Category Archives: defense policy

Europe’s Role in Europe

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In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the EU’s dismay over being dismissed from peace talks among Ukraine, Russia, and the US, there was this bit near the end:

Ukraine’s army today is larger and more capable than the German, French, Italian, and British armies combined. Alongside Russia’s, it is also the only military in the world with a wealth of experience in large-scale modern warfare against a near-peer enemy.

That’s how worthless NATO has become, particularly including those western European nation members. Sure, those nations are nattering on about increasing defense spending. French European Affairs Minister Benjamin Haddad:

The message is clear: it’s time to take our responsibilities, to safeguard our own security.

Well, NSS.

However.

Germany, not atypically, has made those commitments before, and then welched on them. And even those western European nations who did consent to send weapons and money to Ukraine held back on them until the US first sent weapons and money to Ukraine, so timid they have been to act on their own initiative.

It’s time for the US to stand up a separate mutual defense arrangement centered on the eastern European Three Seas Initiative nations—nations which directly front Russia and still remember the devastation caused by the barbarian’s jackboots on their necks. Those nations, too, already are at the European forefront in material and financial support, on a per-GDP basis, for Ukraine’s fight for its existence. And then for us to walk away from NATO, which has been shown to be three years, at least, past its Use By date.

Defanging the PRC

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At least by a little. As part of the People’s Republic of China’s economic war that it’s waging against us, they have moved to block important mergers involving American and non-PRC companies and today are threatening our major tech companies (and by extension our smaller tech companies and those companies that supply or otherwise do business with these).

Beijing has already said it is investigating Nvidia and Google over alleged antitrust issues. Other American companies in its sights include Apple, Silicon Valley tech company Broadcom, and semiconductor-design software vendor Synopsys, said people familiar with the matter. Synopsys has a $35 billion acquisition awaiting approval by Beijing.

And

[The PRC] said it had opened an antitrust probe against Google.

And

In 2018, amid US-China trade conflicts in the first Trump administration, Qualcomm terminated its proposed purchase of Dutch chip maker NXP Semiconductors after failing to obtain clearance from China.

And

US chip maker Broadcom’s takeover of VMware, valued at $61 billion when it was unveiled in May 2022, was in peril until a meeting between Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in November 2023.

If these companies did no business with companies domiciled in the PRC and did no business within the PRC, that nation would be unable to go after them at all, including having no ability to block mergers between US and non-PRC companies. The PRC’s ability to damage our economy would be restricted commensurately. Of course, withdrawing from the PRC would be expensive in the short run, but it’s a large economic world, and while the PRC is a major player in it, that nation is not the only player. The magnitude of its role, too, would shrink as we reduce our economic ties with it.

Another, central, question is this: what’s the cost of letting an enemy nation have so much influence over our economy?

Why do we Care?

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President Donald Trump (R) is moving to transfer as many as 30,000 illegal aliens with violent criminal histories to Guantanamo Bay for temporary housing until their final disposition is determined. A couple of Fox News‘ news writers are in such a tizzy over the prospect that they enumerated the 15 remaining prisoners—terrorists, the lot of them—along with brief biographies, who are still housed there. The writers seem worried in some inchoate manner about the potential for interaction between the two groups. The writers don’t say so in so many words, but why else would they feel constrained to point out the juxtaposition?

The larger question, which apparently hasn’t occurred to those writers, is this: why would any of us care that violent illegal aliens are being housed in the same facility as violent terrorists? After all, the former already are hardened criminals in their own right.

Testing?

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Some folks think that Baby Kim, the gang leader of northern Korea, is beginning to question the loyalty of the youngest adult and near-adult cohorts in that area.

He is particularly worried about the foreign media trickling into his information-repressed country….
At risk is Kim’s ability to maintain the illusion of North Korea as a socialist paradise, which is key to his ability to maintain power. And no group is more vulnerable to ideological slippage than North Korea’s youngest citizens.

Thus,

That is why Kim has handed a central propaganda role of late to the Paektusan Hero Youth Shock Brigade. …hailed as national heroes for helping to rebuild a western border region leveled by summer floods. Over four months, they erected 15,000 houses, schools and hospitals, the country’s state media claimed.
…
The construction work, Kim was quoted as saying in state media, had represented a “good opportunity for training our young people to be staunch defenders and reliable builders of socialism.”

That’s one test. Baby Kim also has sent 12,000 soldiers to fight on the side of the Russians against Ukraine. Those soldiers, despite their claimed reputation for prowess, are performing extremely poorly, even after accounting for the Russian tactics they’re expected to operate within.

Could Baby Kim be testing Ukraine as his version of being sent to the Eastern Front? It’s true enough that a severely wounded northern Korean soldier kills himself rather than risk capture, or his comrades murder him to prevent that capture, even as they run away from the battlefield. Those incidents, possibly representing a newly claimed loyalty in an attempt to protect the family left behind, are quite rare, though, compared to the casualty rate they’re experiencing.

Time to Go

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Here’s yet another Federal agency that needs to be eliminated, its budget returned to the Treasury, and its personnel—all of them—returned to the private sector rather than reallocated within the Federal Leviathan.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency [emphasis added]:

  • its role in organizing the Election Integrity Partnership—the private group that worked with social media companies to censor content during the 2020 election
  • did not implement effective controls for the selected High Value Asset (HVA) system per Federal and departmental requirements
    • DHS OIG found inactive user accounts were not consistently disabled or removed, according to established rules—40% of nearly 2,800 “users”
    • 15% of sampled users missed initial or annual cybersecurity training
  • did not follow its own recommendations when conducting its own review of the system, failing to detect the access control deficiencies identified by the watchdog

When the agency personnel aren’t being overtly corrupt, they’re being patently incompetent. The organization is far beyond redeemability, and it’s new enough (created out of whole cloth in 2018) that there are much fewer entrenched interests in preserving its corruption or its incompetence.