Sovereign Virtual Order of Anonymous?

Lulz Warfare Declares Independence

I have been sitting on this screen shot from @LulzWarefare since it happened in March, but my motivation for this is a little bit older. I was reading on Nile valley hydropolitics when I noticed the Hala’ib Triangle and the associated area of Bir Tawil. Both Egypt and Sudan claim Hala’ib and due to the wording of the treaties that govern this dispute neither country claims Bir Tawil – it is terra nullius, land unclaimed by any nation state. There are two other notable unclaimed bits in Africa – a strip of land between Niger and Burkina-Faso was finally divided in an agreement in 2013, and Western Sahara was the scene of the Kafka-esque “wall war” from 1975 until 1991.

Even rarer than unclaimed land in the age of GPS satellites are sovereign entities without geographic territory. The Knights of St. John were expelled from Jerusalem in Malta by Napolean in 1798, where the order had resided since 1530. They have never established another state, but the 13,000 members, 80,000 volunteers, and 20,000 medical personel celebrated their 900th anniversary this year.

And most important of all, the Knights of St. John can issue passports.

So there is some precedent for a non-territorial entity existing at a diplomatic level, issuing passports, and otherwise behaving as a ‘virtual state’. The Principality of Sealand, established as a home for a pirate radio station in 1967, has de facto sovereignty, but the population is apparently just Prince Michael, the son of founder Paddy Roy Bates. One has to imagine this location would be willing to provide a PO box for a virtual organization without asking too many questions.

Anonymous has given de facto recognition to Gaza in the form of extensive support during #OpIsrael in late 2012. If Julian Assange’s Australian Senate campaign succeeds, Anonymous will have another friend in the halls of power, as Assange would be joining Icelandic PM Birgitta Jónsdóttir in her support of privacy and human rights.

While there have been various declarations that are more weighty than @LulzWarfare‘s tongue in cheek pronouncement, I believe I am the first to note the similarity between what Anonymous does and the role played by the Knights of St. John.

What happens next?

Anonymous has already demonstrated transnational peacekeeping capabilities, raining fire on Israel for their mistreatment of Palestinians, and bringing similar heat to the government of Myanmar for its persecution of the Rohingya. They clearly have an ability to act on par with that of the Knights of St. John.

There is a small logistics problem in that members of Anonymous lose all standing once their names are known. This has all sorts of implications for identification (public/private keys?), biometrics at border crossings, and so forth. I leave the deep thinking on how to handle this to those more focused cryptographic research.

Afghanistan’s Future Air Force?

Embraer A-29 Super Tucano

The U.S. withdrawal means the current Afghanistan government will have to stand or fall on its own efforts, but we are leaving them with equipment, training, and there will presumably be some sort of funding effort. Recall that after the Soviet Union withdrew the successor government lasted three years, imploding once the funds stopped flowing. Broadly speaking, the inevitable warlords can tax the opium crop, while a legitimate government can not. That is an entirely separate topic, and today my eye is on Afghanistan’s future Air Force and the fleet of 20 A-29 Embraer Super Tucano attack planes they’ll be receiving.

I first began paying attention to our fixed wing gunship fleet after I had a chance to tour an AC-130H Spectre a few years ago. I have long been concerned that we had a mismatch between the number of ground missions and the count and condition of our gunship fleet, which I wrote about in April of 2009.

We have been upgrading other C-130 platforms and as I was fact checking this I discovered that the MC-130W Combat Spear has evolved to include a 30mm cannon and been designated the AC-130W Stinger II. This is a trifle confusing reuse of the name – the original was the Fairchild AC-119 Stinger and the first aircraft dubbed Stinger II was a prototype based on the Alenia C-27 Spartan. The idea was to use the smaller twin engine plane with a smaller crew, newer weapons control system, and have it closer to the action. The C-130 has a huge constituency in Congress and this plan, while operationally sensible, was politically impossible.

The little A-29 faces similar resistance. Hawker Beechcraft got an injunction against maker Embraer while attempting to supplant the combat tested Brazilian plane with their T-6 Texan II trainer. Just like the Stinger II, the T-6 takes it’s name from the World War II vintage T-6 Texan trainer. This blockage was finally cleared April 19th.

The A-29 offers performance similar to a World War II fighter. They can fly out 300 miles in a little over an hour carrying a full load of 3,000 pounds of weapons on external hardpoints. This can include unguided bombs between 250 and 750 pounds, as well as cluster and incendiary munitions. The devices under the wings in the picture are 70mm rocket carriers. There are a variety of warheads available for this simple, unguided rocket including anti-tank, anti-personnel, and a number of options for dealing with bunkers or other fortifications.

When deployed by a relatively stable central government against drug trafficking or insurgency this close air support plane can be used for observation, air only strike missions against known targets, or in support of ground forces. What will the Afghan government do?

A/V-8B Harrier Wreckage, Camp Bastion, Afghanistan

This is what’s left of one of the eight Marine Corps A/V-8B Harriers destroyed in the attack on Camp Bastion. This raid in mid-September of 2012 cost fourteen of the fifteen Taliban involved their lives and only killed two Marines, but the Wake Island Avengers VMA-211 went home with just two of the ten Harrier A/V-8B they brought with them. $200 million in damage divided by fifteen men lost doing the job? $13 million in damage for each KIA they took – that’s a roaring success.

The Afghan government’s objective with regard to any of these planes which are actually delivered will be to keep them from being turned into twisted piles of scorched metal. A secondary objective will be protecting the capitol and maintaining the world perception that Afghanistan has a functional central government. This won’t happen right away, but like the government the Soviet Union left behind, the minute the funding dries up the clock starts ticking for Karzai & Co.

Is this another billion dollars down the Afghan rat hole? This is hard to say, but what this does represent is 1,400 jobs in the U.S., a running production line, and a couple of Congressmen who will block any attempt to disturb that arrangement. The project appears timed to keep the producers out of harm’s way during the sequestration infighting, and in a few years when we need a small, efficient close air support plane we will already have the domestic capacity to produce it.

This took a long time, but the little Super Tucano finally got it’s nose under the tent here in the U.S. Given the dollars involved and the apparent timeline it will prove very difficult for the larger system builders to dislodge it.

Afghanistan Logistics

We are in the process of withdrawing from Afghanistan and there are a number of navel-gazing articles that address “what we will leave behind”, with the focus generally being the political affects in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Slightly less common but still present are the articles on the cost of retrieving some 35,000 armored vehicles from a land locked country.

The casualty map is important for context. The shortest route would be a southern exit through the Chaman crossing to the port of Karachi, but this has consistently been the most dangerous part of the country and conditions on the Pakistan side are also troublesome.

The northern exit crosses the Khyber pass, but based on my reading the threats are equal, they’re just more focused on transport, as opposed to the general anti-NATO view held in the Pashtun dominated Helmand and Khandahar provinces.

I borrowed this map from The Long War Journal as it shows the northern routes, which involve Baltic or Black Sea ports and long train trips. Transiting the Russian Federation is slower and more expensive than landing materials at Karachi, and there are political ramifications to having access, just as they are with Pakistan.

Afghanistan Northern Supply Routes

Part of the reason we have such trouble is the death of 24 Pakistani troops in Mohmand in the winter of 2011. Sensitive about their sovereignty, Pakistan closed supply routes to the U.S. after this event.

I recently posted Disruptive Technology & Reforming The Pentagon Establishment, a series of four articles about the MRAP acquisition, our largest land acquisition since World War II, and how this was done in spite of Pentagon resistance.

Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles

The United States has seen just over 2,200 flag draped caskets come through Dover AFB from Afghanistan. If the Marine Corps had stayed the course on developing the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, the quintessential weapon system in search of a suitable battle, we might have seen double that number of men lost during the 2010 – 2012 surge.

Now that we’re pulling out the fate of the MRAPs is in question. Are we removing all of them? I would guess not – some will be deemed war weary, stripped of all usable equipment, and the bodies left for the scrappers. I have talked to men who have served in Afghanistan and they joke about the need for a “black eye” medal, a lesser companion to the Purple Heart, which would be awarded for non-combat MRAP rollover injuries, which are apparently fairly common. We may see a more complex selection process than a sorting of working/non-working vehicles – those which are deemed to be less capable in some fashion may be left behind.

We’ll never hear grand speeches about “The War To Get Our Stuff Back From Afghanistan”, but that is the phase we are in, and it’s as complex and as challenging as getting there in the first place.

Shifting Priorities

When I wrote What 2013 Has In Store on December 4th, 2012 I had just archived about a thousand posts with political content. I have the habit of doing a bi-annual review and picking something new to do, and this is what I thought would happen next.

I am taking the rest of December off and when I return the direction will be totally different. I have been slowly making my way back to my point of origin – climate, energy, economy, and geopolitics. I will certainly get back on top of global wheat yields and stocks, and I’m going to consider writing about renewable ammonia again, but not until I get a good look at the natural gas market and all of the anti-frac efforts out there.

Grain information is available but I see there isn’t a lot of hope for situational awareness there without taking on the expense of a service meant for commodities traders. I can write qualitatively on broad trends, but I felt the combined financial and opportunity cost was too large.

Map curation coupled with 250 to 500 word pieces on current geopolitical topics got me a small, dedicated core of two dozen readers. I hoped to address the online grassroots activist audience, but I misjudged the opportunity. I did find a few dozen dedicated readers, so there is a core group that services this need, but the demand is not nearly what I thought it would be.

I started writing about situational awareness tools and I hit paydirt. My readership didn’t go up, but LinkedIn postings led to an expanding group of professional contacts working on things like temporal and geospatial analysis, sentiment monitoring, cloud computing, and other things that get lumped under the industry buzzword ‘big data’.

I examined my education and skills in light the technologies being used. I knew I had a gap to fill and I was pleased to find a set of three Coursera classes that would do the trick.

The Natural Language Processing class is also cross disciplinary. My formal education included compilers, I have been using regular expressions tools for about twenty years, and I knew about computational modeling of human speech from my work with voice over IP carriers. I was already familiar with transformational grammar’s application to sentence structure analysis. The underlying set theory, inductive proofs, and algorithm analysis are things I’ve not done in twenty five years, but it came back pretty quickly.

The Social Network Analysis class is somewhat misnamed; it’s a mix of graph theory, game theory, epidemiology, and it uses Gephi, a general purpose visualization tool rather than the penetration testing/law enforcement oriented tools I have used in the past.

The math of Coding the Matrix: Linear Algebra through Computer Science Applications
is familiar but computational methods have changed dramatically since we did this with Pascal on a Vax 11/785. This is a refresher and a chance to use the NumPy libraries on a variety of problems.

Take a new direction, a new target audience, a new format, and that adds up to a need for venue changes, too. LinkedIn has been working well. I got a Google Currents feed going a few weeks back and I really like the reaction I get when I use my tablet to show others this site. Facebook and Twitter don’t really address my new target demographic so I removed the post promotion for them.

I can’t make any predictions on how often I am going to write with the class load I have, but when I do it will be a fusion of foreign policy topics and whatever tool I am evaluating at the moment.

Rohingya: Stateless In Myanmar

The Rohingya people are a group of 1.5 to 3 million people living along the eastern coastline of the Bay of Bengal. Some 800,000 live in the Rakhine state of Myanmar. The country is primarily Buddhist and the Sunni Muslim Rohingya are viewed as Bangladeshi refugees by the government, but their presence there predates the annexation of their traditional homeland three hundred years ago.

The Rohingya were largely invisible until the release of political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi in 2010. She has not spoken of them, but her release coincided with an overall lightening of the heavy hand of the government of Myanmar, and reports began to flow.

I saw a couple of mentions of the Rohingya in my Twitter stream yesterday which means something is brewing. Given the unique group name this seemed like a good time to apply RecordedFuture‘s predictive capabilities. I searched from the start of the year through March 22nd. There are a steady flow of reports.

The ‘travel’ category here is a few diplomats on the move, the rest are reports on Rohingya refugees. Protests are instability triggered by the mistreatment of this ethnic group by the Myanmar government. The quotations didn’t have much in the way of false positives – there is some real world buzz about this issue.

The map of the happenings provided another big clue. A large pie graph in Myanmar, a smaller one in the Rakhine state itself, but there are also reports in Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Andaman islands. The military and protest reports are at their origin, while military and travel items are found at their destinations.

I had to scrub a dozen places I deemed to be false positives. There are relevant pronouncements from diplomats and human rights agencies in the U.S. and U.K., but I wanted to see things at the geographic locus. The places on the network map provided even more detail as to which nations and specific locations are affected.

Once I removed the western locations most of the names of westerners dropped out, leaving me with a large group of names from the region and a couple of westerner experts. The only name I recognized was Aung San Suu Kyi, so this view provides a pool of names to examine. She has a complete profile.

Selecting “What is happening this month” produced a timeline focused on her. She is often quoted and if she travels this is newsworthy, too.

Most of the other names did not have a profile but they still have the same set of search functions available. Keep in mind that RecordedFuture’s value is not just that it deduces geospatial and temporal information from the text of articles. They have a ‘Report As Inaccurate’ function that permits users to briefly explain why a given item is incorrectly classified. The Feedback & Support tab on the right provides access to answers for common questions and a means to provide information to support and development. Since the system’s output is largely graphical they have provided the ‘attach a file’ so it’s easy to send a screen shot if you find something out of place.

This collection of feedback from users for the sake of training the system is a neural network concept – RecordedFuture‘s system can be viewed as a temporally aware media oriented hive mind. It will be interesting to see what unexpected phenomenon emerge as the user base grows and innovates. As each of us become more aware of our place in the world we might even find a path to relieving the suffering of the stateless.

Carrier Strike Group

The United States has eleven aircraft carriers. There is one surviving Enterprise class ships, the ten Nimitz class ships are the backbone of the fleet, and the first of the three planned Gerald R. Ford class ships is under construction. The surviving Enterprise class vessel is the Enterprise herself – the first nuclear powered aircraft carrier ever launched.

USS Enterprise CVN-65

Are you shaking your head at my ancient example photo? The two planes parked crosswise near the front appear to me to be A6 Intruders while the delta shaped one standing alone near the fantail is an F-14 Tomcat. The Intruder is a decade into retirement while the mighty Tomcat held out until 2006. This shot is from the late 1970s.

Carriers never travel alone, despite the photo. A typical configuration for a carrier strike group involves one or two of our twenty two Ticonderoga class Aegis cruisers, two or three of our fifty one Arleigh Burke class Aegis destroyers, one or two of our thirty Oliver Hazard Perry frigates, and one or two of our forty five Los Angeles class attack submarines.

The Ticonderoga class cruiser packs the heaviest punch of any surface vessel we have. The original five ships of this class were limited to 88 missiles and could not fire the Tomahawk so they’ve been retired. The twenty two remaining ships all have vertical launch systems and can carry 122 missiles. The Tomahawk cruise missile is just one tool, with antiaircraft and antisubmarine missiles rounding out the magazine contents. The Ticonderoga class are AEGIS ships, with AEGIS being the networked combatant system. They readily share information with other AEGIS ships, carriers, aircraft, and so forth, making their coordination unparalleled.

Port Royale CG-73 Ticonderoga Class

The Ticonderoga class each pack a pair of five inch guns. This is a dramatic change from the cruisers of World War II, which typically had nine eight inch guns. The seventy pound five inch round has much less range and utility in terms of shore bombardment than the two hundred sixty pound eight inch shell.

The Arleigh Burke class destroyer is a giant as far as destroyers go, displacing almost as much as a Ticonderoga class. These ships have 90 missiles or about three quarters of the capacity of the Ticonderoga and the use the same mix of cruise, antiaircraft, and antisubmarine missiles. They have a different role than the Ticonderoga, as they’re fitted with much more gear used for antiaircraft and antisubmarine duty. Later models have become more cruiser like with the fitting of the facilities needed to support the Seahawk antisubmarine helicopters found on the Ticonderoga.

Arleigh Burke Class DDG-51

The smallest surface combat ships in operation are the Oliver Hazard Perry class frigates, with fifty one total ships in service today. These are 40% of the weight of the AEGIS vessels, they formerly had an older style of missile launcher but these were decommissioned in 2003, and they pack a lot of antisubmarine gear as well as a curious 76mm automatic cannon capable of firing 120 rounds per minute.

Oliver Hazard Perry Class FFG

The Los Angeles class attack boats are the last piece of the carrier strike group’s combat vessels. A ship is a ship, but a submarine is a boat. Remember that and you’ll sound like you have half a clue if you’re talking to a submariner.

   This is an older Los Angeles class. You can tell that by the diving planes attached to the sail. The newer ships have them on the bow and the sail is heavily reinforced, permitting them to surface through ice in the Arctic.

Expeditionary Strike Group

The United States has ten Expeditionary Strike Groups. Instead of the aerial package our Carrier Strike Groups deliver they carry an integrated mix of marines, armor, landing craft, helicopters, V-22 Osprey, and AV-8B Harrier attack planes.

The heart of the expeditionary strike group is either one of five Tarawa class landing helicopter assault ships or one of the seven Wasp class landing helicopter dock ships. The Tarawa class date from the 1970s while the Wasps are twenty years newer. Each can carry roughly thirty five aircraft, a crew of about a thousand, two thousand marines, and both have internal “wells” where other vessels can ride.

Tarawa Class Landing Helicopter Assault Ship

Wasp Class Landing Helicopter Dock Ship

The Wasp class can support three of these guys – the LCAC, while the Tarawa can support just one.

Wasp Class LHD Deploying LCAC

Additional landing craft come aboard either an Austin class or the newer San Antonio class landing platform dock. The Austin class holds a single LCAC and the San Antonio class can take two. This type of vessel has great below deck capacity for landing craft but can only take a few aircraft – six helicopters for the Austin and just two to four aboard the San Antonio class.

San Antonio Class Landing Platform Dock

Austin Class Landing Platform Dock

Rounding out the amphibious assault ship complement would be a landing ship dock, either a Whidbey Island class or a Harpers Ferry class. The Whidbey Island class carries four LCACs while the Harpers Ferry class derived from it only carries two LCACs, leaving much more room for cargo. These guys have places for helicopters to land but they’re not really set up for air units.

Whidbey Island Class Landing Ship Dock

Harper’s Ferry Class Landing Ship Dock

An expeditionary strike group doesn’t go roaming around without escort and they get at least one each of the three types of escorts – cruisers, destroyers, and frigates.

The Ticonderoga class cruiser packs the heaviest punch of any surface vessel we have. The original five ships of this class were limited to 88 missiles and could not fire the Tomahawk so they’ve been retired. The twenty two remaining ships all have vertical launch systems and can carry 122 missiles. The Tomahawk cruise missile is just one tool, with antiaircraft and antisubmarine missiles rounding out the magazine contents. The Ticonderoga class are AEGIS ships, with AEGIS being the networked combatant system. They readily share information with other AEGIS ships, carriers, aircraft, and so forth, making their coordination unparalleled.

Port Royale CG-73 Ticonderoga Class

The Ticonderoga class each pack a pair of five inch guns. This is a dramatic change from the cruisers of World War II, which typically had nine eight inch guns. The seventy pound five inch round has much less range and utility in terms of shore bombardment than the two hundred sixty pound eight inch shell.

The Arleigh Burke class destroyer is a giant as far as destroyers go, displacing almost as much as a Ticonderoga class. These ships have 90 missiles or about three quarters of the capacity of the Ticonderoga and the use the same mix of cruise, antiaircraft, and antisubmarine missiles. They have a different role than the Ticonderoga, as they’re fitted with much more gear used for antiaircraft and antisubmarine duty. Later models have become more cruiser like with the fitting of the facilities needed to support the Seahawk antisubmarine helicopters found on the Ticonderoga.

Arleigh Burke Class DDG-51

The smallest surface combat ships in operation are the Oliver Hazard Perry class frigates, with fifty one total ships in service today. These are 40% of the weight of the AEGIS vessels, they formerly had an older style of missile launcher but these were decommissioned in 2003, and they pack a lot of antisubmarine gear as well as a curious 76mm automatic cannon capable of firing 120 rounds per minute.

Oliver Hazard Perry Class FFG

This article was originally published on DailyKos in 2010.

Algeria: Operators Are Standing By

Yesterday a group known as Katibat Moulathamine, Algeria’s Masked Brigade, staged an attack on a British Petroleum natural gas facility. They took hostages and the linked report indicates 35 of them were killed by an Algerian air strike, along with 15 of their captors.

This came via a Foreign Policy magazine situation report.

As many as 25 hostages may have escaped from the In Amenas natural gas complex in Algeria. But reports do not indicate if any Americans are among them. ABC News, quoting intelligence officials, has reported that three of the hostages are Americans. The group of workers were taken yesterday in bold move by what appears to be the al Qaeda offshoot group in North Africa, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, apparently in response to recent French action against Islamic extremists in neighboring Mali. A U.S. “Commander’s in Extremis”, stood up Oct. 1, in the wake of the attack in Libya, is on a four-hour alert status should it be asked to deploy to the region, CNN is reporting. Africom Commander Gen. Carter Ham is, naturally, the lead military officer in the matter.

I noticed AFRICOM commander Carter Ham due to the personality oriented coverage that happens only via Foreign Policy, but I’d never heard the phrase “Commander’s in Extremis”. This link provided some background.

Every Special Forces Group (Airborne) (SFG(A)) includes a Combatant Commanders In-extremis Force (CIF) Company. The CIF is a specially-trained and resourced element that is focused on Direct Action (DA) / Counter Terrorism (CT) missions. This role includes both training foreign tactical units in DA / CT techniques and carrying out DA / CT operations themselves, often with partner nation forces.

Based on a quick read this appears to be several small direct action teams, able to be delivered by one or two MH-60 helicopters, and a logistics and support unit. Prior to this all my reading and writing regarding special forces has focused on their close air support systems – our tired gunship fleet, our expanding drone fleet, and the Super Tucano close air support turboprop plane.

Our military doctrine has changed steadily in response to our war of necessity in Afghanistan and Bush’s adventure in Iraq. The Division as a unit of military organization is an artifact of the massive ground actions of World War II. The eight wheeled Stryker vehicles were organized into Stryker Brigades, with a brigade being the smallest unit that has the integrated logistics necessary for long term deployments.

The Expeditionary Strike Group moves a 2,200 man Marine Expeditionary Unit. The future deployment size may be two or more littoral combat ships guarded by a single Arleigh Burke class destroyer, delivering mechanized infantry companies containing a mix of Strykers and MRAPs.

I had not intended to focus on systems, as I have in the past, but I think the doctrine changes are something only an intent, long term watcher would notice. I may have to retrieve writings from other places and spend some time doing a survey of current practices.

State Department Witch Hunt

There has been loose talk from various loose screws in the Republican dominated House regarding the need to impeach President Obama for the 9/11/2012 Benghazi incident.

I recently discovered DiploPundit and this post was enlightening: Accountability Review Board Fallout: Who Will be Nudged to Leave, Resign, Retire? Go Draw a Straw. This is the closing paragraph, which I hope motivates you to read the whole piece – it’s only 500 words or so.

Folks, we do not like the look of this bureaucratic firewall. The NEA resignation if true looks contrived and the artificiality offends us. What decisions regarding Benghazi did Mr. Maxwell actually do, that the NEA Assistant Secretary and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary and their bosses at “P” and beyond did not sign off? Did the seven NEA officials below PDAS had to draw a straw on who should step down? Inquiring minds would like to know.

So, it’s all bureaucratic ass covering now, but who is really to blame? State Department Reeling From Budget Cuts provides a clue:

Andrew Shapiro, assistant secretary of state in its Bureau of Political Military Affairs, told a meeting last week of the Center for New American Security that the hefty cuts will compromise national security. He noted that the 2012 funding bill for State Department and foreign operations was cut 8 percent by the full Senate Appropriations Committee and a whopping 18 percent by the House Appropriations State and Foreign Operations subcommittee.

So the House Republicans partially strangle the State Department using the purse strings back in 2011, and now the witch hunters are out in force, making sure that Hillary Clinton isn’t viable for a 2016 presidential run. Four diplomats died and this decreased our overall national security. The experts are saying the 2014 election will likely be a national referendum on GOP obstructionism. Let’s hope we don’t lose a couple more embassies due to their irresponsibility over the next two years.

America’s Peak Biofuel Acres

When do you think we hit peak biofuel acres? This year? 2007, before the economy went sideways. Nope. It was …

1915, when we had 75 million acres of hay and 36 million acres of oats, used to feed an estimated 21 million horses and a similar number of oxen.

Detailed stats from precisely a century ago are impossible to find, but we can get a sense of what it was like from the 1900 Census maps. The first one is hay, the second shows where oats were grown.

Things changed a great deal in a hundred years – here’s the 2002 hay production map. I couldn’t find similar information for oats.

And here is why there isn’t a production map for oats. Production dropped from 36 million to about half a million acres. Oats are primarily a human food now. They were also a crop for marginal land when I was young – raised for both its for the grain, and for the leftover straw, which was baled and used as bedding for animals.

I found this fall 2012 article, Pushing The Corn Numbers. I hunted up conversions of the various units and came up with 37 million out of 84 million acres of corn being used for ethanol.

Looking at this from another perspective, we use 20 million barrels of oil a day. Ethanol is less efficient by volume due to the oxygen atom in the mix, so divide an oil figure by .57 to get the corresponding amount of ethanol needed to provide the same energy as a given amount of oil. We go through liquid fuel to the tune of 35 million barrels of ethanol a day, or 840 million gallons. The entire ethanol industry produced 13.9 billion gallons last year – enough to replace seventeen days of driving. Divide 365 by 17 and you learn we’d need to expand ethanol by a factor of 22 to replace oil. Multiply 22 times that 37 million acres used and you come up needing 816 million acres. The entire U.S. is 3.79 million square miles, or 2.4 billion acres, and the most we ever cultivated was 330 million acres.

What happens next, given that we face climate change, peak oil, and a banking sector primed to consume itself in an orgy of write downs? I can offer a lot of guesses, but no one really knows. Here’s a clue for you – this is a map of the continents the last time Earth faced a carbon exhumation on the scale we are creating with our fossil fuel addiction. Even if we turned our entire will to this problem I suspect it would be the equivalent of trying to stop a freight train with a flyswatter.