Category Archives: defense policy

The Draft

Posted on by
Reply

A correspondent to The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday’s Letters wrote of the consequences of ending the military draft and of the need for reinstating it.

He’s spot on, including his call for keeping exemptions to a bare minimum.

If we are to reinstate the draft, exemptions must be few and confined to medical reasons. American youth deserve fairness if they are to respond to the call of freedom.

I agree with reinstating the draft, but I would add two opportunities for delay by one drafted.

College/trade school students who are drafted should be allowed an opportunity to finish their degrees/certifications before heading to boot camp. That opportunity, though, should come with its own limit. College degrees take four, or at most five years, and trade school programs take two, or at most three years. A drafted student’s delay clock should start from the first year of his time in school, and the delay should expire at the end of those four/five years or two/three years, whether he’s finished his program or not.

Graduate students would have no such delay; they should be required to report on the specified date.

The other delay—which could convert to an exemption—should apply to those enrolled in ROTC programs. When I went through USAF ROTC some while ago, the program proceeded in two phases. The first was a General Military Course, which lasted for two years, and at the conclusion conferred no obligation to enlist. Any student could enroll in the GMC. The second phase, the Professional Officer Course, was open only to those who had completed the GMC (the requirement could be waived, but that was only rarely done), and enrolling in the POC involved formally enlisting in the Air Force as an NCO. Cadets could resign from the POC at any time, but they were then expected to report for duty at their NCO rank (a requirement that, in the realization, wasn’t always enforced.)

A draft/delay exemption would apply to ROTC enrollees in this way. Their draft delays would date from their enrollment in the GMC. Resigning from the GMC, or declining to subsequently enroll in the POC would require the draft-delayed student to report to boot camp on the next available date. Students who resign from the POC would be required—with no exceptions—to report for duty at their NCO rank. A cadet who completes the ROTC program and is commissioned would see his draft status OBE.

Biden would be Encouraged

Posted on by
Reply

That’s what’s in the REPO Act, or Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity for Ukrainians Act, which is included in the latest Ukrainian aid package.

It encourages Mr Biden to transfer frozen Russian reserves to a trust fund for Ukraine.

Those frozen assets amount to some $300 billion, globally. Count on Biden, though, to decline to be encouraged.

He won’t touch those frozen assets. He’s already been…encouraged…by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to slow-walk delivery of the weapons Ukraine needs actually to defeat the barbarian and drive him back out of Ukraine. He’s already been…encouraged…by Putin to deny altogether other weapons that would facilitate a Ukrainian outright victory.

Biden has—supposedly—been working on lending money to Ukraine that’s based on the interest accruing on all those frozen Russian assets. As Robert Zoellick put it in his op-ed at the link above, though,

Washington, London, and Ottawa should instead transfer all the frozen Russian assets in their currencies worldwide to a trust fund for Ukraine while urging Europeans to act when they can agree. If Europeans won’t use Russian assets, they can’t expect others to keep paying. After all, the war is in Europe.

Indeed.

Berlin and Paris have been the principal obstacles. Washington can assuage their anxieties.

Don’t bother. If Germany and France wish to render themselves irrelevant to the barbarian’s annihilative war, honor their desire. Move on without them, and move on with those eastern Europe nations still fresh from under the barbarian’s jackboots, Poland and the Baltic States especially, along with newly alert Finland and Sweden.

Turn as much of those $300 billion as are in the direct or indirect jurisdiction of the US and others at least nominally interested in crushing the barbarian’s invasion (if not the barbarian himself) into that trust fund, or better, into a fund on which Ukraine can draw directly, at need. And make the weapons Ukraine might wish to buy or lend/lease available for immediate sale/borrow/lease and delivery in the numbers Ukraine needs.

Israel and Genocide

Posted on by
Reply

In a WSJ article regarding the present explosion of Hamas terrorist pro-Palestinian protests and the demands of disruptors perpetrating these “protests” that the colleges and universities divest from Israel-related investments, there is the disruptors’ claims that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip (and, presumably in the West Bank). This claim is risible on its face.

Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group. Even if we take the terrorists’ own claims of casualties in Gaza as accurate—30,000 casualties—this hardly constitutes genocide: those casualties are only a bit over 1% of the Gaza Strip population. If Israel is committing genocide, the nation is atrociously bad at it. At most, that casualty figure would constitute nothing more than Israeli carelessness in protecting civilians as Israel moves to defend itself against the terrorists who inflicted the rapes and child butcheries of October 7 (more on this below).

Regarding actual genocide, Nazi Germany attempted extermination of Jews.

The Hutus attempted, and nearly succeeded at, genocide against the Tutsis in the Rwandan “civil” war.

The People’s Republic of China is attempting genocide against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

Regarding Israeli responsibility vis-à-vis those Gazan casualties: what the disruptors carefully ignore is that Hamas uses Gaza Strip civilian residents as shields behind which the terrorists hide during firefights, and they use those civilian residents’ residential buildings, schools, hospitals, and mosques(!) as weapon storage sites, housing for their command centers, and as places from which to launch their weapons against Israel and against IDF forces in Gaza.

Further, the IDF is so careless in its handling of civilians in target zones that it’s at pains to warn those civilians of impending attacks so that the civilians can leave before the attack goes in—which gives the terrorists the same warnings and opportunities to leave, when the terrorists aren’t staying and forcing the warned civilians to stay also as shields for their terrorist captors, and to run up the civilian casualty count purely for terrorist propaganda.

No, the state of Israel is the victim of an ongoing genocide attempt, including the series of wars of extermination inflicted on the nation in the latter half of the 20th century, and as most recently and plainly announced by major Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad, who promised serial October 7s until Israel is destroyed.

Of course these disruptors—who insist they are so much better informed and so much smarter than us average Americans—know these things. Their genocide claim is nothing but an illustration of their dishonesty and of their support for the terrorists bent on exterminating Israel.

Just as despicable, though, is the cowardice of the schools’ managers who refuse even to address the lie of Israeli genocide. They’d rather bow down to the disruptors.

Nuclear Missile Defense

Posted on by
Reply

In their Thursday missive to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, Laura Grego and Lisbeth Gronlund, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote correctly that defending against relatively low-flying and short-range rockets that Israel’s Iron Dome does so well is different from defending against long-range, fast, exoatmospheric missiles.

But then they segued to their strawman argument.

…potential adversaries will develop systems to counter a potential buildup or improvement in defenses.

Missiles and missile defense are in an arms race. Who knew?

Instructively, these two scientists offered no alternative solution to the national security problem of defending against nuclear attack.

Apparently, their position—implied by their careful silence on how actually to defend against nuclear attack—is that we should stop trying to defend ourselves; we should instead merely surrender when an enemy mentions its own nuclear capability.

Misunderstood Difficulty

Posted on by
Reply

Hamas terrorists are resuming their presence in northern Gaza Strip, months after the IDF had initially cleared the Strip except for the far south of the Strip: Rafah and a couple small villages near Rafah.

[R]enewed violence, in areas Israeli forces had previously largely cleared of Hamas, serves as a sobering example for Israel’s forces of the difficulty of consolidating gains as they prepare an offensive in Rafah, the militant group’s last major bastion.

It’s certainly true that clearing an area of the remnants of a terrorist entity that operates as a dispersed network and that is skilled at (literal) underground operations and keeping that area clear is deucedly difficult.

The problem illustrated by the renewed fighting in the cleared areas, though, is not one of that difficulty. On the contrary, the problem so illustrated originates in the IDF’s failure to finally destroy the terrorists in their last enclave, Rafah and those one or two remaining villages. So long as those terrorist entities exist, they’ll continue to infiltrate from wherever they are concentrated to other areas of Gaza.

Israel needs to stop dithering about Rafah and go in, in force, and finish exterminating the terrorists there. The Biden administration needs to stop supporting Hamas with its words and Biden’s kowtowing to the terrorist supporters in his administration and get fully behind Israel in words and especially in overt action as the IDF (finally) moves in.