America’s Military Doesn’t Have Enough Money to Do Its Job

BY MAX BOOT-

NOVEMBER 22, 2017, 9:00 AM
Sherlock Holmes once solved the mystery of a disappearing racehorse by noting “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” But, a Scotland Yard detective objected, “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” Holmes’s laconic reply: “That was the curious incident.”

Today, in Washington, the dog that isn’t barking is the defense budget. It is the biggest issue that no one — at least no one outside the defense policy community‚ is talking about.

There are plenty of warning signs that the defense budget is too small to meet the United States’ global commitments, and that military readiness is suffering with dangerous consequences. Back in June, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee that having returned to the military after four years of retirement, he was“shocked by what I’ve seen with our readiness to fight.”

What shocks a hardened warrior like Mattis? Defense analyst Dan Goure notes: “the Army has only three brigade combat teams out of more than 50 fully manned, equipped and trained for major conflict…. Due to a lack of spare parts and insufficient maintenance dollars, only about half of Navy and Marine Corps front line fighters are currently available for combat. In addition, the Air Force is short some 1,000 pilots even though its size has shrunk significantly over the past decade.”

Yet despite these shortcomings, the “operations tempo” for the military, especially the Navy, Air Force, and Special Operations Forces, remains as high as ever. The Navy has seen its fleet reduced from 594 ships in 1987 to just 278 ships today, yet it still keeps roughly the same number of ships deployed outside of home waters. That means crews have to work at a frenetic pace; naval expert Seth Cropsey of the Hudson Institute says it’s common for sailors to work 100-hour weeks.

This punishing ops tempo is believed to have contributed to two terrible accidents suffered by destroyers this summer — both the USS John S. McCain and USS Fitzgerald collided with merchant ships, killing a total of 17 sailors. The ship shortfall will only be exacerbated by those collisions, with the Fitzgerald likely to be out of service for more than a year. Navy Secretary Richard Spencer says,

“We have been punching way above our weight and possibly robbing Peter to pay Paul to get our missions done, and now the bills are coming home.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His forthcoming book is “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.”

The Marine Corps is also paying a terrible price for the shortfall of defense dollars. According to dataobtained by Breaking Defense, “aircraft accidents have killed 62 Marines in the last six years, compared to just 10 personnel from the much larger Navy.” The deadly accidents include the crash of a MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft in August, killing three, and of a KC-130T transport aircraft in July, killing 16. The problem is that the Marine Corps is flying aging aircraft such as AV-8 Harrier jump jets (which entered service in 1985), early models of the F/A-18 Hornet (1984), and the CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter (1981). The money simply isn’t there to rapidly phase out these aging aircraft with newer models such as the F-35.

Overall, the Heritage Foundation finds in its 2018 Index of U.S. Military Strength that “the United States’ military posture is rated ‘marginal’ and is trending toward ‘weak.’” Heritage analysts rate the Army and Marine Corps as “weak” and the Navy and Air Force as “marginal.” The military has had to abandon its historic, post-1945 commitment to fight two major wars at once — that is simply beyond its current capabilities.

Those trends are all the more alarming when we see America’s rivals — including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea — rapidly building up their arsenals. Russia has rebounded from the nadir of the 1990s to field increasingly professional military forces equipped with high-tech weapons that allow Vladimir Putin to project power as far away as Syria. China, meanwhile, is building aircraft, missiles, submarines, and even aircraft carriers to tilt the balance of power in the Western Pacific in its favor. Both Russia and China now field ultra-quiet diesel submarines that are hard for the U.S. Navy to detect.

These are dangerous developments that threaten to unravel the post-1945 Pax Americana and leave the United States and its allies vulnerable to aggression.

These are dangerous developments that threaten to unravel the post-1945 Pax Americana and leave the United States and its allies vulnerable to aggression.

 The problem is widely recognized in both Congress and the Trump administration, and yet it is unlikely that anything will be done about it.

During last year’s campaign, Donald Trump promisedmore defense spending to increase the army from a planned active-duty end strength of 450,000 personnel to 540,000; the Marine Corps from 24 infantry battalions to 36; the Navy from 278 combat ships to 350; and the Air Force from 915 combat-ready fighter aircraft to 1,200. Those are good goals. But the defense budget that the Trump administration released in March doesn’t come close to funding those commitments.

Trump proposes adding $54 billion, or 10 percent, to the core defense budget (excluding wartime costs). Although the president boasts that this is “one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history,” it is, in reality, only the 16^th-largest increase since 1977. And it is wholly inadequate to the size of the challenge. Given the limited capacity of U.S. shipyards, it would take 18 years to create a 350-ship navy at a rate of four new ships a year. The Trump defense budget funds just one, or possibly two, new ships for 2017-2018.

Recognizing the shortfall, the Senate and House of Representatives just approved a $700 billion defense budget — a significant increase from Trump’s $603 billion request. So, problem solved, right? Wrong. This is only an “authorization” bill, and its passage is largely symbolic. The actual money for the Pentagon has to come from appropriations bills, and the appropriators are unlikely to be so generous, because they have competing priorities. Republicans want tax cuts; the tax bill passed by the House last week would add $1.7 trillionto the already large federal budget deficits, crowding out defense spending. Democrats don’t like the tax cuts, but most of them want more domestic, not defense, spending. Although there are defense hawks on both sides of the aisle, neither caucus, at the end of the day, prioritizes defense spending over other ideological commitments.

And neither, for that matter, does the Trump administration. Note that the president — who has plenty of time to opine on the NFL, the “fake media,” Jimmy Kimmel, the mayor of San Juan, Hillary Clinton, Gold Star families, “Little Rocket Man,” “Al Frankenstein,” and other favorite targets — has absolutely nothing to say about defense spending. It simply isn’t a priority for him, or for his aides. Even Defense Secretary Mattis, who favors more defense spending, has not made it a single-minded priority in the way that Caspar Weinberger did in the 1980s.

Back in the Reagan administration, the president settled the debate between Weinberger and budget director David Stockman firmly in favor of the Pentagon. Today the widespread sense is that budget director Mick Mulvaney calls the shots more than Mattis does. Mattis is a probably distracted simply preventing Trump from launching World War III, with little energy left over for budget fights.

Mattis is a probably distracted simply preventing Trump from launching World War III, with little energy left over for budget fights.

 In any case he is by nature and experience a warrior, not an accountant.

The result of the bipartisan, bicameral lack of urgency is that the Pentagon is being funded with a three-month “continuing resolution” that was passed in early September and expires in early December. There is a real risk, in fact, that congressional leaders will fail to agree to a budget by then and will simply pass another continuing resolution, even though the military complains that this make it impossible to do long-term planning or budgeting. Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, rightly called this “fricking stupid” and describes it as “borderline legislative malpractice.”

Yet, with presidential leadership on this issue (or any other) effectively AWOL, there is scant chance of fixing what ails defense.  Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said, “We are gambling with the lives of the best among us and we’re now seeing the cost  —  the tragic but foreseeable costs of an overworked, strained force with aging equipment and not enough of it.” The gamble is going to continue, with the losers being the men and women in uniform sworn to protect the United States.

Trump The Eradicator

Trumpism is a natural reaction to the self-destruction of America’s industrial base. But the president’s mania to wreck international trade agreements and impose tariff barriers will result in diminishing America’s economic and political influence around the globe.

by Eric S. Margolis- Dec 31, 2017

( December 31, 2017​, Toronto, Sri Lanka Guardian) There is much President Trump does not understand about the outside world. High up on the list is the crucial importance of US trade policy in creating and sustaining the American Empire.

The key to the post-World War II US imperium was granting other nations commercial access to the huge, vibrant American domestic market. This, as much as the highly successful Marshall Plan in Europe, was responsible for stabilizing the world economy and extending US geopolitical power across much of the globe.

I vividly recall when war-ravaged Japan produced only junk and cheap toys. A small town in Japan called ‘Usa’ produced fake Zippo cigarette lighters stamped ‘made in USA.’ Five years later, I was amazed to discover the quality and capability of new transistor radios from an electric company later known as ‘Toshiba.’

Japan’s hard work and determination played a key role in rebuilding that war-ravaged nation, half of whose cities and industries had been fire-bombed into ruins.

But industrial Japan would not have risen from the ashes without access to the American market which consumed an ever-larger share of Japan’s high quality exports.

South Korea and then China followed the same growth curve, responding to America’s insatiable demand for lower cost products. In both cases, the boom in exports sparked rising economic activity in domestic industries and commerce.

Today, large parts of the world economy depend on access to the US market, its primary engine of growth. Canada and Mexico are prime examples. Almost 80% of Canada’s exports go to the US. As a result, Washington treats Canada like a dependency, though most Canadians don’t seem to care.

A major trade war between the US and Canada looms, centered on efforts by Washington to break into Canada’s heavily protected dairy, poultry and swine markets. Amid all the heated exchanges between Ottawa and Washington, there is hardly any mention of improving the cruel treatment and lessening the terrible suffering of farm animals.

What President Trump and his advisors don’t seem to get is that China’s access to Wal-Mart shelves deeply affects its behavior. Profits from China’s exports have been plowed into $1.2 trillion of US treasury instruments, making the Communist People’s Republic America’s leading creditor.

It’s an old canard that nations that trade don’t go to war. Untrue. Just look at Britain and Germany in 1914 or Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941. War, as the bellicose Trump threatens, is quite possible even between major trading partners like the US and China.

Risks of a Sino-US military confrontation over the disputed South China Sea or North Korea remain dangerously elevated. The dangers of war to major industrial powers Japan and China also remain elevated, posing another systemic risk to the world economy.

Trump’s campaign to return manufacturing to America and repatriate profits held overseas makes good business sense. The ravaging of America’s once mighty industrial base to boost corporate profits was a crime against the nation by unscrupulous Wall Street bankers and short-sighted, greedy CEO’s.

The basis of industrial power is the ability to make products people use. Shockingly, US manufacturing has shrunk to only 14% of GDP. Today, America’s primary business has become finance, the largely non-productive act of paper-passing that only benefits a tiny big city parasitic elite.

Trumpism is a natural reaction to the self-destruction of America’s industrial base. But the president’s mania to wreck international trade agreements and impose tariff barriers will result in diminishing America’s economic and political influence around the globe.

Access to America’s markets is in certain ways a more powerful political tool than deployment of US forces around the globe. Lessening access to the US markets will inevitably have negative repercussions on US exports.

Trump has been on a rampage to undo almost every positive initiative undertaken by the Obama administration, even though many earned the US applause and respect around the civilized world. The president has made trade agreements a prime target. He has targeted trade pacts involving Mexico, Canada, the EU, Japan, China and a host of other nations by claiming they are unfair to American workers. However, a degree of wage unfairness is the price Washington must pay for bringing lower-cost nations into America’s economic orbit.

This month, the Trump administration threatened new restrictions against 120 US trade partners who may now face much higher tariffs on their exports to the US.

Trump is in a hurry because he fears he may not be re-elected. He is trying to eradicate all vestiges of the Obama presidency with the ruthlessness and ferocity of Stalinist officials eradicating every trace of liquidated commissars, even from official photos. America now faces its own era of purges as an uneasy world watches.

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2017

Three things that will shape the economy in 2018

Jonathan Michie-December 28, 2017

Professor of Innovation & Knowledge Exchange, University of Oxford


Whether you follow opinion polls, experts, the media, or soothsayers, a few common themes have emerged regarding the economy in 2018 and beyond.

These are Brexit, the rise of the robots and a continued obsession with bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Here’s a primer on how to better understand these three stories that will dominate the news.

1. Brexit

Someone claimed to have asked their iPhone: “Siri, what’s a good metaphor for Brexit?” Siri replied with the news story of someone trying to kill a spider with a blowtorch, and burning his house down. It nicely captures Britain’s approach to the EU.

Few would deny there are problems with the EU; some of which may be as annoying as having an unwanted spider in one’s house. But there are different ways of approaching these issues, some of which may prove more drastic and costly than others. While moving the European Parliament between Brussels and Strasbourg may be a costly waste of resources, and the euro project never made economic sense, it is quite another thing for a country to voluntarily give up access to its key export markets – as was recently made clear by the founder of Cobra beer, Lord Bilimoria.

Even if the UK negotiates a favourable trade deal in 2018, what the impact will be on UK industry is unknown and unknowable. Hence the importance of developing an effective industrial strategy, to maximise the chance of UK industry being able to continue to sell to Europe, even if faced with tariff and other restrictions. It’s important for industries to compete on the basis of high quality and innovation. Such industrial success will also be key for finding new markets, which may prove vital if European ones are blocked.

Brexit trade negotiations will start in 2018. shutterstock.com

The industrial strategy looks good as far as it goes, in identifying potential growth areas, and setting out the sort of investments which will be required to stay at the forefront of new product and process developments. But it’s hard to get too excited when a number of its predecessors sunk without trace.
A big reason is that for over a century British industry has been locked in a trap of “short-termism”, with managers focusing on the next quarter’s share price and dividend payout, for fear that if these dip their company may be prey to takeover. And behind this industrial weakness lies the dominance of finance and the City of London, which has always been more interested in global deal-making than domestic investment.

The unveiling of the latest industrial strategy left many asking who is responsible for monitoring its performance and ensuring its success? It is unlikely to succeed unless such a commitment is made – along with delivering long-term industrial investment; greater corporate diversity; a revolution in Britain’s education, training, and skills base; the creation and implementation of regional policy; tackling inequality of income, wealth, and opportunity; boosting Research and Development and innovation; and ensuring environmental sustainability.

2. Robots and jobs

While the industrial strategy has focused on new technology sectors such as robotics, these have also been depicted as threatening to wipe out swathes of jobs over the next ten years. That may be, but we need to recall that the same was said by the Luddites 200 years ago – and many times since.
There are two crucial aspects to why technology will not render us all jobless. First, although new technology replaces some jobs, it creates others. And given that technological innovation usually helps promote economic growth, the outcome has generally been more jobs rather than fewer.

No need to look so worried. shutterstock.com

Second, if the number of jobs – or rather, the total amount of employment – were to decline, this should be a good thing, as the work could be shared out. This would give more time for leisure, with less intensive, stressful work. That has long been the promise, though rarely the reality.

To reduce employment (either the number of jobs, or the amount each of us had to do, if a reduced amount of employment enabled greater leisure time for all) means increasing the amount produced per person (or per person hour). In other words, higher productivity. This is not occurring in Britain. Indeed, over the past ten years the UK has witnessed the exact opposite, with the rate of productivity growth declining rather than increasing. So, don’t plan for your three-day week just yet.

Bitcoin, blockchain and bubbles

Much of the above – stagnant productivity growth, the need for an industrial strategy, even the vote for Brexit – might be laid at the door of the 2007-08 global financial crisis and the subsequent global recession in 2009 – the first time the world’s output and income had fallen since the 1930s.

Another thing to be wary of into 2018 is the fact that the danger of a repeat performance of this crash remains. International governments prevented the global recession slipping into a 1930s-style global depression by boosting government spending. But as soon as the immediate danger had passed the UK government – and several others – reverted to type, imposing austerity policies that held back the already fragile recovery.

So, another shock to the global system could create a further financial crisis and recession. Last time the trigger was home-loan defaults; what might trigger the next one? Defaults on the growing car-loan debts? International conflict and even war? Or perhaps the bursting of the bitcoin bubble?
Blockchain technology will be used increasingly for a range of activities – from the accreditation of global online learning to the creation of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, which are basically IOUs in digital form.

So the answer to the question whether the bitcoin bubble will burst, or whether bitcoin becomes mainstream, is “both”. Cryptocurrencies will replace some of what current banking and monetary systems do. But the extent may be limited by concerns over their use for illegal activities, their heavy resource use in an era when we need to be making less use of energy, and their susceptibility to speculative bubbles and crashes, which always carries the threat of more general crises and recessions.

Happy 2018!

Rise of the strongman: Asia’s top 10 newsmakers in 2017

30th December 2017

The first year of the Trump presidency couldn’t have gone better for authoritarians across the Asia Pacific. China’s influence in the region and indeed across the world, meanwhile, continued to grow.

Tensions on the Korean peninsula grew to their highest point in decades, while there was no resolution on competing territorial claims in the South China Sea. South Korea replaced a corrupt and unpopular leader, Thailand and Malaysia did not.

Religious extremism caused violence and instability across the region.

An alleged genocide took place against the Rohingya Muslims of Rakhine State, Burma, as more than 650,000 fled into Bangladesh in a few short months. As it lost ground in Syria and Iraq, Islamic State came to the region through an assault on Marawi City in the Philippines.

With democracy on the decline across Asia, individual political personalities more important than ever. Here are those who shaped the news this year.

Xi Jinping, President of China

In 2017, Xi Jinping became the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong though insertion of his own political thought into the Communist Party’s constitution. The Economist has now called Xi the world’s most powerful man. At the helm of the planet’s most populous nation and second largest economy, the president made strides towards his stated aim of restoring China’s historical glory this year. Highlights were aggressive investment across Asia through the Belt and Road initiative, staying in the Paris Agreement on climate change while Trump’s America pulled out, and refusing to back down on territorial claims in the South China Sea. Under Xi’s command, Beijing is tightening its grip over Hong Kong. In charge of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, the world seems to be Xi’s oyster.

Kim Jong Un, Supreme Leader of North Korea

At least by his standards, 2017 was a successful one for North Korea’s eccentric dictator Kim Jong Un. While his leadership failed to prevent a raft of new sanctions against Pyongyang, Kim was successful in provoking the leader of the free world into an ongoing exchange of personal insults and by November had declared North Korea’s nuclear statehood. As we opined in September, Kim has repeatedly given the metaphorical middle finger to Western diplomacy. For his efforts, Kim was even named TIME magazine’s runner-up Person of the Year.

Donald Trump, President of the United States

Widely considered to have changed the presidency forever, Donald Trump dismantled decades of US diplomacy in Asia during 2017. Retreating from the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia”, Trump shied away from being too enthusiastic in the promotion of human rights and democracy. Instead, he welcomed a number of Southeast Asian autocrats like Duterte and Prayut to the White House. His support for the Philippines’ drug war has damaged the United States’ image in Asia while relentless Twitter shade directed at Kim Jong Un was ridiculed the world over. Most recently, protests broke out in Muslim nations like Indonesia and Malaysia over his intended decision to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel. If America’s time in the sun wasn’t already over, Trump has made sure of it.

Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan

On track to become Japan’s longest serving premier, Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party won a shock election by a landslide after calling it in October. The Prime Minister has sought to overall Japan’s post-war pacifist constitution so as to allow the country to develop a strong military of its own, which he had initially promised would take place in 2020. While that unpopular move has been shelved for now, Abe has nevetheless declared he will “firmly deal” with North Korea, an aim towards which he has buddied up with Trump.

Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India

A staunch Hindu nationalist of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the leader of the world’s second largest country by population remains wildly popular. A Pew poll released in November showed that nine in ten Indians hold a “favourable view” of Modi. They are happy with his economic management, but his Hindu nationalist platform has emboldened communal violence aimed primarily at Muslims. More and more Muslim Indians in 2017 fell victim to vigilante mobs for killing cows. In March, Modi selected a radical Hindu accused of inciting violence against Indian Muslims to lead the country’s largest state Uttar Pradesh. This furthered long-held fears that India will ditch its secularism and become a “Hindu Pakistan” – in other words an intolerant, religious state which offers little protection for its diverse minorities. Given Modi has promised to create a “New India” by 2022, the march of hardline Hindu nationalism looks to continue throughout 2018.

Aung San Suu Kyi, State Counsellor of Burma (Myanmar)

The de facto leader of Burma emerged as the surprise villain of 2017. “I’m no Mother Teresa” she pronounced in April. Long a hero of democracy and human rights under the country’s brutal military dictatorship, Aung San Suu Kyi disappointed many around the world in 2017 for her failure to speak out on behalf of persecuted Rohingya Muslims and prevent them from falling prey to what some have called ethnic cleansing and even genocide. While Western criticism of Burma has been relentless, Suu Kyi has a friend in the Chinese Communist Party. Arrests of foreign and local journalists with the tacit support of the State Counsellor’s National League for Democracy do not bode well either for Burma’s difficult democratic transition. Suu Kyi may have been stripped of international accolades like the Freedom of Oxford during 2017, but she remains a popular figure amongst a huge portion of Burmese.

Hun Sen, Prime Minister of Cambodia

Almost single-handedly responsible for dismantling Cambodian democracy in 2017, Prime Minister Hun Sen had a ripper year. The Kingdom’s leader for 30 years, Hun Sen attempted to cement another 10 years in power by dissolving the opposition Cambodian National Rescue Party, media outlets including the Cambodia Daily newspaper, and clamping down on NGOs like the US-funded National Democratic Institute ahead of 2018’s election. This crackdown has earnt condemnation from governments and human rights groups from around the world, but Hun Sen isn’t done yet – his government is pondering the introduction of ‘Thai style’ lese majeste laws before next year’s poll.

Rodrigo Duterte, President of the Philippines

Once dubbed the Filipino Trump, Duterte outdid even the American president when it came to ruthless top-down policymaking and outrageous language during 2017. Along with his US counterpart this year he mocked journalists as ‘spies’, bragged he had murdered somebody as a teenager and said cops should kill his own son should he be found to be involved with illegal drugs. During 2017, Duterte dismantled the peace process with communist insurgents by reclassifying them as a terrorist group and introduced martial law in the southern Mindanao, a tactic reminiscent of the country’s former dictator Marcos. While his government stands accused of gross rights violations including the extrajudicial killings of more than 10,000 people amid the drug war since June 2016, he turned heads in November when he offered to host a ‘world summit’ on human rights. As with Suu Kyi though, Duterte has a friend in China who is unperturbed by widespread human rights abuses. In fact along with Hun Sen, the president was in late 2017 even nominated for China’s Confucius Peace Prize.

Prayut Chan-o-cha, Prime Minister of Thailand

Thailand’s military seized power in 2014 for the 12th time since Thailand became a constitutional monarchy in 1932. At the head of its junta is Prayut Chan-o-cha, who insisted this year that he can “do whatever” without being held accountable. The country’s formerly vibrant civil society and political parties have come under the chill of military dictatorship, with rising prosecution of dissenters under draconian cybercrime and lese majeste laws. Having repeatedly promised a return to democracy via a popular vote, it has now been delayed to November 2018. Nevertheless, along with a number of Southeast Asian autocrats, Prayut was in 2017 invited to Trump’s White House. With the government pursuing former popularly-elected PMs Yingluck Shinawatra and her brother Thaksin, Thailand’s democratic future remains uncertain.

Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama, former Governor of Jakarta

Jailed in May under Indonesia’s strict blasphemy laws for allegedly insulting Islam, Ahok may not be a strongman but rather represents a victim of the ugly identity politics which affected many societies around the world in 2017. After replacing now-president Joko Widodo as governor in 2014, Christian, ethnically Chinese Ahok enjoyed strong support but drew the ire of Islamic fundamentalists. Perhaps more importantly – he made enemies with his no-nonsense style of leadership and anti-corruption drive. Fears have grown for Indonesia’s historical religious tolerance amid rising fundamentalism – of which Ahok is seen to be the most high-profile victim to date. As the world’s third largest democracy, his case is emblematic of the perilous nature of democratic values and human rights as we move into 2018.

Villagers pay tragic price as Indian building boom drives demand for sand

Last May three men from one family were shot dead, victims of the violence that has spread as local people protest against miners

 Burnt and damaged sand excavators lying on the river near Jatpura village. They were vandalised by angry villagers after miners shot three men from one family. Photograph: Shaikh Azizur Rahman

Michael Safi in Jatpura-Sat 30 Dec ‘17 21.00 GMT

“We didn’t know they had guns,” Santosh Yadav says. “If we knew they had so many guns – that they were planning to commit a massacre – we would never have argued with them.”

Months later Yadav still replays the morning of 19 May in his mind. The decision he made with his uncle and cousins to go to the riverbank. To confront the men mining sand near his village. Not to run when the miners went to their vehicles and returned with guns.

“We were telling them to stop taking the sand,” he says, standing by the same river on the outskirts of Jatpura, his village in the east Indian state of Jharkhand. “They said, who are you to stop us? If we want to lift sand, we will. Then they lifted their guns and fired.”

His cousin, Niranjan Yadav, died first, he says. Then his uncle, Uday, who threw himself on his son’s body. The miners then turned their guns on Vimlesh, the second son. Postmortem reports show all three were shot at close range in the chest. “They also fired at me,” Yadav says. “To save myself, I jumped back and hid behind one of the trucks, and then in a hole behind a nearby bush.”

He stayed in the hole, he says, “shivering in fear” for minutes until other villagers arrived at the river. “It is by sheer luck that I managed to escape death that day.”


The cremation ground of Jatpura village. Photograph: Shaikh Azizur Rahman

The three Yadav men shot in May were victims of an unlikely environmental crisis. Virtually every facet of modern construction depends on sand. Heated, it becomes glass. Mixed with gravel, asphalt. Bound with cement, concrete. With Asia in the midst of history’s largest ever building spree, awareness is growing of the extent to which the world’s supplies are dwindling.

China used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the US used in the entire 20th century. In India, by some estimates, the amount of sand used for construction has tripled since 2000. Demand is expected to keep soaring: the country plans to build at least 60m new houses by 2024. “Demand for sand now outstrips that of any other raw material,” says Sumaira Abdulali, the convener of the Awaaz Foundation, an activist group that campaigns against illegal sand extraction.

As supplies of sand close to major cities such as Delhi and Mumbai have become exhausted, developers are turning to more remote regions to source it, bringing them into conflict with smaller, usually vulnerable, communities. Groundwater shortages, flooding, and depletion of fish and other animal life often follow in the wake of unsustainable mining, which activists claim can also weaken bridges and barrages along the path of heavily mined rivers, leading some to collapse. No reliable data exists for the amount of sand currently being mined in India, Abdulali says. “But it’s quite clear when you visit the countryside in India, there is hardly a creek, river or beach where you don’t see the effect of sand mining.”

Also unknown is the toll of the hundreds of conflicts erupting in small communities across the country between those who hold mining leases and local residents. “But we know the violence is extremely widespread,” Abdulali says.

Jatpura is a long way from the burgeoning cities of urban India. Ranchi, the Jharkhand state capital, has just over one million residents – tiny by Indian standards – and is six hours away by car, along patchy highways that degrade and narrow as Jatpura nears.

The sand miners arrived at the beginning of the year, using excavators and industrial vacuums that could slurp vast quantities of sand from the riverbed. Watching over them were men the villagers called “lathait” – Hindi for someone skilled at wielding a club.

Niranjan Yadav led the opposition to the project. The mining was veering close to a patch on the banks of the river where Hindu villagers traditionally burned their dead. Local people worried they would wake up one morning to find the sacred earth heaped in the back of a truck.

The dredging also made the river treacherous. Holes began to appear beneath the surface, sometimes 20ft deep. Villagers said that in April, weeks before the Yadavs confronted the miners, a 12-year-old boy had been playing in the water when he slipped into a crevice and drowned.


The widows Bindu Devi (left) and Rekha Devi of Niranjan Yadav and Vimlesh Yadav. Photograph: Shaikh Azizur Rahman

Resentment grew with each chunk of riverbed that was carted away. “People who are in distant areas, rich people – like a mafia – are becoming richer,” says another Jatpura resident, Sudama Ram. “We feel very helpless. But we have our brothers with us in the village. The whole village is with us. We are fighting.”

His remarks were met with approving murmurs among the other Jatpura residents. It was true the village was fighting, but Ram had exaggerated its helplessness. The pressure of runaway resource extraction had not just turned the people of Jatpura into victims. Some believe it made them into killers, too.

Satinder Singh was a manager from a nearby village who oversaw the sand mining in Jatpura and other sites. After the Yadav men were shot and the alleged gunmen fled, he remained close to the river “to keep watch”, according to Neha Arora, the deputy commissioner for Garwha. Officers found him beaten to death, and the house he had been renting in Jatpura razed. Police believe that he was attacked by a mob, “but it’s difficult to pinpoint who was involved,” Arora says. “Nobody is talking.”

The bodies are gone, but the rest of the scene that confronted police when they arrived at the riverbank that morning is unchanged. The shovel of one of the excavators is still half-buried in the sand, as if its owner fled in a hurry. Several other vehicles are strewn about the site, warped and gutted by fire.

Conflict has frequently accompanied mining operations in the Garwha district. “It happens anywhere there is excavation of resources,” Arora says.

The mining licence for Jatpura was held by Dharambeer Singh, a small contractor from a nearby district. His lease permitted him to mine sand close to the cremation ground, but not to use heavy machinery. Arora says that he had been advised, like all contractors, to be “sensitive to the issues of the villages”, to clearly demarcate the mine’s boundaries, and to try to employ the villagers as labourers in order to cushion their discontent.

“But I would not say that sensitivity is what they keep in mind,” she says. The amount of money at stake and the nature of the business models discourage it. “The [contractors] are target-driven, profit-driven,” Arora says.

The shooting in Jatpura triggered protests in Garwha town and was raised in the Jharkhand state assembly. The state has since amended its mining policies. Lifting sand is now permitted only from large rivers, which officials say can be mined more sustainably. The river by Jatpura, classified as medium-sized, is out of bounds.

Arora says she is unsure why the use of heavy machinery, among other legal breaches, continued in Jatpura for months without officials being alerted. “We did not know what tension was brewing there,” she says.

In other cases, she says, village chiefs – or “mukhias” – have struck deals with the miners to overlook their operations in exchange for a cut of the profits. It is a lesser-known consequence of the vast demand for sand: as well as environmental degradation, soaring sand prices encourage corruption and spark conflicts within villages.

The fires that gutted the trucks and excavators on the morning of the killings in May were not the last to be set on the riverbank that day. After midnight, more than 500 men gathered at the cremation ground, metres from where the Yadav men were shot. They watched silently as the three bodies were placed on a wooden pyre.

It burned until dawn, until the men’s ashes caught in the wind and settled with the sand in the riverbank.

Burnt sand-carrying trucks lying by the ghat where sand mining took place near Jatpura village. Photograph: Shaikh Azizur Rahman

Additional reporting by Shaikh Azizur Rahman

Special Report: In a hospital ward in Yemen, the collapse of a nation

Nahla Arishi, a pediatrician, checks a woman infected with diphtheria at the al-Sadaqa teaching hospital in the southern port city of Aden, Yemen December 18, 2017. REUTERS/Fawaz Salman

Selam Gebrekidan-DECEMBER 29, 2017

ADEN (Reuters) - Nahla Arishi, chief pediatrician at the al-Sadaqa hospital in this Yemeni port city, had not seen diphtheria in her 20-year career. Then, late last month, a three-year-old girl with high fever was rushed to Arishi’s ward. Her neck was swollen, and she gasped for air through a lump of tissue in her throat. Eight days later, she died.

Soon after, a 10-month-old boy with similar symptoms died less than 24 hours after arriving at the hospital.

Two five-year-old cousins were admitted; only one survived.

A 45-day-old boy, his neck swollen and bruised, lasted a few hours. His last breath was through an oxygen mask.

One morning in early December, 16-month-old Sameh arrived at the hospital carried by his aunt and delirious with fever. Arishi immediately recognized a new case of diphtheria. “Put on your mask,” she ordered the aunt.

Sameh’s father, a fighter in Yemen’s three-year war, rushed in, grabbed his son, yanked off the baby’s shoes and threw them on the floor. “Sameh is the light of the house,” he wailed, feeling the boy’s feverish brow and body.

This is the emergency ward to a nation. After three years of warfare, cholera and hunger, Yemen faces a new battle: In the past four months, doctors across the country have recorded at least 380 cases of diphtheria, a bacterial disease that last appeared here in 1992.

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Arishi, like her country around her, is struggling to cope. Every month, she and her team drip-feed dozens of Yemen’s half a million severely malnourished children. Her ward has also treated hundreds of the one million people infected by cholera.

This spring, Arishi and her colleagues reopened an abandoned wing of al-Sadaqa hospital, fenced it with chicken wire and created a makeshift cholera treatment center. Now, they are converting part of that center into a diphtheria ward, cordoning off isolation units by barring hallway doors.

But with rusty oxygen tanks and only two functional ventilators in a different part of the hospital – and with the expectation that the cholera epidemic will worsen in coming months — her triage upon triage is no longer working.

“We’re getting more patients but we can’t deal with them. We don’t have supplies. We don’t have money,” said Arishi, “This war has got to end.”

For the past three years, Yemen has been the combat zone of a struggle for regional supremacy between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Riyadh and some of its Arab allies jumped into Yemen’s civil war in 2015 to help quell an uprising by the Houthis, an Islamic political-religious movement backed by Iran. In addition to airstrikes, Riyadh – with U.S. and U.N. backing – has positioned ships in Yemeni waters as a way to stop arms reaching Houthi militia.

But the blockade has ended up isolating a country that was already the poorest in the Middle East. Vital provisions – food, medicine, fuel, medical equipment, batteries, solar panels and more – are not getting through. Humanitarian shipments of food and medicine have mostly been allowed into the country. Yet Saudi-led forces have severely delayed aid shipments or closed ports outright, especially in northern Yemen where fighting and the humanitarian crisis are most acute.

The war and blockade have also thwarted Yemen’s vaccination programs.

Seven years ago, 80 percent of children were fully immunized with three doses of diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus vaccine, or DTP as the combined shot is called, according to Zaher Sahloul, a critical-care specialist who cofounded a nonprofit called MedGlobal. Now, he says, that has dropped to 60 percent.

Poor record keeping means there are discrepancies in data related to vaccine coverage. Yemen’s Ministry of Health says 85 percent of Yemeni children have been immunized against diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, Hepatitis B and bacterial influenza since the beginning of the conflict, a mere two percentage point drop from pre-war years.

In late November, the U.N.’s World Health Organization (WHO) sent a shipment of diphtheria antitoxins - designed to treat those already infected - and vaccines to the capital Sanaa. The vaccines were delayed by the Saudi blockade for a week, the WHO said.

In July, the Geneva-based International Coordinating Group on Vaccine Provision earmarked a million cholera vaccines for Yemen. An initial shipment of 500,000 doses was sent to the African Horn country of Djibouti, and was ready to send on to Sanaa. But the WHO and local authorities in Sanaa decided together to scrap the vaccination plan, citing logistical and technical issues.

“Yemen needs a Marshall Plan,” said Sahloul, who was visiting al-Sadaqa’s treatment center in December. “It is difficult to foresee an optimistic scenario if the current conditions persist,” he said.

DISEASE AFTER DISEASE

Arishi began her medical career in the mid-1990s after Yemen unified following years of conflict between communist and pro-western forces. She joined the al-Sadaqa hospital, which was built in the 1980s with funds from the Soviet Union.

In her two decades at the hospital’s pediatric ward, Arishi has seen Yemen slowly come apart again. Even in the mid 2000s, the country faced widespread hunger because of rising food prices. The feeding center of al-Sadaqa’s hospital, she said, was crowded even before the new civil war began.

In the spring of 2015, Houthi forces, aided by the now-deceased former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, advanced south from their stronghold in the Yemeni capital Sanaa and took over Aden’s airport. It was then that the coalition of Arab states led by Saudi Arabia joined the war and began launching airstrikes against Houthi-held enclaves. Fighting raged until troops backing the officially-recognized government wrenched Aden from Houthi control in July of that year.

During the first months of fighting, al-Sadaqa filled with hundreds of wounded children and adults.
By the middle of 2016, another group of patients began pouring into the hospital. A cholera outbreak that started in Sanaa had spread to Aden. Dehydrated children, their condition made worse by malnutrition, flooded into her pediatric ward. Many did not survive, Arishi said.

Cholera can kill because patients quickly lose their fluids through vomiting and watery diarrhea. When caught early, it can be treated by replacing fluids.

When a second wave of cholera infections swept Yemen in April this year, Arishi and her colleagues decided to set up the new treatment center. They picked a building away from the main wings of the hospital to avoid contamination and repaired it with funds from the WHO and medical aid group Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Converting the building, which had been abandoned for two years after the war, required “heavy cleaning work, electricity, water system repairs as well as installing air conditioners,” according to MSF.

Yet, like the country itself, al-Sadaqa was overwhelmed by the cholera epidemic. Nationwide, a million people have been infected, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The WHO says cholera has killed more than 2,200 people.

 Nahla Arishi, a pediatrician, checks a boy infected with diphtheria at the al-Sadaqa teaching hospital in the southern port city of Aden, Yemen December 18, 2017. REUTERS/Fawaz Salman

Most of the infected were in the populous north of the country. But al-Sadaqa, which took in patients from across south Yemen, was also unprepared. Arishi and her colleagues had expected 10 patients at a time. Instead, by the summer, they were treating more than a hundred, mostly adults, a day.

Since September, the spread of cholera across the country has abated. However, doctors agree that a new wave of infections is likely in March, when the country’s rainy season returns. Cholera spreads more easily in wet weather, because the bacteria live in rivers and coastal waters which swell with the rain. Rain brings sewage into sources of drinking water.

In August, a new disease began to emerge. In Ibb governorate, 170 km south of Sanaa, a 17-year-old boy was diagnosed with diphtheria, according to the WHO.

Diphtheria is caused by bacteria that mainly infect the throat, nose and airways and send toxins into the bloodstream. It has largely receded as a global health threat, because much of the world’s population is protected through routine immunization.

But the disease is highly contagious once it takes root, doctors say, since it spreads in the droplets from coughing and sneezing. Small children are particularly vulnerable because toxins from the bacteria build up a coating of dead tissue that blocks their small airways.

Since the mid-August case, more than 380 patients have been admitted to hospitals across Yemen with diphtheria-like symptoms, according to the WHO. Doctors diagnosed the cases based solely on patients’ symptoms. Close to 40 of the patients have died, by WHO estimates.

The first case of suspected diphtheria reached al-Sadaqa in November. Of the seven children who arrived within a fortnight, nearly all were initially misdiagnosed with mumps or flu. Four died.

Arishi faced the problem of isolating children with symptoms of diphtheria. She asked hospital administrators to block a hallway door with a cupboard. Behind it, she tried to isolate those who might infect others.

But she lacked basic resources to treat the new disease. Al-Sadaqa hospital, like most others in Yemen, does not have the reagents needed to test for diphtheria. In fact, none of Arishi’s diagnoses has been confirmed by laboratory tests.

Marc Poncin, an MSF emergency coordinator in Ibb governorate, said the lack of recent experience means it could be harder to treat diphtheria.

“There has been a loss of knowledge regarding its treatment, because it’s become something of a neglected and forgotten disease,” he said.


After a diagnosis, treatment is far from easy. Doctors can prescribe antitoxins and antibiotics. But until a few weeks ago, Yemen had no such antitoxin stocks.

The United Nations Children’s Fund and the WHO have imported more than 5 million doses of vaccines to immunize children in the worst affected areas. The WHO has already distributed antibiotics to patients and, as prophylactics, to their families.

Some diphtheria patients need emergency surgery to remove blockages from their airways or need machines to breathe. But most of Yemen’s hospitals don’t have such equipment. As of early December, only two of al-Sadaqa’s three mechanical ventilators were working, and the hospital didn’t have an isolated operating room for diphtheria patients.

The lack of resources has caused strains with the hospital’s supporters. When Arishi cordoned off a part of the cholera ward for the incoming diphtheria patients a couple of weeks ago, the WHO was not happy with the decision, according to Hussein Hassan, head of the WHO’s Aden office.

“We cannot confidently say that cholera is over. It is a seasonal problem and it may come back. What happens if another wave starts and the ward is filled with diphtheria patients?” said Hassan.

“I DIDN‘T WANT TO LOSE MY KID”

Arishi says there is another sign that Yemen is breaking down: parents’ waning faith.

She sees more examples of families that have not vaccinated their children because they distrust both their government and international organizations.

Earlier this month she confronted Saleh Khaled, the father of a five-year-old boy called Yasir, who arrived with severe diphtheria symptoms.

“Why did you not vaccinate your son?” Arishi asked.

Yasir’s first cousin, who was also five years old and unvaccinated, had died a few days earlier. When the first symptoms had appeared on Yasir’s neck and chin, the boy’s parents had given him honey.

Khaled said he had heard rumors, years earlier, about children who had died after healthcare workers had allegedly switched vaccine vials with insulin during a door-to-door vaccination campaign.

“I didn’t want to lose my kid because of something like this,” he said. “We don’t trust the people who work in the health department.”

Others in the al-Sadaqa ward that day echoed similar fears.

“We live only because of God’s mercy,” said Khaled Nasser, the father of 16-month-old Sameh.

Nasser, a member of a local armed group that fights alongside Saudi-allied forces, said fellow fighters had helped him buy medicine when Sameh got sick.

Arishi herself barely ekes out a living. She makes $210 a month at al-Sadaqa and works at a private clinic three days a week to supplement her income. The mother of three treats neighbors and relatives without getting paid. Her husband, also a pediatrician, works at another clinic in Aden.

For Arishi, war is both burden and inspiration. She says it has made her commitment to medicine stronger.

“If I leave and my husband leaves and everyone leaves, who will stay to treat our patients?” she said. “Aden is my city. It is my responsibility.”