A former partner in a top-10 global management consulting firm, Joe Buff is a seasoned risk analyst and professional writer on national security and defense preparedness. He is also a novelist of tales of near-future warfare featuring nuclear submariners and Navy SEALs in action at their bravest and best. Two of Joe's non-fiction articles on future submarine technology and tactics, which appeared in The Submarine Review, received literary awards from the Naval Submarine League. His recent novel Crush Depth made the Military Book Club's Top 20 Bestseller List after being selected as a Featured Alternate of the Club in late 2002. Tidal Rip was released
from Wm. Morrow/HarperCollins in hardcover in November, 2003, and the paperback edition (October, 2004) quickly hit high on the Barnes & Noble bookstores weekly National Bestseller List. Joe's next book, Straits of Power, was published in hardcover in late November, 2004.
Joe is a member of the Society for Risk Analysis, a non-partisan international scholarly body headquartered in McLean, VA. He is a Life Member of the following organizations: U.S. Naval Institute, the Navy League of the United States, the Fellows of the Naval War College, CEC/Seabees Historical Foundation, and the Naval Submarine League. Joe's father was an enlisted man in the Navy (Seabees in the Pacific Theater) from 1946 through 1951, and his uncle was a merchant mariner on the North Atlantic convoys late in World War II, before being drafted into the U.S. Army to serve in the Occupation of Nazi Germany. In August, 2004, Joe was made an Honorary Life Associate Member of the Navy Seabee Veterans of America, partly in recognition of his pro bono work for Operation Seabees Knowledge. In November, 2004, after having been a guest luncheon speaker at their Annual National Convention, Joe became a sponsored Life Associate Member of the U.S. Submarine Veterans, Inc.
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November 29, 2004
[Have an opinion on this column? Sound off in Military.com
at the Frontlines.]
Two of my recent essays made reference to the end of the Cold War. Watching the latest news stories unfold, though, I'm beginning to frankly wonder if Russia has already embarked down a road to increasingly hostile relations with the U.S., which future historians might label the Second Cold War. If this is true, several ingredients would have to be in place, and it seems that they are: a mounting clash of ideologies, a ruthless dictatorship entrenched in Moscow, combat by proxy in brushfire conflicts in various global hot spots, escalating head-to-head nuclear brinkmanship, and a robust source of foreign exchange to top off Russia's coffers of battle. Let's take these one by one.
The clash of Russian and American ideologies, this time, isn't that of communism versus capitalism so much as it's something far more fundamental: a tug-of-war between totalitarianism/kleptocracy on the one hand, and freedom -- transparent democracy -- on the other.
By kleptocracy I mean what journalists have meant for years: the amoral wholesale thievery of monetary wealth and infrastructure assets, perpetrated by a shrewd and conniving elite few, which has raged in the Former Soviet Union for over a decade. Some of these nouveau-riche billionaires are ex-Soviet ministers who grabbed entire industries which they once oversaw as faceless bureaucrats. Others are opportunistic entrepreneurs, who collected untold riches by purchasing chunks of privatizing corporations on the cheap; they bought out the stock vouchers, mistakenly perceived by most as worthless, via which Moscow transferred ownership fairly to every working citizen. The tribulations of Yukos Oil and its imprisoned ex-CEO show that dangerous shifts are occurring in this volatile kleptocracy, as power brokers, political and economic, turn on each other like sharks. There really is no honor among thieves.
This leads right to my next point: A dictatorship needs a dictator. Russia has one in my opinion (but certainly not in my opinion alone): Vladimir Putin -- former KGB crony of Yuri Andropov (aka "the Butcher of Budapest") -- and himself for several years head of the KGB's successor organization, the FSB secret police. Some readers will already be aware of Putin's anti-democratic actions since he gained the very top Kremlin post, Russia's presidency, in early 2000 -- more by Boris Yeltsin's anointing him as acting successor, and by FSB extortion of viable competitors, than by any honest and open popular vote.
The anti-democratic moves, so far, include seizing the right to pick Russia's 89 regional governors, who in recent years were chosen by direct elections. Worse, local parliaments that disagree with Putin's gubernatorial choices can be dissolved if he merely gives the word. (Putin used the infamous terrorist siege of a school in North Ossetia as his excuse for strengthening centralized personal control.) Putin's meddling in the internal politics of a sovereign nation, Ukraine, by aggressively taking sides in a disputed presidential election that the UN and Western countries have called corrupt, seems to show that the expansionist tendencies of Russia are virulent, still. It shouldn't be a surprise. This striving to influence buffer states in Russia's "near abroad," and in the process also improve access through nautical choke points that otherwise bottle up Russian fleets, isn't associated solely with communism -- it dates to Czar Peter the Great around 1700, even earlier. The goal has been a deeply ingrained imperative of Russian statecraft and scheming in every era since, including today.
Signs of the new-age anti-U.S. brushfire engagement by proxy abound. Russia behaved quite contrarily during the Kosovo Crisis. In fact, it was a road race between U.S. and Russian forces to be first to occupy an important airfield -- a race that the U.S. lost -- which led straight to the controversial, rushed development of the Stryker armored car. Russian technicians were actively
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helping Saddam Hussein construct ballistic missiles whose range far exceeded the maximum permitted by UN sanctions -- and this work continued until just before U.S. troops went into Iraq. Russia is also, according to some reports, a supplier of expertise and technology that Iran has been using in its nuclear research -- even as Iran yanks Europe's and the IAEA's chains over halting Tehran's alleged (I'm being polite) atomic weapons program. Russia, like the USSR before it, has been a major exporter of both diesel and nuclear-powered submarines to nations (Iran, India, China, and Libya among them) whose interests, to put it mildly, don't always entirely coincide with America's.
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