Asymmetrical Information

The problem is counterdetection. If you're broadcasting your position, anyone can listen in and radiolocate. There are countermeasures, but I'm not sure how small they can be made.
I vaguely recall that 160th SOAR has such devices, but if I read that it was only in once place eg not particularly reliable.

I had the same thought a few weeks ago (I know, I know, you'll just have to take my word for it). It might even save some lives if it had an alarm feature that the user could activate immediately if captured, allowing a prompt response before the terrorists could get them to their safe house.

As you say, even if they are killed, it might be better to be bombed than to have your head hacked off after hours or days of anticipating it, and after a few such incidents the monster would probably give up, both because it wouldn't be effective and because they'd be sacrificing themselves every time. Though it would have been nice to be able to call in an air strike just as Zarquawi was starting to cut.

Unfortunately, we're all in the army now, particularly when in the Middle East. If I were working there, I'd certainly like such a device, so at least my death could serve some useful purpose, instead of propaganda for the enemy.

That should have been "monsters" plural...

in fall REI catalog they sell PLBs (Personal Locator Beacons) that talk to satellites. They retail for $699.

I would venture to guess that in a kidnap situation, you:

a) don't have time to activate the beacon
b) any equipment you have would be quickly confiscated

But... if the product you describe were available, then I for one would buy it if I was venturing into possible kidnap areas.

Sounds like a product for the private security agencies...

Implantable type devices have a range measured in inches. And they are used for identification than for location (although some are advertised for location kidnap victims, physics dictates that they cannot possibly be used for that).

Personal lojacks? I bet those would be used to target folks who were worth kidnapping. You don't need to determine what the signal said, just that it was being transmitted. Throw your target into a faraday cage, strip them, then toss their old belongings in a river. Nice idea, but there are too many countermeasures that can be done on the cheap to make it feasible. In cities where lojack is common, smart (ie, not joy riders) thieves will park a car in a location where it can be observed. Any police vehicle coming within visual range = lojacked car, and the car is then abandoned. Using the transmitters to call in airstrikes? I bet they will then be quickly torn off the victims and tossed onto the roof of the green zone, or your enemy of the day.

I predict that the kidnappings will die out only when the media is ordered to stop broadcasting it. Like in all the cities in the US that had troubles with roadside snipers and "road rage" killers (St Louis and Jacksonville come to mind). The shootings would continue until the police caught them, or they moved away, but the public believed that they stopped, because the news stopped.

I think that the point about using the system to locate potential victims is well made. Also, I read recently that there exist fairly cheap jammers which create a bubble within which cell phones won't work (say 30 ft. in a restaurant); I would imagine that the same system could be used to render useless the lojack. Any telecom engineers out there who could confirm this?

One misconception - Lojacks don't transmit until they are triggered. So they can't be detected.

Any counter jamming could also be detected by the good guys. They'd probably just start stuffing people underground or in concrete buildings so the signal wouldn't get out.

Eventually, the huge media exposure to beheading will die down as it loses it's edge due to overexposure. I just had a discussion this morning with a colleague who took the time to watch one of the beheading videos. (I, for one, can live the rest of my life without seeing one) Given the disgusting nature of these killings, we suspect that the acts must be polarizing those in their own community. Drawing the extremists together and pushing away those with a shred of decency.

Yes, the technology is extant to have receiver
units ... as small as a pinhead ... able to be
detected by a 'blanket' search initiated by many
means. To implement this at this time might prove
to be counter-productive, as sad as the life of a few lost might seem. To implement this technology
now would give rise to counter-measures. Better to save it until more is at stake. Harsh? Yep.
War often, if not always, has casualities that
at face seem ... grave. But the loss of a few
may mean the survival of the rest. That would
be us. No need to grant the enemy any ground.

Better to hold ours until we succeed in the
fight.

Jayson:

Any counter jamming could also be detected by the good guys. Cool. Thanks for the good information.

[A] colleague who took the time to watch one of the beheading videos.Be nice to him. When he snaps and comes into the office blazing, maybe he'll spare you. Jeebus.

Gee....it may just be the way my mind works, but I was thinking about this:

I think I would jut wear a hand grenade around my neck, if the bastards go to grab me, hope I can get the pin out of it before they take it away from me.

The ultimate would be a device implanted into the body they can be detonated by voice command. I realize that this sounds like suicide bombing (it is actually) but in this case they victims aren't exactly inoccent women and children, are they?

That would provide quite a nasty suprise,wouldn't it?

Actually for those of you who are not engineers there is a technology, UWB (Ultra Wide-Band), that when combined with spread-spectrum and other encoding technologies renders the signal virtually immune to ecm (electronic counter measures).

As for detectability, UWB is indistinguishable from random noise.

This technology is already being deployed for "high value" equipment. Although I can't say for certain if Dick Cheney has one implanted in him.

I'm surprised at the low quality of the comments so far. There are lots of poorly thought out claims. I'm not going to address them all, however, as one thing trumps them all.

We can't build an implantable device of the sort you are proposing at this time, full stop. We could not construct a transmitter which would be detectable at a sufficient distance which would operate for a significant period of time with the power budget available in a small implantable device, especially given the constraints in an environment where there is (essentially) salt water all around the device attenuating signals.

Having the device wait to transmit until it receives a signal will not help given that a receiver requires power, too.

Overall, I don't think this is a particularly promising idea at the moment. Perhaps in ten years, but not now.

Personally, if I had to be over there, I think I'd probably carry cyanide pills with me. Of course, there's no guarantee you'd get the chance to take them, but I'd still like to have them if I were there.

Dead is dead, but I'd prefer to go in a firefight, even if I was only reaching for my weapon, or didn't even have time to do so, than to be led away like a lamb to a videotaped slaughter.

Mr. Metzger:

The receiver would need orders of magnitude less power. In fact, it could be purely passive (like a dog microchip). Only if it got a matching signal (something simple, like a garage door sequence; no need for 1024 bit keys) would it fire up the transmitter and actively drain the power source.

Now, the size of the radiator might be a difficulty. I'm not really an RF guy, so am not sure about that.

Perry,

It depends on what your definition of implantable is. Current pacemaker and insulin pumps are sizable (larger than many cell phones)

Also, are you familiar with the power requirements of UWB transmitters?

Notice that I'm not addressing the practicality of the subject only the feasibility.

But as Peter did point out previously, a properly constructed Faraday cage would render the effectiveness of the strategy somewhat moot.

Has it already been done? A recent lopsided prisoner exchange in Israel was followed by an astonishingly-accurate assasination campaign against terrorist leaders.

Perhaps RFID's will be the answer in the future. It's a technology being driven by private industry and will make huge gains in the future. The passive tags do not need power and are only activated and powered when a reader sends out a query. The UHF versions have a range of up to 100 meters. This is sure to increase in the future...ideally to the point where one could "ping" a city to find a location.

this is absolutely feasible, comments above to the contrary.

you can buy a breitling watch with a GPS locator beacon inside (targeted at pilots and sailors).. it's not ridiculously huge.

transmission could be accomplished many ways: implant in torso and have a barely subcutaneous transmitter, to reduce attenuation and possible damage; have a transdermal transmitter (kind of a bad idea due to infection, etc) with the radio on the outside; have an external antenna thats powered and driven by internal source (reverse of some current pumps and implantable devices).

and as mentioned, you could have a passive trigger that uses induction to turn on the transmitter...

lots of semi-knowledgeable and negative people shooting down a concept for illegitimate reasons.

whether it is workable for cost reasons (and the need to implant these in many people) or if you can put the components together/develop them fast enough to be of use is another question.

i would at least buy a gps emergency watch and wear it at all times in hostile situations... its better than nothing and they are likely to let you keep your watch for a bit and may keep it themselves as a trophy.. some trophy

A GPS locator is not a transmitter; it receives radio signals and can tell you where you are, but to tell anyone else it also needs a transmitter. Receivers can be shrunk indefinitely, but to be received at more than a few feet, the transmitter needs some power, and it needs a substantial antenna. To see the minimum requirements for a range of a few miles and batteries that last for about an hour of transmitting, just look at a small cell phone. If they could make it smaller, they would have. And if it was implanted (transmitting through some flesh), the batteries would have to be bigger to push the signal through radio-absorptive material.

It is, as said above, perfectly feasible from a technology standpoint. Use a passive receiver, code triggered (so that triggering it doesn't trigger all of the thousands of others). Transmits a sub-second coded burst (sounds like static), at pretty low power. Standby is cheap on power, and total transmit time would be only several seconds (maybe a couple dozen triggered bursts).

GPS is a non-starter -- the satellites are invisible from inside most buildings, or even car trunks -- so can't assume the device will know where it is. Have to do location through triangulation.

The problems are in implementation. The device itself would be pretty cheap. Surgical implantation is probably much more expensive. But if it's removeable, it will be removed (and wired to a schoolbus).

And anything employed on a wide enough scale to be useful in this instance will not be a secret. So the kidnapers will know that there is at least a likelihood that it is there. My guess is that they will do a very quick strip-search, and any signs of the device (or, possibly, your old appendectomy scar) gets the victim immediately killed and dumped.

You can get tiny cell phones, of a size suitable for implantation, with a talk time of 5 hours, a transmission rate of 10,000 bits per second, and a range of, say, two miles. A emergency locator system only needs to transmit perhaps one bit every five minutes, and needs a range of perhaps 25 miles. The lower bit rate saves a factor of 1/3,000,000 in transmitted power, while the extra range adds a factor of (25/2)^2=156 in transmitted power, for a net factor of 0.005%, or a savings of 99.995%. So power isn't much of an issue. (Reduced data rate is why Morse code remains popular for long-distance ham radio, especially among the bounce-signals-off-the-moon crowd.)

Body temperature is relatively constant, so the electronics only have to work over a narrow range of temperatures. That makes the design much easier. (Radio engineers spend way too much time putting their circuits in environmental chambers and then wondering why they drift out of spec.)

Fairly simple cryptographic codes can be used to prevent spoofing. Transmitting over a wide bandwidth is easy but makes jamming extremely difficult. Technically I think it is doable.

The real problem is operations. The enemy can easily change their strategy to accomodate the transmitter, by executing the hostage immediately, then destroying the transmitter, and then releasing the video a little at a time to simulate a longer captivity. The transmitter makes the hostage worse off and does not change the propaganda value much. Or they could leave the transmitter working and take the hostage to either (1) a fortified ambush, or (2) a friendly-rich environment like a school or market. (Or both.) You cannot justify bombing the transmitter zone, sending infantry into a set-up is ugly too, and neither are likely to help the hostage. Furthermore, implanting 50,000 transmitters, and later removing them, would be a logistical and financial nightmare; long-term medical effects would create significant litigation and expense.

My conclusion: the technology would work, but be a complete waste. A better approach would be to cut off food and propane distribution to trouble zones "for the safety of the distribution workers." Locals would quickly discover on which side their bread was buttered. (The "every culture is three meals away from a revolution" theory of diplomacy.)

The high tech stuff is very intresting. But beyond the theoritical, there was an Iraqi Security Guard that left his post at the building the kidnapping took place at, so theres a place to start an investigation. Theres also the owner of the building to question. The Iraqui govt can really interrogate this guard and owner hard, and the intell that two Americans and a Brit were living in the apartments had to come from somewhere.

After 911, I said to myself, "that style of attack will never work again, people wont just stay seated if they know their going to die if they dont act." Then I heard about the plane to San Diego with the sixteen piece Syrian band that behaved suspiciously the entire trip. I thought that after the Berg video, Americans working in Iraq would arm themselves to the teeth, and may die on the street in a shootout, but not by decapatation on video. I cant believe Americans are allowing themselves to be kidnapped, knowing the consequence. I cant help but recall the story of the Italian facing execution at the beggining of this mess that told his captors, "Now I'll show you how an Italian dies" and spit at the camera. I really hope the other American civillians in Iraq have learned the lesson.

Begbee, the incident about the syrian band was a racist incident. At the least, they were guilty of being arab in public, at the most they were guilty of "leering at a white woman," a known capital offence for darkies in the deep south up to the 1960s (and was obvious if you read her tirade). Her story spread around the US, just like Susan Smith's story of how her white taurus (with her 2 boys in the back seat) was carjacked by a black male. When the truth was, she had rolled the car into a lake with her 2 sons belted into the back seat. Racism here in the US is still terribly prevalent, and reading ann jacobson's tirade makes it clear. If you have any experience dealing with witnesses, you already know how fragmented witness testimony is. Reading her tirade makes it clear that it was not from memory she was writing, but instead writing from fantasy, and she later hypnotized herself into believing her fantasy. Folks who keep spreading her story are her accomplices.

"[RFID]'s a technology being driven by private industry and will make huge gains in the future."

Yes, especially in the future year of 2003, in which every truck, container, pallet and skid will have a RFID passive "tag" affixed and Army Logisticians will use scanners at gateways and marshalling yards in Kuwait, Qatar and even just-behind-the-front staging areas to determine just how many rounds of ammo and bottles of drinking water the troops will have as the supply chain supports the fastest military advance in history ...

It'll be great when private industry releases their futuristic tools to the bone heads in uniform, someday in, perhaps, the 21st century.

Oh. Wait a minute ... Uhm.

Oh well. At least FedEx and UPS pioneered GPS positioning and tracking technology before the military had it...

there is this article about the mexican attorney general who has a chip in him in case he gets kidnapped:
http://apnews.myway.com//article/20040714/D83QQBP80.html

wired has an arcticle about attempts to stymie kidnapping in mexico:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,60771,00.html

wow, kuro5hin does better reporting than wired:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/5/1/19527/62704

Peter I understand that racism exists in America, and 99% of Arabs arent terrorists. But from the interview I saw, and the articles I read, these Syrians were behaving strangely, at least. Ive read that half of them were in the front of the plane, half were in the back of the plane, and they were communicating with hand signals. Ive read that they ignored the remain seated signs when lit, and entered the restroom in pairs. If all these claims are accurate, I would have felt compelled to act, if only to put an obstacle between the Syrians and the cockpit. What really alarmed me about this story, was Larry King had actor James Woods on CNN just after this incident, and he reported similar behavior by Arabs on a commercial flight just prior to 911. But I do agree that eyewitness testimony is often shakey evidence, and I have heard of no passenger but Jacobson comment on this incident. The point Im trying to get across is there comes a time when aggressively defending yourself is the best decision.

Maybe there are only two of us, but I'm with Jeff regarding the personal grenade solution. You'd also want to learn how to shout, "grenade" and "no-delay fuse" in Arabic, I reckon.

Maybe there's potential for a secondary market for confiscated Palestinian suicide bomber belts among foreign contractors working in Iraq. . . .

The sky marshalls on board that plane felt no threat from the syrians. I suspect they are far better trained than you, I or ms jacobson. One of the sky marshall on that flight did something extremely few have ever done, which is give a (department approved) interview. Why? because of her inflammatory statements and the press coverage of them. His story contradicts ms jacobsons in several key areas.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,676558,00.html

Paul I have no problem accepting the sky marshalls version of events, I had never come across that information. And Im not in anyway advocating racism. But I do hope the US civilians in Iraq understand the danger their in, and that to not resist any attempted kidnapping will result in their family suffering alot more than if they die in a shootout in the street.

I think that an implanted device would be the only way to go, but, I, for one, would never consent to such a device until there were a simple and painless way to remove it after I had left such a theatre. I certainly wouldn't want anyone to be able to trigger radio device tracking of my person any time they wanted. Down that path is the dark shadow of totalitarianism.

According to the Breitling web site, their Emergency & Emergency Mission watches broadcast a locator signal on 112.5 MHz with an effective range of 200 miles.

This is the same emergency location technology in use by Yachtsmen and Aviators for at least 2 decades. Albeit HIGHLY miniaturized. GPS has nothing to do with it, although the Emergency also has a GPS receiver.

So many knowledgeable people without any actual knowledge. Amusing!

CiT

Funny you should ask.

I was just having this conversation with a neighbor who has the opportunity to work in Iraq. He was asking my opinion of whether he should go; and being a bit radical, I told only go if they put a chip inside you so if you are taken they will be able to track you. The radical part was my then telling him that if I were going I would also tell them that if they did not think they could get me in time, they would have my permission to bomb the location; I'd want my captors to die too.

Strangely, he tells me today that in the conference call interview with the Dept. of State he said just that to the those people, (I wonder if he forget where he got the idea?), along with challenging them on how these latest men could have been taken from inside the compound. He added, he says, a "wtf was going on", and a demand for an satisfactory answer before he will go.

Also. The Mexican government has been implanting a tracking chip

At the risk of being a link whore (gigolo?), I wrote about this chip implant idea in July: Here

So many knowledgeable people without any actual knowledge. Amusing!

I think I got a bucket of crow for you, starting right here: Definition of Emergency Beacon

Money quote:

"The oldest, cheapest (US$ 139) beacons send an anonymous warble at 121.5 MHz. They work over only 60% of the earth, require up to 6 hours for notification, locate within 20 km (search area of 1214 sq. km.) and are anonymous. Coverage is partial because the satellite has to be in view of both the beacon and a ground station at the same time - the satellite does not store and forward the beacon's position. Coverage in polar and south-hemisphere areas is bad. The frequency is the standard aviation emergency frequency, so false alarms are common. To reduce false alarms, a beacon is confirmed by a second satellite pass, which slows notification to 4 hours. Also, the beacons can't be located as well because their frequency is only accurate to 50 parts per million, and they send only 75 milliwatts."

This is clearly not a suitable device for the kind of operation we are describing here. In addition to the above, it could easily be jammed once the enemy combatants know it is being used, and the watch probably gets an antenna boost from external contact with human body. If implanted, your broadcast range just fell by a whole lot, and externally it is easily found and destroyed (or used for more nefarious purposes).

The two newer 406MHz transmitter types described on that same page seem to require a 5W broadcast power, which is fine if you don't mind carrying a small power supply around but that won't be suitable for minmally-invasive implanting.

1. Leak fake tech specs of nonexistent implant
2. Wait for matching jammers to pop up
3. Locate and destroy the jammers

Trumpeting nonexistent American super-technology as a poison pill to enemies, causing them to overreact and trip themselves up, is a strategy with a fine pedigree (see Reagan & SDI).

It doesn’t have to work for it to work. ;-)

By the way, if ever there were a thread that cried out for the participation of Steven Den Beste...

Calling Sky Captain. Come in, Sky Captain.
Emergency.
Calling Sky Captain. Come in, Sky Captain...

Pouncer:

You are confused.

RFID's are not in such common use by the military, although the Pentagon is requiring their use on pallets and cases by January 2005. Yes, the Army has been leading the way in active tags, but nowhere near the widespread use you suggest.

I'm not suggesting that those in the military are boneheads, however, the days of the military having more advanced technology than private industry are long gone. In fact, the company supplying the military with the current contract for RFID's is quite private and has been purchased and resold several times since 1989.

If you have some top secret information regarding passive RFID's on rounds of ammo and drinking water, please post it so the rest of the world may learn.

Hey Jayson,

It's not secret or anything. In fact, the whole RFID thing is kinda like Patton's comment on logistics generally. "I don't understand it, but I want more of it."

That the GAO in December 2003 was criticizing the shortcomings of the early implementation of the systems and recommending the 2nd generation of hardware, database links, and infrastructure, should give you some indication of how far ahead DoD is over WalMart:

http://www.gao.gov/atext/d04305r.txt

You might want to look at what the supply sergeants themselves think...

http://www.quartermaster.army.mil/oqmg/Professional_Bulletin/2004/Summer04/RFID_Initiatives_The_Race_Against_Time_and_Technology.htm

"The DOD’s current RFID network infrastructure relies upon a fixed RFID interrogator at all points in a military transportation route to ensure proper asset-tracking capabilities. Although vast improvements have been made for Operation Iraqi Freedom in Southwest Asia, the disadvantages with the current fixed infrastructure limit DOD’s capabilities. ..."

SO various brainy officers are writing the milspec for the new and improved versions; taking advantage of RFID as an "underused resource", doing MUCH more with gear just a BIT better:

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0PAI/is_1_36/ai_113456659

As far as I know, WalMart is still attempting to get the first 100 vendors to meet their January 200-FIVE deadline to ONE (test, pilot program) distribution hub. And the rest of commercial industry is in "wait and see" mode behind WalMart.

I'm sure when WalMart does get it going it'll be nice, cheap, and effective. The military's approach has been, and is likely to continue to be, slapdash, expensive, and just-good-enough.

Just so I have this straight:

"We should implant people in Iraq with tracking devices. That way, if they're kidnapped, they can be blown up before they're forced to go on television and it looks bad."

Terrorists go in for beheading captives because it makes for dramatic television. They would go back to bombings or mortar attacks if they were somehow prevented from doing kidnappings.

A beacon which has to be remotely triggered does have to have a receiver, but the receiver doesn't have to run continuously. I don't see any reason why the receiver couldn't run 1 second out of ever five minutes, since the "turn yourself on" signal to it can run continuously until you get a response from the beacon. Couple that with a decent sized silver battery (i.e. similar to what they use in implantable pacemakers), and you could have a very long operational life for such an implant before the battery had to be replaced.

I don't see such a beacon as being an invitation for kidnap. Why would they want someone known to have a beacon implanted? Besides which, they have no difficulty finding potential targets.

Also, remember that the enemy is low-budget and low-tech. They won't easily be able to get hold of the kind of equipment which would be needed to detect this kind of beacon. (And as has already been pointed out, a jammer is an invitation. That's why God gave us HARMs.)

But all this strikes me as the wrong answer. The goal should not be to find kidnap victims, the goal should be to prevent kidnappings and to kill kidnappers.

It seems to me that the right answer is for people who are vulnerable to realize that they are vulnerable, and to realize that if they're kidnapped then they are virtually certain to suffer a slow and horrible death. In that case, isn't it better to be armed at all times and to fight the kidnappers if-and-when? Better to die in a gunbattle than to be butchered.

If every kidnap victim fights, and if the kidnapper gangs are losing an average of one guy for every victim they manage to take alive, they'll soon cease kidnapping.

I don't think relying on insurgent kidnappers in Iraq to be unwilling to accept equivalent losses is a very good idea, either.

It's also a "boil the ocean" solution; do you seriously think "everyone in Iraq should be heavily armed and willing to fight to the death rather than be captured" is practical?

It doesn't have to be 100%, and yes, I do think it's practical.

"We should implant people in Iraq with tracking devices. That way, if they're kidnapped, they can be blown up before they're forced to go on television and it looks bad."

No, to deprive them of the benefits of kidnapping and thus provide a disincentive and save lives.

Oh right, incentives. I keep forgetting that word isn't in everyone's vocabulary.

I ran across this idea elsewhere, and tried to get some notion of the limits of technology available off-the-shelf. I haven't looked into the Breitling thing as yet, but for what it's worth, this is what I found. The long and short is that it appears doable, but just not super cheap. As far as it goes, with some of the itsy-bitsy GPS recievers available, it might be possible to feed that information out when the chip does its thing. At any rate, it's not a complete examination, but merely some thoughts jotted down.

I made a similar proposal on my blog, and a friend has done a preliminary analysis at his blogsite. I think the folks who are immediately pissing icewater on this idea have the wrong perspective. The epidemeological approach gives the right general perspective. Anything you can do to increase the cost of predation will reduce the frequency. Just because there are feasible countermeasures is no reason not to impose the cost of those countermeasures on the enemy.

I thought that after the Berg video, Americans working in Iraq would arm themselves to the teeth, and may die on the street in a shootout, but not by decapatation on video. I cant believe Americans are allowing themselves to be kidnapped, knowing the consequence.

I have a friend about to head out for five years in Saudi Arabia. I've suggested that he buy and learn to use a handgun, but since he's never used one here I doubt that he'll use one there. Were it me I'd carry a 17 round Beretta loaded with Hydra-Shocks, or something to increase the rather negligible stopping power of the 9mm round. (The 9mm is also nice since the round is standard and widely available in foreign countries, although other rounds are superior, like the .40 cal.) Failing that, or if I were limited to ball ammo, I'd go with a .45ACP weapon like the milspec 1911 (Kimber or Springfield, depending on my resources). At the very minimum I have a 9mm Kahr P9 with eight rounds of Corbin (1 in the chamber) and the last round would be for me. I'd at least take out a few of them before they got me, or I'd shock them enough that they gave up the effort. Odds of not being killed in a shootout are pretty minimal once it starts. Like you, I simply don't understand why these people were taken unarmed. I attribute it to the success of the utterly stupid anti-gun movement.

By the way, whoever said that the GPS locators available from REI are "passive only" doesn't know what they're talking about. Here's one for $699, and here's a full-featured one for $750. These provide location via satellite, and are about the size of a cell phone. One assumes that the requirements of a simple beacon would be even more spartan. Again countermeasures are possible but those impose a cost, and can also be countered. And we have more resources than they do. Basically it puts us in precisely the kind of "arms race" that we can easily win. We'll routinely be a step or two ahead of the enemy.

"No, to deprive them of the benefits of kidnapping and thus provide a disincentive and save lives."

Maybe you shouldn't write as if the chief benefit of killing the kidnapped will be its positive effect on the media environment for the war, then:

"It is clear that terrorists operating in Iraq believe that kidnapping and internet-beheading are among their most powerful weapons because the media exposure amplifies the effect."

Comments are Closed.