Monthly Archives: March 2018

Readiness Capability

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There’s a dismaying graph in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that illustrates the combat readiness of several of NATO nations’ forces.

In essence,

If Europe came into conflict with Russia, only several thousand of the more than one million troops in its armies would be ready for rapid deployment, military planners fear.

Plans to correct this (using the term loosely) don’t come close to the capability regularly exercised during the Cold War, when the US planned for moving 10 divisions into Europe within 10 days.  Current planning goal is to feed dribs and drabs into the furnace.

A US proposal would have the alliance commit to having 30 battalions, 30 fighter squadrons and 30 naval ships ready to deploy. That would translate to roughly 30,000 troops and more than 360 fighter planes.

Sadly, given Europe’s long history of free-loading off US nuclear and soldier commitments, and the EU’s current reluctance even to meet the nations’ 2% of GDP on defense commitment, that’s probably all we can expect out of that continent.

Feeding the furnace: 30 days was all that was necessary in WWII to overrun Poland once the Germans crossed the frontier, and it was all that was needed to knock France out of the war and push the remnants of British forces off the continent once Hitler moved west.  Only 60 days after Barbarossa went in, the Germans were approaching Leningrad, were over halfway to Moscow, and had overrun half of today’s Ukraine.  And that was against an allied contingent that, in retrospect, was better equipped and numerically superior, at least in the West.  The lack of political will then and now is the same, and Putin has shown the willingness to aggress as did Hitler, even if Putin is quite a bit more subtle about it.

And: the 30 days is from the decision to put the forces “on alert.”  Given the amount of warning available today, with the speed of modern communications, transportation, and so on—the ability to deliver tactical surprise—what is the time relationship between going on alert and having actually to launch the forces?  Thirty hours seems more like reality than does 30 days.

The graph, too, is misleading to an extent.  Italy currently can produce 5 combat-ready battalions in 10 days, while three other European nations can produce all of 3 combat-ready battalions apiece—in 30 days.  The rest, none at all in the time frame.  But what does that mean?  What is the actual combat capability of these nations’ units?  Until the term is normalized, the comparisons in the graph have only the coarsest of meanings.

The FBI’s Subpoena Response

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After Attorney General Jeff Sessions told FBI Director Christopher Wray to cut the stonewalling and deliver up, promptly, the documents Congress had requested and then subpoenaed, Wray doubled the number of agents he had assigned to the task.

Wray also assured Congress he’d mended his ways.

Mr Wray’s statement pledges the FBI will be “transparent and responsive to legitimate congressional requests.” If not, Mr [House Judiciary Chairman Bob (R, VA)] Goodlatte and the House leadership must be willing to use their powers of contempt and impeachment to impose consequences.

This is a cynical sham. The target of a “Congressional request” is in no position to judge the request’s legitimacy, whether the target is the FBI or a mafia soldier.  Goodlatte needs to prepare the impeachment case, even though the Progressive-Democrats in the Senate will not approve.

Suboptimal

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A Maryland gerrymandering case, this one brought by the Republican Party, after it lost an election in the newly gerrymandered district, was before the Supreme Court this week.

One of the plaintiffs’ arguments is that the redistricting “violated Republican voters’ free-expression and political-association rights.”

Justice Sam Alito had the correct response to that bit of nonsense:

[I]f understand it, I really don’t see how any legislature will ever be able to redistrict[]

If the Republicans don’t have anything more than whining about losing an election, how can their legitimate gerrymandering complaints be taken seriously?

Yemen and Spain

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Is Yemen becoming like 1930s Spain?  Is the civil war in Yemen being used, like Nazi Germany did the Spanish civil war, by Iran as a test bed for doctrine and weapons development?

Iran certainly is trying out techniques for running terrorist clients there, just as it is in Syria and Iraq.  Iran has an active ballistic missile development program, too, and Iranian ballistic missiles have been tried out against Saudi Arabia, including a mini-barrage of seven tested over the weekend.

Which, just incidentally, also is giving the Iranians valuable data on the Saudis’ (read: our) missile defense capabilities and techniques.

The Fed and Inflation

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There was a Letter to the Editor in a recent Wall Street Journal that talked about a “half-truth” that inflation is “always” a result of rapid economic growth and low unemployment.

The Fed’s obsession with its arbitrary 2% inflation target compels them to argue that higher inflation is desirable because it is always linked to stronger economic growth. The governors simply ignore evidence to the contrary, such as in 2017 when, after the first quarter, growth accelerated and unemployment fell, yet inflation rates declined.

Couple things about this claim. One is that that isn’t the only argument the Fed makes on the matter or on the Fed’s role. The Fed’s role is to maintain price stability (and low unemployment, but price stability facilitates that), and any target rate of inflation, within a broad range, does that.  The Fed targets 2% in order to have…engineering slop…as a cushion against the natural fluctuations of inflation taking the economy into a deflationary period, which if sustained can have more deleterious effects than high inflation.  Much higher target rates make maintaining stability more difficult.  Two per cent is a suitable middle ground target.

The other thing relates to those natural fluctuations in inflation rates, and their inputs. Stauffer is assuming, falsely, that a single occurrence, a single quarter’s behavior—an anecdote—is the trend.  Not at all.  It’s just noise.