Monthly Archives: April 2024

Some DoD Acquisition Problems

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Our DoD’s failure with battlefield drones (as opposed to large surveillance and targeted raid drones) is shamefully demonstrated by a small US drone builder and Ukraine’s position on and need for actual, small, battle-capable drones.

Most small drones from US startups have failed to perform in combat, dashing companies’ hopes that a badge of being battle-tested would bring the startups sales and attention. It is also bad news for the Pentagon, which needs a reliable supply of thousands of small, unmanned aircraft.

One aspect of the American problem stems from too much dependence on DoD specifications.

American drone company executives say they didn’t anticipate the electronic warfare in Ukraine. In Skydio‘s [a Silicon Valley company] case, its drone was designed in 2019 to meet communications standards set by the US military.

How is it possible that our own military establishment, with its battlefield experience, has so badly misunderstood battlefield communications threats, counters, and needs? One reason—not the only one, since military officers are capable of learning from the past and anticipating the future—is that our military establishment hasn’t any current battlefield experience, only experience at fighting terrorist organizations. Even as recently as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US military didn’t face a qualified army, for all its formal army-like structure.

There’s this, too, particularly related to acquisition, although here applied specifically to drone acquisition:

Several startup executives said US restrictions on drone parts and testing limit what they can build and how fast they can build it.
Those restrictions have proven a problem in the drone battles that sometimes require daily updates and upgrades, said Georgii Dubynskyi, Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation, the agency that oversees the country’s drone program.
“What is flying today won’t be able to fly tomorrow,” he said. “We have to adapt to the emerging technologies quickly. The innovation cycle in this war is very short.”

But the bureaucrats don’t care. They only care about their personal imperatives. One result of this bureaucratic interference and failure:

Ukrainian officials have found US-made drones fragile and unable to overcome Russian jamming and GPS blackout technology. … American drones often fail to fly at the distances advertised or carry substantial payloads.

There’s that communications failure again, along with a general failure to perform.

Skydio is showing the way [emphasis added]:

Skydio employees went back to Ukraine 17 times to get feedback, Bry said. Its new drone is built around Ukraine’s military needs and feedback from public-safety agencies and other customers, he said, rather than US Defense Department requirements that are sometimes divorced from battlefield realities.

None of our DoD acquisitors have done that. That’s as much on SecDef Lloyd Austin and CJCS General Charles Brown, Jr (and General Mark Milley before him) as it is on the acquisitors, though.

Skydio‘s growing success from its more independent development process is illustrated here:

Ukraine has requested thousands of the new Skydio X10, which has a radio that can switch frequencies on its own as soon as its signal is jammed by electronic interference. It also has better navigation capabilities so it can fly at high altitudes without GPS, Skydio said.
“It is critical for Skydio, and I think the US drone industry at large, that we make X10 succeed at scale on the battlefield in Ukraine,” Bry said. “There’s no alternative. As a country, we can’t miss on this.”

These problems—and they aren’t the only ones, they’re just a few exposed by DoD drone incompetence—will prove fatal in American battles, and so damaging if not fatal to American national security—independence.

We badly need to clean house in the DoD, following that with a removal of the civilian bureaucrat contingent in DoD acquisition (returning them to the private economy, rather than reassignment withing the Federal government), and we badly need to elect a President and Congress with the national security awareness and political courage to do so.

Toddler Temper Tantrums and the Fears of the Timid

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Karl Rove may be whistling past the graveyard in his Wednesday WSJ op-ed. He opened his piece with this lede:

Conventional wisdom is that Republicans will lose the US House this fall. That may be right.

Then he ran a counterargument.

Yet the conventional wisdom that Republicans will lose the House may be wrong.
One reason is retirements. Much has been made of how many Republicans are leaving, including talented members such as Wisconsin’s Mike Gallagher, North Carolina’s Patrick McHenry, and Washington’s Cathy McMorris Rodgers. But more Democrats (24) than Republicans (19) have announced their retirements. Moreover, all the Republican retirements are in overwhelmingly red districts. The only open GOP seat considered competitive—the Cook Political Report calls it “lean Republican”—is Colorado’s Third District. Cook’s partisan vote index—which estimates a district’s leaning relative to the country based on the two most recent presidential elections—labels it an R+7 seat.
Retiring Democrats represent more-competitive seats. Cook rates the open Michigan Seventh and Eighth districts as “toss-ups.” They are R+2 and R+1 respectively. Cook classifies the California 47th (D+3) and Virginia Seventh (D+1) as “lean Democrat.” The Maryland Sixth and New Hampshire Second (both D+2) are “likely Democrat.”

Rove gave too little credence to the damage the toddler temper tantrum, led by Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA) and her Chaos Caucus supporters, does. These toddlers may well hand the House Speakership, and control of the House agenda, to the Progressive-Democrat Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) before the current session ends, especially given the number of nominally Conservative Republicans who are abjectly cutting and running from their House seats, whether at the end of the current session or quitting just as soon as they can get their desks cleared.

The inability of Republicans to agree among themselves on what to put forward—the Chaos Caucus blows up anything that doesn’t suit their veriest whims to t—and the party’s timidity in putting any Conservative policies forward and putting the onus on the Progressive-Democrat-ruled Senate and the White House to work with them—tells the voting public that this is a ragtag collection of junior high politicians not ready for the national obligations they have.

Rove also gave too little effect to the timidity of the remaining “mainstream” Republican Congressmen. There are number of legitimate conservative policies that are proposed by the Freedom Caucus (when they aren’t acting in their Chaos Caucus guise). These, though, are routinely rejected by too many of the other Republicans in the House Republican caucus under the excuse that the Progressive-Democratic Party Senators would never agree to them, and that the Progressive-Democrat President would never sign, even were something to get to his desk. So, these Republicans won’t even try. They’re too timid to do something that might force the Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians to take a stand, much less to force them to work with Republicans. Instead, these Timid Republicans would rather try, meekly, to work with the Progressive-Democrats, ceding functional House control to the minority party.

That timidity isn’t encouraging for voters.

Rove also underestimated the effect on voters by those who are heading out the door just as the battle is heating up. That timidity may well turn off voters, voters who won’t vote for the overtly destructive Progressive-Democratic Party, but who find they can’t trust Republican candidates who might well run away themselves. These voters are likely to stay home, which with today’s divisions is the same as voting Progressive-Democrat.

More Progressive-Democrats (my term, not Rove’s) than Republicans are leaving the fight? Only by five, and that, out of 43 departures, is as thin as the current Republican nominal majority. The Republican Party, too, has demonstrated in elections from 2018 forward that it’s fully capable of throwing away eminently winnable seats and donating them to the Progressive-Democrats. It would take only a net gain of five seats to get Jeffries as Speaker.

Public disgust with a Republican Party populated, at least at the national level, with toddlers and timids may well cost us a government interested in our borders, our economic strength—our national security.

Whistling past the graveyard, indeed.

“Dialog”

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Ex-Republic of China President Ma Ying-jeou, of the RoC’s pro-People’s Republic of China Kuomintang Party, was invited to and met with PRC President Xi Jinping, and they talked about the prospects for improved relations across the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait that separates Taiwan from mainland China.

Amanda Hsiao, a Taipei-based analyst with the Brussels-headquartered International Crisis Group, accurately characterized the meeting:

Beijing is trying to show for an international audience that they are open to dialogue with Taiwan—open to peaceful unification. All of which is an attempt to try to make China appear more reasonable.

Indeed. But it’s dialog within a PRC framework: Xi: “Stop resisting. Surrender and be assimilated into the body of the People’s Republic of China.” Ma: “Yes, Sir.”

In addition to Hsaio’s characterization, thought, the Xi-Ma meeting also was an in-your-face counter to our own Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s White House contemporaneous meeting with Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida (which Philippine’s President Ferdinand Marcos Jr later will join them) regarding PRC aggressiveness.

For each reason, and especially for both together, Biden’s response to the Xi-Ma meeting will be important for RoC security.

Another Example…

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…of the racist and sexist bigotry of the Biden administration.

The Biden administration’s Department of Agriculture has begun making disaster relief funding contingent on the race and sex of the disaster sufferer.

[T]he Biden administration has taken roughly $25 billion in disaster and pandemic aid approved by Congress for farmers in eight programs and devised a system to make awards based on race, gender, or other “socially disadvantaged” traits.

Texas farmers have filed suit to block this USDA move, noting that the

USDA does this by first defining farmers who are black/African-American, American Indian, Alaskan native, Hispanic, Asian-American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, or a woman as “socially disadvantaged.” Then, it provides farmers who qualify as socially disadvantaged more money for the same loss than those it deems non-underserved, along with other preferential treatment[.]

An unbigoted Biden administration never would have done this in the first place. The farmer’s lawsuit shouldn’t be necessary, and it wouldn’t be, absent this administration’s naked racism and sexism.

Progressive-Democratic Party Selling Out Israel

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Progressive-Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren (MA) wants to deny Israel F-15 fighters—in the middle of Israel’s war for survival against a Hamas and Islamic Jihad of Palestine’s effort to exterminate that nation. She’s gaslighting Americans with her premise that Israel is somehow responsible for the destruction and death that the terrorists are inflicting through their use of Gazan civilians as shields for the terrorists, and the terrorists’ use of civilian residences, schools, mosques and churches, and hospitals as cover for the terrorists’ weapons caches, launching sites, and command centers.

Nor is Warren’s move an isolated incident. It’s typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s sellout.

House [Progressive-]Democrats called on President Joe Biden to stop sending weapons to Israel following the country’s drone strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza.

These wonders are using the tragically mistaken strike by the IDF as their own excuse to betray Israel. They don’t care that one of the things that makes the mistaken strike so notable is the utter rarity of such mistakes by the IDF and the enormous pains they go to to minimize civilian casualties. Those pains include, but are far from limited to, warning everyone in the target zone—including, in consequence, the terrorists—of an impending strike so the civilians (and terrorists) could leave beforehand.

This is the depth of the perfidy of the Progressive-Democratic Party that they’ve become so protective of the Hamas and IJP terrorists.