Daily Archives: 27 February 2023

Any Excuse to Slow-Walk

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Now the Biden Defense Department is saying that it won’t be able to deliver the “promised” M1 tanks to Ukraine before the end of this year or potentially the next. According to Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, the military does not currently have the available inventory to supply the tanks. “Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh added:

We just don’t have these tanks available in excess in our US stocks, which is why it is going to take months to transfer these M1A2 Abrams to Ukraine[.]

Actually, we do have the tanks to pass along, excess or not. We have lots of them in active units both here and overseas—like in Europe. It seems that President Joe Biden (D), his SecDoD Lloyd Austin, and Wormuth are concerned about drawing down active inventory and, furthermore, do not take seriously the need to get contracts let (and to get Pentagon bureaucrats out of the way so contracts can be let efficiently) in order to ramp up tank (and other weapon systems) production.

Tanks we have in Europe could be at the Ukrainian fronts in a couple of days plus training time. And the Slavs aren’t as dumb as the German government makes them out to be; they’d train up quickly.

Separately, F-16s, European NATO fighter aircraft, and associated logistics chains could be transferred to Ukraine in a few hours plus training time. A-10s, designed from the ground up to destroy armor and other ground formations and which too many in DoD insist are excess to our needs (so no inventory about which to worry drawing down) could be delivered to Ukraine in a matter of days plus training time. It’s time to stop saying “No.”

I have to ask: what’s the value of weapons that are held in reserve and held in reserve and…? Weapons held in reserve in favor of not drawing down inventory, rather than for sound tactical reasons, are weapons that are not available to defeat an enemy’s offensive, or to punch through enemy defense lines, or to exploit breakthroughs otherwise created. (Note, for instance, that the Ukrainian offensives in the east that liberated Kharkiv and much of that oblast, and in the south that liberated Kherson, petered out by the time the one got to Bakhmut in the east, and the other to the river on the southern edge of Kherson, due to lack of armor and other mechanized systems with which to continue exploiting those efforts’ success.)

Aircraft withheld altogether are aircraft not available to shoot down the barbarian’s aircraft and missiles that the barbarian is using to destroy Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, hospitals, and residential neighborhoods all across Ukraine and to butcher civilian women and children.

The only effect of holding back these tanks—and of NATO nations (like Germany) slow-walking delivery of their “promised” Leopard tanks—and aircraft is to prolong the barbarian’s war against Ukraine. The only purpose for prolonging that war is to increase the bleeding and the weakening of Russia, with the side effect of increasing the odds that Russia will eventually succeed in overrunning and destroying Ukraine.

That the prolongation also increases the bleeding that Ukrainians are doing—civilian women and children as well as Ukrainian soldiers—doesn’t seem to matter in the slightest to Biden and his cronies or to those European NATO nations. That increased Ukrainian bloodshed also comes in close parallel with Biden’s avowed policy of creating and then protecting the invader’s status as sanctuary, proof against Ukrainian strikes against the barbarian’s staging areas and supply dumps that are inside Russia.

Yet Another Reason…

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…for State and local jurisdictions to stop taking government funds. This one is from HUD.

In proposed regulations that would touch any jurisdiction that accepts any sort of HUD funding, fair housing must mean a plan to “promote equity in their communities, decrease segregation, and increase access to opportunity and community assets for people of color and other underserved communities.”

Sounds reasonable.

However.

Those required to comply will include more than 1,200 cities and counties receiving HUD funding. All will be required to develop “equity plans.”
Such equity could mean anything from building low-income housing to redrawing school district lines for racial or socio-economic integration, all as assessed by the HUD bureaucracy.

Because folks moving from here to there still will be told, on arrival there, where they will be permitted to live and where their kids will be permitted to go to school and on and on—they’ll still be under government control. If they want, for good or bad reasons, to live with folks who look like them, or who share their values, or…, central government under these rules will not permit them that choice.

Racial discrimination in housing is pernicious, Husock concluded his piece (at the link). But he doesn’t go far enough in his conclusion. For Washington to invoke it to socially engineer neighborhoods across America is dangerous. No. For the Federal government itself to give special treatment to one group of Americans over other groups of Americans is especially pernicious racism.

This is another example of Federal government funds that are being transferred to State and local jurisdictions coming with strings attached, for good reasons or ill. Government strings only increase the central government’ ability to dictate terms to locals, to reduce our States to the same relationship to the central government as counties have relative to their States: merely convenient districts whose sole purpose is to enforce Federal law. That works for counties in States, but the structure of our system of federal government puts the States—individually as well as a group—on par with our central government on nationally domestic matters—and on higher authority on matters domestic to an individual State.

It is this federal republican structure, the role of our several States as [50] separate experiments in democracy, that string-loaded Federal funds transferred to States and locals so severely deprecates.