The Mordred Principle and Flight MH-17

The story goes that in a last ditch effort to avoid civil war, King Arthur and his bastard son Mordred held a peace conference.  Both armies occupied their ground and the two contenders for the throne met in the middle, each with a few retainers.  The armies were given instructions not to make any hostile move unless they saw one of the parties in the middle draw his sword.  As father and son tried to reconcile their differences, one of the soldiers saw a snake and instinctively drew his sword to slay it.  As soon as both armies saw this, and being ignorant of the cause, they rushed at each other believing peace talks had broken down.  The battle was joined and a mass slaughter ensued.  Arthur killed Mordred but was mortally wounded.  Only three survived the battle.  After the slaughter, the Saxons, who had been waiting and watching, were able to take over Britain unopposed.

Did this actually happen?  Perhaps.  Perhaps not.  But the principle we learn from this story is a simple one.  One of the main ingredients of war is chaos.  In fact, if there is any major crisis, chances are one of the main ingredients is chaos.  Chaos in this context is caused by many things.  Foremost among these are panic, and miscommunication.  I think it is fair to say that miscommunication is always present.

Just think about the Boston Marathon Bombing.  At first it was a gas explosion.  Then maybe not.  Then perhaps it was a terrorist attack, and on and on.  It was a while before the chaos cleared and for a while, no one really knew what had happened.  I thought my sister Susan was at the finish line because she sometimes helps out.  That’s the kind of person she is.  I was frantically trying to reach her but phone traffic was so congested, I could not get through.  It turned out, she was thinking of volunteering, but changed her mind and was nowhere near the horror.

I think thanks to Hollywood, we are not used to chaos in crisis.  This is because that makes for poor movies.  When a bomb goes off in Hollywood, we know who the bad guys are.  Chances are, we saw them planting the bomb.  Chances are we saw some phone conversations or meetings among the bad guys which detail all the planning that went into the attack.  In fact, there is virtually no chaos in the movies from the viewer’s perspective because we need to know what is going on, at least to some extent.  Because of this, people have forgotten the Mordred Principle.

In the real world, war and crisis – and really war is an extreme crisis – is highly chaotic.  For one thing, both sides are attempting to hide their intentions and movements from the other side.  You also have both sides trying to jam the communications of the other side, as well as kill scouts and anyone else who can communicate the true situation to commanders.  Finally, you have panic and fear which can cause people to react in ways they would not normally react. 

I once spoke to an Israeli friend of mine who had been a soldier involved in one of Israel’s incursions into Lebanon.  We were talking about our respective paint balling experiences and I said I thought he must have been devastating.  He said he wasn’t.  In fact, he was terrible at it.  His mistake was he approached paint balling the way he approached fighting in Lebanon.  He told me when you are in a real war, you are so afraid you hardly want to move.  You know someone could shoot you at any moment and you wouldn’t know where the shot came from.  So he was over cautious.  He said in paint balling, you know you are not going to die so people do things they would never do in a real war.

And so although we are unfortunately surrounded by war, many people, particularly in the west, have no idea what it is actually like.  I hope I never find out.

But I do know what a severe crisis is like.  I was involved in the siege of Mount Carmel in 1993.  I wasn’t there, but I worked with the ATF and then the FBI to resolve the crisis.  A movie would have given you a coherent sequence of events – in fact there was a movie which did just that – and although the people involved might not have known every detail, the viewer of the movie would have.  When it actually happened, the situation was complete chaos!  No one, and I mean no one, knew anything.  We did not know what started the shooting.  We did not know who was dead and who was wounded on either side.  We did not know the disposition of the Branch Davidians.  We knew virtually nothing.  When one of the FBI negotiators called me within hours of the botched raid, he said with a haggard voice “who are these people?”  He did not know who David Koresh was, what he believed, where he came from, how many guns he had, or whether he was still alive.  He did not know who his followers were, how much training, if any, they had, and what kind of people he was dealing with.  The FBI was brought in blind.  Meanwhile the ATF, who had planned the raid, had suffered massive casualties, the worst in US law enforcement history, and were in shock.  For my part, I knew who the people were but I did not know the ATF had changed their minds and gone for a full raid instead of arresting Koresh when he was in town.  I couldn’t believe they had actually raided the compound, something I, and the field agents I spoke to, thought should never happen.  I wanted to know why plans had changed but I didn’t know.  The raid came out of the blue for me and bore no resemblance to anything I had discussed with the ATF, and those discussions were extensive.  In fact, I was still unsure what had happened.  It was unmitigated chaos!

When trying to reconstruct the full event chain in a crisis, you have to factor high levels of chaos into the mix.  Sometimes we think that the more information we have, the more sure we will be of what happened.  This is sometimes true and this is sometimes not true.  But in the end, we are left most of the time with a most likely scenario.

Let us apply the Mordred Principle to Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-17, which was shot down over disputed Ukrainian air space.  The Dutch have published their findings that the plane was brought down by a Russian missile.  So now people are pointing the finger at Russia and at Putin.  Meanwhile the Russians claim the plane was shot down by an older model of the missile no longer used by the Russian Military.  Since many governments sell their old stock to less powerful countries, the implication is that the Ukrainians opposing the Russian separatists shot the plane down.

Most people are not going to go through the expert reports published by either the Dutch or the Russians.  If we did, chances are, we wouldn’t understand them.  And that is to be expected.  So how do we know what happened?  When we consider that several airlines, including Lufthansa, Air France, and Delta, regularly flew over the same airspace during the time of the conflict, and that of all those flights, only one flight was shot down, I can see only two scenarios which qualify as most likely.  In order, these are:

1.       It was an accident caused by the chaos which accompanies any war zone.

2.       It was a deliberate attempt to cause the opposing side to take a massive public opinion hit.

Let us deal with the second scenario first.  Suppose Russia wanted to do something which would cause outrage against the Ukraine government.  What would they do?  Even if Russia and her allies wanted to shoot down the plane, they would have surely used a non Russian missile to do it.  Given they had gained ground against Ukraine, they could have used something that definitely belonged to the Ukraine government, or they could have gone out secretly to the arms market and bought something made by someone else.  But instead they use one of their own missiles hoping to cast blame on Ukraine?  That makes absolutely no sense.

Cast your mind back to World War I.  The USA entered the war because of the sinking of the Lusitania.  Germany warned its New York passengers with newspaper ads that any ship caught in the war zone would be sunk.  The ship was sunk outside of the war zone and America entered the war because Germany had violated international law.  Had they sunk the Lusitania inside the war zone, Germany would have been guiltless especially since they had provided fair warning.  However, the British had breached the same international law on numerous occasions prior to the Lusitania and the Lusitania was carrying war munitions destined for the British.  But because trans-Atlantic passenger shipping was lucrative, the owners of the Lusitania put money ahead of safety and thousands of Americans died as a result of its entrance into the Great War.

Assuming Germany did sink the Lusitania, and I think this is quite likely, the location of its sinking was probably an accident.  It would have been in Germany’s best interests to wait until it hit the war zone since it knew the ship was headed to Liverpool.  Germany had no reason to sink the ship outside the war zone.  But it did and Germany paid the heaviest of prices.  In this case, the most likely scenario is the U-boat captain made a mistake and sunk the ship prematurely.  And of course, because the USA entered the war, Germany was eventually overwhelmed by superior forces and lost.  The devastating treaty demands led to the rise of Hitler and World War II.

On the other hand, if the Ukrainian government wanted to give Russia a massive PR headache, it would have used a Russian missile to shoot down the plane.  So if my second scenario represents what actually happened, the most likely culprit is the Ukrainian government, not the pro-Russian separatists. 

But if the missile is truly a Russian missile which is currently used, chances are the separatists shot down the plane.  But why that plane?  As I said, many airlines were flying many planes over the disputed area during the time of the conflict.  It is possible a Separatist commander got it into his head to do something to cause blame to fall on the Ukrainian government and fired on the plane.  In this case, Russia is blameless because it was a stupid act.  Chaos once again.

But to me, the most likely scenario is that it was an accident.  For some reason, someone mistook that particular plane as a military aircraft or spy aircraft operating on the side of Ukraine.  I have had people tell me this could not have happened because the equipment available now is so good that it is impossible to mistake such things.

Really?  These people don’t understand the Mordred principle.  Not too long ago, Pat Tillman, an NFL player gave up a lucrative career to fight in Afghanistan.  He was tragically killed in the line of duty in 2004.  It turns out, Tillman was killed by friendly fire.  The movies show the US military with super sophisticated equipment and indeed, the US has such equipment.  That someone could die of friendly fire came as a shock to many Americans whose experience of war comes through Rambo movies.  But friendly fire deaths happen more often than we would like to believe no matter how sophisticated the equipment is.  Just a few days ago, a Russian missile aimed at Syrian rebels hit Iran by accident.  And that’s my point.  In war, chaos rules and in the case of Malaysian Flight MH-17, I believe the most likely scenario is that it was an accident.  No one meant to shoot down a civilian aircraft, but it happened.  Lots of accidents happen in war.

My father fought in the Pacific during World War II.  He told me of his ship’s “holy shit” moment.  They were searching for Japanese submarines using their sonar and they discovered one directly below them.  It was straight down vertical.  Talk about panic!  The ship’s captain ordered all speed for all the ship was worth.  That the enemy submarine was directly below them is probably what saved them because it meant the Japanese submarine would have had to go completely vertical in order to fire.  But from the Japanese side, how did it not know an American ship was there until it was right above them?  The Japanese just didn’t.  It was a fluke which resulted in no loss of life on either side.  Had either vessel detected the other when they should have, somebody would have died.  In this case, chaos was everyone’s best friend.

We must never underestimate the power of chaos in these situations.  Sadly, I think in the case of MH-17, unless some smoking gun evidence emerges, we need to chalk this up as yet another in a long line of accidents of war and move on.  I did not lose anyone on that flight so it is easy for me to say this.  But having been in a situation where scores of dear friends of mine died because something went horribly wrong, I honestly think this understanding is best for those who have lost loved ones.