Category Archives: defense policy

Drafting Haredim

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Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled, unanimously, that the nation must begin drafting its ultra-Orthodox Jewish men—haredim—into its military.

A panel of nine judges unanimously ruled that there is no legal basis for exempting ultra-Orthodox religious scholars after a series of laws and government decisions carving out service exemptions were either struck down by the court or expired.

And

The ruling also blocks government funding for religious students without a valid military exemption, a decision that experts say could affect tens of thousands of current religious students and tens of millions of dollars in funding, raising the political stakes for the two ultra-Orthodox political parties upon which Netanyahu’s thin parliamentary coalition rests.

My question here isn’t concerned with the stability of the current Israeli government. I wonder, instead, whether this Court ruling will tip the balance in the Knesset toward passing legislation reforming the Israeli Supreme Court and elevating an Israeli concept of Parliamentary superiority, making the Knesset the final authority on what constitutes legitimate Israeli law.

Opposing that, with this ruling purporting to push for more equal treatment of all Israeli Jews (Israel’s Druze minority apparently remain exempt from the draft in this ruling), I wonder if popular opposition to reforming the Court and elevating the Knesset will grow even stronger.

Lab-Grown Meat for our Troops

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And for everyone else, too. DoD wants to have this stuff for our soldiers to the tune of a $450 million budget increase—increase, not an initial funding—for BioMADE to produce meat in a petri dish for our military’s chow halls and, presumably, for what passes for MREs these days.

The Department of Defense is funding a bio-industrial manufacturing company that has proposed feeding US troops lab-grown meat to help “reduce the CO2 footprint of food production.”

BioMADE’s proposal includes

growing meat and other kinds of food by “utilizing one carbon molecule (C1) feedstocks for food production.”

There are plenty of reasons to object to this expenditure and to this food “development” program. One thing not being addressed, though, is the simple fact that there are some few lipids—fat molecules—that our bodies cannot make from scratch and must be eaten intact. They are essential lipids in precisely the same manner that essential amino acids cannot be made by our bodies and must be eaten intact by eating…meat. (I’m eliding here the question of whether these essential amino acids will be produced in the petri dishes.) These essential lipids are best taken in by eating…red meat. Which is not the petri dish meat—which isn’t really meat, but protein—that BioMADE wants to inflict on sell to our troops.

Will BioMADE be growing fat in adjacent petri dishes? Or will our troops’ diets suffer, and their health be heavily endangered, by that lack?

Limited Options?

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Some of The Wall Street Journal‘s news personalities claim that not only are America’s options few, but we are Running Out of Options in the Gaza War. And further, as their subheadline intimates, those options are purely American political re-electability options.

Biden’s stalled cease-fire plan is a political vulnerability ahead of his debate with Trump. Israel and Hamas have a longer timeline.

Of course they do, and of course the news personalities’ bit is nonsense.

While it is true that our—not only Biden’s personal political prospects (and Trump’s, come to that)—are limited, it’s only in the fetid imaginations of pressmen that our options are running out.

Putting any emphasis at all on any sort of ceasefire in the Gaza Strip is dangerously misguided. There can be no hope of a ceasefire with an enemy that will strike at will regardless of the terms of any extant ceasefire agreement, just as Hamas did last October, in violation of the then-existing ceasefire agreement, and just as Hamas has done repeatedly before then in violation of all of those ceasefire agreements.

Our option as a nation—disregard self-serving politicians—is restricted to a single one. Support Israel fully in its war for survival against butchers whose own sole goal is the extermination of Israel. That war, of course, is the source of the longer timeline of Israel and Hamas (notice that: a single timeline, not separate ones for the nation and the terrorists). Hamas mucky-mucks have promised repeated October 7s, no matter the costs the terrorists inflict on Gaza Strip civilians, until the terrorists achieve their goal of extermination. Which makes Israel’s timeline stretch until they’ve succeeded in destroying (not exterminating—an out of line IDF general has badly conflated the two) Hamas.

On reflection, though, there is one more national option, even if Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden lacks both the political courage and the morals to apply it. That is to cut off Hamas’ source of money and arms: going back to enforcing existing sanctions on Iran (which are less effective, now, due to Russia’s and People’s Republic of China’s support, but still damaging), to begin sinking Iranian arms shipping and interdicting overland arms shipments through Iraq before it can deliver arms and ammunition, and severely damaging, if not destroying, Iran’s nuclear weapons development facilities cybernetically and, if necessary, kinetically. Dealing with Iran also would have the happy side effect of weakening Hezbollah’s ability to continue its terrorist attacks against Israel from the north.

An Arms Sale to the Republic of China

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The Biden administration has approved a sale of $360 million worth of drones, missiles and other military equipment to the Republic of China.

So far, so good.

There remains a Critical Item, though: when is the actual delivery. American governments—not just the Biden administration, this time—have a venerable history of slow-walking actual delivery to the RoC.

Over-the-Beach Resupply

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We have a floating pier off the coast of the Gaza Strip which was intended to greatly increase the amount and pace of humanitarian aid to Gazan civilians during the ongoing Hamas war against Israel. It took weeks to get the components sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and then along the length of the Mediterranean Sea to that Gazan coast. Those weeks included delays enroute (and at the start) caused by equipment failure, both in some of the components and in the ships transporting the components.

Once assembled and in more-or-less operation, the volume of traffic was much lower than expected, and under heavy Med seas (heavy for the Med, the seas weren’t the raging high waves of the Atlantic), the pier broke apart with a section being pushed across the remaining gap between the end of the pier and the actual shore (a gap that exists by design) up onto the shore. A ship sent to catch the pier section before it grounded also wound up grounded in the shallow waters near the shore. It took some weeks to repair the damage and reopen the pier.

Now, in anticipation of further heavy seas, this pier has been preemptively dismantled.

This is the level of capability we have in our military to conduct post-forced landing resupply while our troops remain engaged, either still on/near the beach or farther inland? I hope not. I hope this floating pier is not typical of our ability conduct over-the-beach resupply, especially while under fire, but I’m not sanguine about it.