems to be the fact that many of their members were associated with the murder of 900,000 civilians in the Rwandan Genocide. Since then the FDLR has been forced to operate from outside Rwanda, finally having settled in the anarchic environment of the DRC. The FDLR has been ingratiating themselves with the locals in the fashion typical of African militias, beating people, raping women and stealing everything else that's not nailed down. They claim to have something in the order of 10-20,000 active troops in the DRC.
Apparently, sometime early in the month, MONUC decided that it was time to clean out the area. On July 4th they began operations in the sector, mostly against concentrations of militia power. I'm having a difficult time telling how many groups were targeted. At some point though, the FDLR were warned that they had only a short time to vacate the area.
However, I'm more interested in this latest operation. 1,200 troops, reportedly well-trained Pakistani and Guatemalans, swept down on a major FDLR base. There's a claim that something on the order of 800 rebels were forced out of the area by the sudden appearance of UN Peacekeepers. The Peacekeepers appeared via helicopter, probably from their Indian air support, in order to pacify the area and prepare for the arrival of Congolese troops. The rebels fled into the wild, the Peacekeepers burned down the village, and then they rode off into the sunset. And that was it.
Dude, WTF?
If 1,200 police swooped down on a cartel hideout in the desert, and all they managed to find were some empty boxes that they promptly put on a bonfire, people would be screaming about inefficiency and incompetence. This is not precisely a trivial number of troops. It's more than most infantry battalions, a major operation. Together with helicopter support (and you can bet that some of those helicopters were armed), and possibly even long-range artillery support, satellite imaging, intelligence on the ground, and general native sympathy, they got precisely nothing. Oh sure, they can argue that by destroying those huts they forced the FDLR to return to their home territory, but that's not much of an argument. They made no arrests, forced no surrenders, and apparently failed to secure the area by driving the FDLR away.
Think on that. The UN has managed to put together a force of Peacekeepers that, after years of training, months in the field, days of preparation, and some element of surprise on their side, failed completely to do anything useful. If the rebels decided to raid villages the moment the UN left, the UN could not do a damn thing about it.
This is one of the fundamental flaws in UN Peacekeeping today. They cannot decide whether they are police (seeking to arrest the militias) or whether they are soldiers (seeking to eliminate their threat, either by destroying them as a fighting force or driving them from the country). They are inefficient as police, because they can't capture anybody without a miracle. They are ineffective as soldiers because they don't have the ability, support or will to chase down militias and drive them into the ground.
Thir frustrates me. I hope this demonstration proved something, but I suspect that the end result will be more of the eternal African status quo.
I'll probably post some story-related stuff soon.
Reality is becoming a hazy dream. I'm having a hard time remembering that there are people out there who don't know how many flavors of quarks there are, and who don't spend their time talking about fiducial volume cuts on electroweak interactions. But then every once in a while I stumble onto the religious right on the internet and get smacked right in the face.
I'm still waiting to hear a magnet quench. It's supposed to sound like a bomb.
I also am avoiding a discussion on the London, Baghdad and Egyptian bombings until I get my facts together.
Hence you get the following interesting thoughts:
We were reviewing some of the physics for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and came up with some interesting results. For instance the beam is made mostly of protons traveling at some incredible speed. There are a lot of them (something like 10^18 of the blighters), but that's much less than a gram (actually it's about a microgram more or less if you do the actual math). So this thing weights so little that is has equivalent mass to one one-millionth of a gram. That's nothing compared to a potato chip, which masses about two grams a chip (according to the back of my bag). It also has 700MJ of energy.
At Fermilab we have a lot of buffalo. This is because we raise buffalo on a small farm here as part of a conservancy project. An adult buffalo can weigh as much as a thousand kilograms. A little high school physics will tell you that if we flew a buffalo from Fermi to CERN, and it accidentally wandered into the beam and got hit by a standard burst, it would be a hell of a barbecue. If it actually managed to absorb all of that energy, the bison would be flung out of the beam tunnel at about 1200 m/sec. That's about Mach 3.5.
Today's lesson. Do not stand in front of the beam. Even when you take into account the fact that you've just got this puny little punch of protons whizzing around the track, the radiation from the beam can burn a hole through stainless steel. It's a far cry from your dentist's X-Ray machine.
And now for some politics:
Operation Thunder Storm went off earlier this week without a hitch from the operational standpoint, but raising more questions than it was able to answer from a strategic point of view. This is made even worse by the fact that details regarding it are so scarce to find in the west.
Here's what I can reconstruct.
Some time on or around July 20th, a detachment of troops, some 1,200 strong, were deployed to enforce a deadline delivered to insurgents some days ago, just after previous operations in the same area. This was mostly seen as a followup to operations Falcon Sweep and Iron Fist, carried out earlier in the month. The troops covered an area of about 70 by 30 kilometers around the village of Miranda. The insurgents, being forewarned or possibly having evacuated the region after combat in operations beginning on July 4th, were no longer present at the village. After confirming that neither people nor ammunition remained at the village, troops burned somewhere between 120 and 150 huts, destroying an insurgent base of operations, and then withdrew. Locals are possibly afraid of reprisals, as expected troops from the government sent to secure the area are late in arriving, and the insurgents and rebels may have retreated by as little as 5km.
That's not exactly big news these days, but I thought in context it would create a significantly bigger splash than it did. But it didn't, probably because it did not happen in Iraq.
The troops involved in the raid were members of the Ituri Brigade. If you think you're up on international politics, don't feel too bad for not knowing who the Ituri Brigade is either. I certainly had to look it up.
The Ituri Brigade is a military unit attached to MONUC: the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They've been assigned some of the most troublesome territory in the Nation Formerly Known As Zaire to deal with, the Ituri region. The Ituri region has been a site of struggle between two similar ethnicities for some time, but the aftermath of the Second Congo War has pushed things over the edge. It's not a sudden disaster, like the war in Iraq, but rather a continual sinkhole that just keeps getting worse. To combat this the Ituri Brigade was formed.
MONUC itself claims to have 15,562 troops in the field, under the command of Lieutenant General Babacar Gaye of Senegal. Of those troops, 4,500 to 4,800 of them are currently assigned to the four battalions of the Ituri Brigade. More than a thousand of those troops belong to a Pakistani battalion, which apparently played a large part in the operations this month. The primary task of the brigade has been to secure territory around the city of Bunia, and to prevent a recurrence of massacres from earlier times.
The insurgents, on the other hand, were members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, the FDLR. The FDLR is not well liked in the international community; their main claim to fame seems to be the fact that many of their members were associated with the murder of 900,000 civilians in the Rwandan Genocide. Since then the FDLR has been forced to operate from outside Rwanda, finally having settled in the anarchic environment of the DRC. The FDLR has been ingratiating themselves with the locals in the fashion typical of African militias, beating people, raping women and stealing everything else that's not nailed down. They claim to have something in the order of 10-20,000 active troops in the DRC.
Apparently, sometime early in the month, MONUC decided that it was time to clean out the area. On July 4th they began operations in the sector, mostly against concentrations of militia power. I'm having a difficult time telling how many groups were targeted. At some point though, the FDLR were warned that they had only a short time to vacate the area.
However, I'm more interested in this latest operation. 1,200 troops, reportedly well-trained Pakistani and Guatemalans, swept down on a major FDLR base. There's a claim that something on the order of 800 rebels were forced out of the area by the sudden appearance of UN Peacekeepers. The Peacekeepers appeared via helicopter, probably from their Indian air support, in order to pacify the area and prepare for the arrival of Congolese troops. The rebels fled into the wild, the Peacekeepers burned down the village, and then they rode off into the sunset. And that was it.
Dude, WTF?
If 1,200 police swooped down on a cartel hideout in the desert, and all they managed to find were some empty boxes that they promptly put on a bonfire, people would be screaming about inefficiency and incompetence. This is not precisely a trivial number of troops. It's more than most infantry battalions, a major operation. Together with helicopter support (and you can bet that some of those helicopters were armed), and possibly even long-range artillery support, satellite imaging, intelligence on the ground, and general native sympathy, they got precisely nothing. Oh sure, they can argue that by destroying those huts they forced the FDLR to return to their home territory, but that's not much of an argument. They made no arrests, forced no surrenders, and apparently failed to secure the area by driving the FDLR away.
Think on that. The UN has managed to put together a force of Peacekeepers that, after years of training, months in the field, days of preparation, and some element of surprise on their side, failed completely to do anything useful. If the rebels decided to raid villages the moment the UN left, the UN could not do a damn thing about it.
This is one of the fundamental flaws in UN Peacekeeping today. They cannot decide whether they are police (seeking to arrest the militias) or whether they are soldiers (seeking to eliminate their threat, either by destroying them as a fighting force or driving them from the country). They are inefficient as police, because they can't capture anybody without a miracle. They are ineffective as soldiers because they don't have the ability, support or will to chase down militias and drive them into the ground.
Thir frustrates me. I hope this demonstration proved something, but I suspect that the end result will be more of the eternal African status quo.
I'll probably post some story-related stuff soon.