Category Archives: defense policy

Answering the Phone

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Adam Housley, writing for Fox News, had this on the Benghazi fiasco:

On the night of the Benghazi terror attack, special operations put out multiple calls for all available military and other assets to be moved into position to help—but the State Department and White House never gave the military permission to cross into Libya[.]

Normal ops in locations like Benghazi has the Chief of Mission in charge—Ambassador Chris Stevens in this case—who has procedures for calling for help and transferring authority in exigent circumstances.  With Stevens (and such protection as he was allowed to have) trapped, his “distress button” was pushed, and authority was transferred to State, where again in the Benghazi case, response oversight and authority transferred to then-Secretary Hillary Clinton and one of her Undersecretaries, Patrick Kennedy.

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Benghazi and Clinton

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From the House GOP Interim Progress Report…on the Terrorist Attacks in Benghazi Libya:

During 2012, in numerous communications with the State Department, officials from the U.S. Mission in Libya stress both the inadequacy of security as well as the need for additional personnel. Two critical cables warrant specific mention:

March 28, 2012, Ambassador Cretz sends a cable to Secretary Clinton requesting additional security assets.

April 19, 2012, the response cable from the Department of State to Embassy Tripoli, bearing Secretary Clinton’s signature, acknowledges Ambassador Cretz’s request for additional security but instead articulates a plan to scale back security assets for the U.S. Mission in Libya, including the Benghazi Mission.

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Some Remarks on Terrorism

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Congressman Tom Cotton (R, AR) had some on the House floor earlier this week.

I rise today to express grave doubts about the Obama Administration’s counterterrorism policies and programs.  Counterterrorism is often shrouded in secrecy, as it should be, so let us judge by the results.  In barely four years in office, five jihadists have reached their targets in the United States under Barack Obama: the Boston Marathon bomber, the underwear bomber, the Times Square Bomber, the Fort Hood shooter, and in my own state—the Little Rock recruiting office shooter.  In the over seven years after 9/11 under George W Bush, how many terrorists reached their target in the United States?  Zero!  We need to ask, “Why is the Obama Administration failing in its mission to stop terrorism before it reaches its targets in the United States?”

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Are We Projecting?

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The People’s Republic of China, in its latest national defense report, is accusing the US of “destabilizing” the Asia-Pacific region, because we’re shifting the focus of our attention there instead of keeping it on Europe.

PRC Defense Ministry spokesman Yang Yujun, referring to enhancements of our ties with our friends and allies around the Pacific and the South China Sea, and to our strengthening (a little bit) our military presence in the area:

Certain efforts made to highlight the military agenda, enhance military deployment and also strengthen alliances are not in line with the calling of the times and are not conducive to the upholding of peace and stability in the region[.]

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YGTBSM, Again

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Here’s this bit of news from Tech News Daily.

The Department of Defense (DoD) recently conducted an audit to evaluate how well the most powerful military force on Earth handled the security issues concerning personal mobile devices in conjunction with its professional duties.

The result: [failure]

DoD audited “use of iOS, Android, and Windows mobile devices among Army personnel and in Army facilities, where the devices joined on-site Wi-Fi networks.”  The audit found no requirement to:

  • secure storage for data on mobiles
  • insist on keeping devices free of malware
  • monitor mobiles while hooked up to computers or even
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This is Foolish

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A regularly scheduled ICBM test at Vandenberg AFB that had been planned for this week has been delayed by DoD, ostensibly in an effort to lower the tension on the Korean peninsula.  This delay comes as northern Korea has moved ballistic missiles to its east coast.  At least one of those missiles has the range (if not known to have the accuracy) to hit sites in Guam, Japan, Alaska, and Hawaii.  It’s also important to note that the move is more an effort to conceal the missiles’ locations than an effort to get closer to any targets—the distance gained is trivial compared to the distances to be covered.

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More PRC Sea Grab

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The People’s Republic of China is extending its sea grab nearly to the shores of Malaysia, some 1200 miles south of Shenzhen on the PRC’s southern coast.  Last week, the PLA Navy sent three of its heavily armed ships, together with its largest amphibious landing ship, to tool around James Shoal, which is roughly 75 miles from the Malaysian coast, well within the latter’s economic zone; although Brunei has an overlapping claim in the area.

The Chinese task force, which included a guided missile destroyer and two guided missile frigates, was fully capable of attacking and destroying any aircraft or submarines that it might have encountered.

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National Defense in Obama’s Second Term

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Senator Jon Kyl (R, AZ (Ret)) outlined in a Wall Street Journal op-ed what we can see and expect from President Barack Obama during his second term.  It isn’t pretty.  On missile defense, Obama is doing this [emphasis added]:

  • The president is on course to systematically reduce America’s capabilities in both areas despite specific commitments he made while securing bipartisan support for the 2010 New Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with Russia.
  • [Adding 14 ground-based interceptors in Alaska only] gets us back to the numerical level planned during the Bush administration—and without the technological improvements in ground-based interceptors, or GBIs, that the Bush administration supported.
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A Cyber First Strike

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John Wohlstetter in The Wall Street Journal defines cyberspace as the software that controls the operation of networks linking computers in the governmental and private sphere.  This is incomplete, though.  Cyberspace includes that, but it also includes the software running on individual computers, whether they are linked into a (the) network or are operating in isolation.  Even those isolated computers, after all, are susceptible to cyber attacks, with many of them (unless they are physically disconnected from any network at all) susceptible to being hijacked into cyber attacks against other computers/networks through such means as social engineering, a process whereby hackers, or hostile governments, or terrorists, or… convince, usually through subterfuge, the human operator of those computers to load malware onto them.

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Something about Missile Defense

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I won’t go into the older history of the Progressives’ vilification of President Ronald Reagan over his push for a missile defense, and I won’t mention then-Senator John Kerry’s (D, MA) denunciation of such a system as

a dream based on illusion, but one which could have real and terrible consequences[.]

But we do need to think about Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s 2008 promise to gut missile defense development programs and—in one of the few spending cuts to which Progressives have agreed in recent history—to cut spending on such things.

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