Category Archives: defense policy

Should be Good for Us

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Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to start another arms race, which of necessity includes a technology race and a matching of economic strengths.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia would suspend its participation in the last remaining nuclear-arms treaty between Moscow and Washington, a vestige of the security architecture that has helped keep the peace for decades.

Despite the outcomes of Progressive-Democrat Party policies, we still have the strongest economy in the world, with lots of potential for getting even stronger, and we still have the largest economy in the world, with lots of potential for getting even larger. That feeds into our ability to innovate more rapidly than our competitors or our enemies, and so more rapidly in technology arenas, including weapons and cyber tech. And both our economic and technical capabilities potentiate our ability to produce existing weapons and the ammunition and logistics systems needed for them faster than our competitors or our enemies, and to more quickly develop new weapons and get them deployed in useful numbers.

We dissolved the USSR with that nation’s initiation of its late-stage arms race. Russia’s economic and technological establishment is even more fragile.

The People’s Republic of China? That nation is stronger than Russia, but not as strong—still—as the USSR was.

There’s this, too:

An entente between the two would replicate their Cold War anti-Western partnership with one significant difference, that Beijing rather than Moscow would be the dominant partner.

That prior entente was one in which the two nations routinely exchanged gunfire across their border, especially along the Amur River. One factor leading to those exchanges is the PRC’s—and Kuomintang China, and emperor-ist China and on back—longstanding holding that Siberia belongs to China and that Russia stole it centuries ago. This time around, the PRC is not only the dominant partner, it’s much more dominant than was the USSR in that prior arrangement. And the PRC still insists that Siberia is Chinese. Gunfire exchanges would be much more dangerous for Russia, although it would bleed the PLA, also.

That’s a risk worth taking seriously, but this is the much more likely outcome:

The prospect of the two great autocratic powers that dominate the Eurasian landmass moving closer together carries risks for Beijing. It would probably force European countries that now are hoping to maintain close commercial ties with China to move more decisively toward Washington, on which they depend for security. If that happened, geopolitical competition between the West (along with Asian democracies such as Japan and South Korea) and the Moscow-Beijing axis would solidify.

And that also would redound to the benefit of the US and to the West in general, for all the reasons listed earlier.

Bring it.

It Shouldn’t Matter

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In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the US expanding our military presence in the Republic of China from vanishingly small to miniscule, there’s this meek remark from a “US official” regarding the training of RoC forces that that slightly larger presence would be carrying out:

One of the difficult things to determine is what really is objectionable to China. We don’t think at the levels that we’re engaged in and are likely to remain engaged in the near future that we are anywhere close to a tipping point for China….

Leaving aside the question of to which China this person is referring (the timidity of the Biden and so many predecessor administrations makes that transparent, anyway), it doesn’t matter what is objectionable to the People’s Republic of China regarding our presence in the RoC. The PRC has no legitimate interest in the goings-on with respect to the RoC.

Full stop.

Yet Another Reason

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…to stop trading with and to bar exports altogether to (and imports from) the People’s Republic of China.

A US manufacturer of X-ray equipment had a decade-old patent invalidated by a Chinese legal panel. A Spanish mobile-antenna designer lost a similar fight in a Shanghai court. Another Chinese court ruled that a Japanese conglomerate broke antitrust law by refusing to license its technology to a Chinese rival.

This is the PRC weaponizing its legal system as that nation prosecutes the economic axis of its cold war against the US and against the West in general.

This goes further, to include efforts to extend PRC legal jurisdiction into other nations:

In December, the EU sued China in the World Trade Organization on behalf of Swedish telecom-equipment maker Ericsson AB and other companies, complaining that China has barred EU companies from suing to protect their patents in courts outside China. The EU called China’s policy “extremely damaging,” saying Chinese companies requested the intervention “to pressure patent right holders to grant them cheaper access to European technology.”

This is just naked theft by a nation that insists on using its laws and courts as weapons of war rather than as tools for protecting its citizens.

It’s time for us and for the EU to stop technology transfers—under any guise—to the PRC, and that must include what I wrote in my lede: bar all exports to the PRC and stop trading with that enemy nation. The transition will be deucedly expensive, but it’ll only get more so the longer we dither and delay taking that step.

Moderately Stern Letter to Follow

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken claims he wagged his finger very sternly warned his Chinese counterpart against providing Russia with “lethal support” in the invasion of Ukraine and he made it very clear that China must never violate US airspace again.

Blinken told CBS News‘ Face the Nation in an interview aired Sunday that he sent a strong message to Chinese Communist Party Central Foreign Affairs Office Director Wang Yi at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.
“I made very clear to him that China sending a surveillance balloon over the United States, in violation of our sovereignty, in violation of international law, was unacceptable, and must never happen again[.]”

And this from State’s UN Ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, to CNN:

If there are any thoughts and efforts by the Chinese and others to provide lethal support to the Russians in their brutal attack against Ukraine, that is unacceptable[.]

Sure. The PRC will back right down in the face of face-saving words from the man who so meekly accepted his a**-chewing at his first meeting with his…counterparts (the ellipsis because it’s mildly insulting to lower the PRC’s foreign ministers to the weak levels of our State Department) or from any of his subordinates.

New Possibilities

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The People’s Republic of China has already said it intended to expand its presence in Antarctica to

add new ground stations in Antarctica to support its satellite activity and data collection as concerns mount over Beijing’s surveillance programs and the rising security threats directed at the US.

Rick Fisher, Senior Fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center and Global Taiwan Institute Advisory Board member has an additional concern.

In 2021, state media revealed that China had put a LIDAR—a laser radar—into the Zhongshan station to conduct “atmospheric research.’ Any kind of laser raises the possibility that the LIDAR could be upgraded to be a far more powerful laser.

That’s true enough, and it’s a fairly simple upgrade and one about which to be concerned. However, for many of our satellites and those of our friends and allies, it would be a low angle attack through much of our atmosphere to get at very many of our satellites.

I have a larger concern, one also touched on by Fisher.

If you’re going to be attacking the United States in that manner—traversing Antarctica—it is extremely useful to have the ability to update a FOBS [Fractional Orbit Bombardment System] bus[.]

The PRC has already tested an around-the-world hypersonic nuclear missile attack profile; that test missile missed its target after its circumnavigation by some 25 miles. The route wouldn’t need to be all that close to over-the-south-pole to pick up a precise course update from the PRC’s Antarctica ground station. And at this point in our deteriorating defense capability, such a system gone operational would give the PRC a first-strike capability.