On Submarines From Space
So I’ve encountered another policy debate case which makes me sad enough to talk about it. The claim starts off with Columbian cocaine smugglers using submarines to put drugs on the US market. It then claims that that we should track these subs with 18 new satellites so that the Coast Guard can save the world. We know the Coast Guard will save the world because stopping the subs will save the rain forest which is being destroyed by the drug cartels and also prevent them from selling cocaine to the Russian underworld that will totally sell a nuke to terrorists to be used against the US to fund their drug habit. Or something.
This begs to be resoundingly negated. The only thing to really wonder about?
Oh, where to begin…
- Topicality: Those 18 satellites the affirmative wants to launch aren’t exploring space and they’re not a particularly noticeable development compared to the 13000 satellites we’ve got blipping away overhead at this very moment. They add nothing to our space infrastructure; they are 0.13%-ish increase in the status quo, using a mash-up of existing technologies. So we don’t think they’re really affirming the resolution here, but that’s okay because there’s other problems with the case we’ll talk about more.
- Inherency: Even if it were topical, we’re not hearing anything in the core of their plan that really couldn’t have already happened — there’s no status quo barrier to implementation. For all we know, some lackies may be putting the finishing touches on making it happen right now. We hope not, because it’s a bad idea, but other than that they’re not pointing to any law, practice, or precedent that has to be overcome to make this happen. But even if they turn around and say we’re going to a bajillion satellites so that we’re absolutely developing space and doing stuff well outside of the status quo, they’re just going to run into, if you will pardon the pun…
- A Kessler Syndrome Disadvantage: This is where the satellites run into each other like they did in 2009. If you’re a policy debater, you should already have this in your files; if not, go look one up. Regardless, if they want to propose something interesting enough to be topical and interesting enough to debate, they’ll run smack into this. But you know what’s so far away as to not even pass like ships in the night?
- Solvency vs. Coast Guard: While we like the Coast Guard, the fact of the matter is that the Columbian subs are going to El Salvador and not coming anywhere near the US. Or Russia for that matter, but we’ll come back to it. Oakland Ross reports on this in The Star January 21, 2012:
“These submarines are such an innovation,” says Bruce Michael Bagley, chair of international studies at the University of Miami, who follows the drug trade closely. “They can go up to 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometres).”… The voyage is undoubtedly hellish — hot, stinking, claustrophobic and perilous. It ends at a pre-arranged rendezvous at sea, often near the Gulf of Fonseca, where three Central American republics — Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador — converge around a large salt water bay. Here, the submarine crew will be greeted by local fishing boats or small outboard vessels. The cargo is off-loaded…
A 2010 police estimate, cited by a U.S. research and documentation centre called Insight — Organized Crime in the Americas, suggests that as many as 30 vessels unload their drug cargos in or near the Gulf of Fonseca on an average day.So the smugglers starting out from Columbia are stopping off the shore of El Salvador, and not taking their submarines with a 2000 mile range further north past the remaining 2000-ish miles of Mexico to the waters where our Coast Guard has jurisdiction. Why? Because they don’t go that far. So their plan to let the Coast Guard know about these subs is going to fail even if it works. You know who might like to know how to track drug subs? Mr. Bergman of the DEA.
- Solvency vs. Smart Smugglers: But even if the aff changes their plan to ensure that Mr. Bergman knows where to be deploying agents and sending Columbian police and military, the satellites are a problem for us because they’re not going to adapt to tracking the smugglers as fast as the smugglers are going to adapt to them. The reason we’re having this conversation now is precisely because the smugglers are quick to adapt. In his article, Ross points out:
If there is one constant in the South American drug trade, it’s change. The result is an always deadly game of snakes and ladders, pitting well-financed criminal organizations against the often beleaguered forces of the law, with tactics that evolve almost month by month, as the drug barons try anything and everything to bring their product to market.
So if the satellites miraculously work, the cartels are just going to bust out new and stranger ideas to make them stop working and we’ll be back having a debate just like this — instead of on US transit infrastructure — next year. If we survive the rainforest depletion which isn’t going to stop because of boats. But we don’t want to sound like we’re giving into the drug cartels, so we propose…
- Counterplan, with CIA Drones: We suggest that instead of using satellites that are expensive to launch and quickly rendered obsolete that we take some of our remote-controlled drones that the CIA operates, wire them up with the capabilities that the affirmative wanted to put on satellites and deploy them on the Gulf of Fonseca relaying information to the DEA until the drug runners come up with something different to throw at us — at which point we’ll land the drones, re-tool them and re-launch them ready to face the new threat. Of course, sending the CIA into Latin America hasn’t had great results in the past, but it’s still a better idea than what the affirmative presented. And that’s even before we get into…
- Nuke War vs. Common Sense: This is just odious. Nothing short of nuclear disarmament will ever solve for nuke war. We may mitigate one excuse for being trigger-happy, but that’s hardly the same thing as every other case with a plethora of ways to cause nuclear war — inclusive of giving post office boxes to homeless people — would readily demonstrate. But what makes this even worse is the ridiculous fear-mongering: did you catch that “terrorists with WMDs will kill us all” card from 2001, when fear was whipping the American public into supporting not just one but two land wars in Asia?
This is the part where I pull out a Politics of Fear critique — and if you don’t have one, why not? Go find one now and use it whenever you’re faced with a case that claims nothing more than to save us from nuclear annihilation or some other form of extinction — and explain that scare tactics are designed to lubricate the slide to bad decisions, that the evidence the affirmative presented for our impending demise is brinkless because it is bullshit, and that neither the Russian underworld (they sell us heroin) nor the Columbians we’re trying to stop here today want to see anybody cut loose with WMDs because it would be bad for their business to not have customers.
So, to recap, the affirmative is trying to cook up a nuke war scenario to make you scared enough to vote for a bad plan that would be better solved by CIA drones feeding information to the DEA to stop the current-and-temporary practice of drug-smuggling subs going from Columbia to El Salvador where the US Coast Guard has no business being. For the paltry amount of effort this plan requires to enact as-is, we’d not be surprised to hear that it’s already been done as some misguided “economic stimulus,” to which end we don’t see what it is the affirmative is hoping to explore or develop in outer space — unless they want to overkill it, in which case they’ll run into the Kessler syndrome and still not solve anything. That’s what we’ve got, please vote against their plan.