Golden Dome

William Forstchen, historian, author, and reputed EMP expert, wants us to build President Donald Trump’s (R) golden dome, an evolution of former President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative which was designed to destroy incoming ICBMs before they could reach their detonation locations in an attack on the United States. He’s right, but his emphasis is too narrow. His concern:

We have to defend the United States against an EMP attack, which could destroy us in a matter of minutes.

He cited studies, as summarized by Fox News, some statistics:

Congressional reports from 2002 and 2008, said that 80%-90% of Americans would be dead a year later if an EMP strike happened.

That would result from energy and water distribution network failure, power failure, financial system failure, transportation failure, and the resulting lack of food in the cities and the lack of water in urban areas from small to large.

The problem that’s not being addressed, though, is that an EMP does not need a nuclear detonation to generate it. Small EMP devices can be built relatively easily, and our destruction can be achieved with a collection of these small devices being used to destroy our financial and communications data centers, nodes in our energy distribution networks, nodes in our water distribution networks, nodes in our mass transportation and shipping centers.

All of these would aggregate to a nuclear EMP in their end result, and these smaller devices are much harder to detect. The several Departments in our Federal government and the several private companies in our tech industry need to get seriously involved, both in partnership with each other and separately, in figuring out how to detect and neutralize these devices, also.

What the President’s Staff Thinks about our Allies

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial panties are at it again. Now the undergarments are in an uproar over the Signal chat wherein some aspects of an attack on Houthis were discussed just before the attacks went in. The discussion certainly presents bad optics for the administration, and maybe it shouldn’t have been done on Signal.

However.

A real security scandal is that the Signal chat apparently included Steve Witkoff, Mr Trump’s envoy to wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Press reports say Mr Witkoff was receiving these messages on the commercial app while in Moscow. This is security malpractice. Russian intelligence services must be listening to Mr Witkoff’s every eyebrow flutter.

What the editors chose to omit in their hysteria is that Signal is reputed to a very secure means of group communication; it’s also one explicitly approved for secure communications by the Biden administration. To the extent that Signal is that secure—the editors elide mention of any investigation of this—the Russians could listen in to their heart’s content, but they wouldn’t learn anything, unless they had an agent looking over Witkoff’s shoulder at his phone or laptop.

One more item the editors chose to elide, which came out in so many words in Wednesday’s noon o’clock presser hosted by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: Witkoff had no personal communication devices with him on his trip to Mocow. He had only a Federal government-provided secure cell phone provided to him explicitly for the trip. I’m frankly up in the air between these editors being that ignorant of the facts or if, given my nearby post, they’re simply that dishonest in blithely repeating the disinformation of “press reports.”

There’s this overreaction, especially:

Yet Vice President JD Vance second-guessed the President’s strikes on the chat because he said only “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez [sic]” canal, while “40 percent of European trade does.” That understates the US interest in freedom of navigation. Mr Vance even suggested his boss didn’t understand that striking the Houthis was at odds with Mr Trump’s “message on Europe right now.” He added that “I just hate bailing Europe out again.” So the Vice President is willing to let the Houthis shut down shipping to spite the Europeans?

This really is a cynically offered overreaction. For one thing, which the editors omit to mention here, that conversation occurred shortly before Trump made his decision and ordered the strikes to go in. This is staff—Vance—doing its job of devil’s advocating a decision that’s still only potential, even arguing seriously against it while it’s only potential. The editors also omitted to mention that, in that same chat session, Vance said he supported the President’s decision to go ahead: once the boss’s decision was made, argument stopped, and it became everyone’s duty to get behind it and make it work.

For another thing, how well has Pretty Please worked over the last 70 years, or so, in getting Europe to see to its own responsibilities instead of relying primarily if not solely on American blood and treasure for its economic, even political, welfare? Recall that Europe’s NATO members only started getting serious about honoring their commitments to NATO after Trump threatened to leave the organization during his first term, and today a third of Europe’s NATO members continue actively to betray their fellow members with their refusal to honor their duties to the organization. The matter of the Houthis in this conversation is only tangentially related to the overall principle of freedom of navigation.

Vance is far from the only American who’s sick of bailing out Europe. The continent needs to learn, and apparently the only way they will is if they suffer real harm from their determined dependence.

The editors’ remark about being willing to let the Houthis shut down shipping is just cynical exaggeration. The Houthis may be able to severely impact shipping to-from Europe via the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, but that shipping is easily rerouted, and has been, to go around Africa. That’s a route that only a few days longer, and those few days are significant only for shipping from India, Pakistan, or eastern Africa. From farther Asia, which is the bulk of commerce into Europe other than from the United States, the added days are an insignificant delay—and they avoid the toll Egypt charges for the use of its canal.

Who Really Needs Security Clearances?

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors have got their panties in a twist because President Donald Trump (R) has withdrawn Perkins-Coie’s Federal security clearances among other actions regarding the law firm. The editors claim it’s all about Trumpian retribution:

That’s the only way to read his extraordinary executive orders targeting big Washington law firms for federal punishment and investigation. Mr. Trump’s decision to use government power to punish firms for representing clients breaks a cornerstone principle of American justice going back to John Adams and the Founders.

Perhaps. But that’s the editors’ spin, and they present it, in typical news opinionator fashion, as if it were fact and the only possible fact of the matter.

On the other hand, it’s also true that Perkins-Coie, other big Washington law firms, and the individual lawyers in those organizations have no need whatsoever for blanket, routinely extant, Federal security clearances just because. Those should be granted on a case-by-case basis, centered on the lawyers directly involved needing access to classified material in order to defend a client. Furthermore, as soon as that defense is concluded, or as soon as the lawyers in question are no longer involved, those clearances should be canceled; they’d no longer be needed.

Neither should a law firm itself have any security clearance at all. Only those lawyers directly involved in a case needing classified access should have the associated clearance.

These editors would do well to get their angst back under control.

Signaling

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors want President Donald Trump (R) to stand strong against Iran vis-à-vis Iran’s push to develop nuclear weapons and the requisite delivery systems (which aren’t limited to ballistic missiles, even though news writers, herd-like, focus only on those). That add this, though, in their missive:

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent expressed confidence Thursday that sanctions on Iran can “collapse its already buckling economy.” Now he needs the green light to cut off Iran’s oil exports to China. Mr Trump could also let a few Israeli pilots train on US strategic bombers. That would send a message.

No. Iran (and northern Korea and Russia, come to that) has been economically “buckling” for years and years. They’re nowhere near collapse. Sanctions are Critical Items, but they’re far from sufficient. Sending messages by letting foreign pilots train on US aircraft is similarly useless when we’re…messaging…enemy nations that don’t care a fig about the cost to themselves in achieving their destruction of us or our friends.

No.

Iran has shown again and again since 1979 that it wants to spread revolution rather than join and build a prosperous Middle East.

The time for signaling is long past; it never worked anyway: signaling only signals the signaler’s weakness and/or timidity. Trump has sent all the signal that’s necessary in the form of his letter to Khamenei.

The deadline for a serious Iranian response should be a very few days, not weeks or months. The next signal needs to be kinetic, with the complete destruction of Iran’s nuclear and nuclear-related sites, including its uranium storage sites; its air defense facilities; its naval and “commercial” shipping at sea; and its ports on the Persian Gulf and the Persian Sea.

Israel certainly should play the major role in that—they’re Iran’s first target for extermination—but the US should play a major role, as well, from refueling support to participating the bombing and missile attacks.

A Good Start

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has pulled the security clearances and accesses to a number of Biden and other former government officials.

I have revoked security clearances and barred access to classified information for…Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Lisa Monaco, Mark Zaid, Norman Eisen, James, Bragg, and Andrew Weissman, along with the 51 signers of the Hunter Biden “disinformation” letter. The President’s Daily Brief is no longer being provided to former President Biden.

But it’s only a start. I have said before, and I’ll say again: when anyone leaves Federal government employ, for any reason, for any duration other than an authorized leave of absence, that now ex-employee should have his security clearance pulled the day he walks out the door. Even those on a leave of absence should have their access to classified material suspended until he returns to duty at the end of his leave.