Category Archives: defense policy

Some Needed Firings

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They haven’t happened, yet, but they need to.

The US Air Force this month launched an effort to hire a handful of senior-level diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) managers and is hoping to place these officials in posts across the country, from Washington, DC, to Alaska.

And

The Air Force is looking for a “supervisory diversity equity inclusion and accessibility officer for Air Force headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, which will pay anywhere from $155,700 to $183,500 per year.” The person who fills this position will serve as a “first-level supervisor” who will direct employees assigned to the Air Force’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

And

The goal of the managerial slot is to ensure that “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility education and training….

This is nothing but the combat dumbing down of our Air Force: USAF management is putting the divisiveness and bigotry of DEI ahead of training for actual combat against our nation’s enemies.

The staff officers who thought this was a good idea and wasted government time and money developing it and selling to up the chain need to be reassigned to operational billets, not staff billets, in the Combatant Commands, in theater and not safely home in the US. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendell needs to be fired, and Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Brown needs to be dismissed, for allowing this destructive move to occur.

The firings must extend to the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, and JCS Chairman General Mark Milley, also; these wonders are responsible for fostering this destructive culture throughout our defense establishment.

“Dumb Rule”

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Now the Army management corps has struck again, this time doing away with a long- (and I mean long) standing tradition of letting tank crews name their tanks. Unless they perform on the gunnery range (under the range’s necessarily artificial—peacetime safety constraints, and all that—conditions) well enough to suit those in the management corps.

One former Army officer said [brackets in the original],

Sounds like a dumb rule that has [command sergeant major] written all over it[.]

Indeed. The alleged motivation for the change is to allow only those crews performing at the top on the gunnery range to name their tanks as motivation for being allowed to name their tanks. Never mind that there’s already a natural competition among tank crews, and not only on the gunnery range. Never mind that another—better—way to improve tank gunnery is to increase maintenance and training rates, including the frequency of live fire exercises. (‘Course that would take more money than the real dollar cut in defense spending President Joe Biden (D) wants.)

No, this is a rule for the sake of having a rule. As an ex-Air Force officer, the change sounds to me like a new kid on the block, whether CSM or Commanding General, was desperate to find material for his upcoming Performance or Efficiency Report.

New Kid Material is widespread and long-standing enough already, but this is the sort of nonsense that woke-ism in the SecDef’s and JCS’ offices is producing.

Bye Bye

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The People’s Republic of China’s Foreign Minister, Qin Gang, seems to be dismayed with us. The Wall Street Journal‘s headline says it:

China’s Foreign Minister Says Ties With US Risk Going Off the Rails

According to the WSJ, Qin said that

the Biden administration was insincere in saying it wanted to preserve relations and warned the US against engaging in what he called new McCarthyism.

And his boss, PRC President Xi Jinping

criticized what he termed a US policy of “all-round containment, encirclement and suppression” of [the PRC].

Never mind that the PRC badly wants not just encirclement and containment, but a rollback from its seizure and occupation of the South China Sea and other nations’ islands therein, along with a pushback from its overt threats against the Republic of China.

Not to be outdone by his boss, Qin went further:

If the United States does not hit the brakes but continues to speed down the wrong path, no amount of guardrails can prevent derailing, and there will surely be conflict and confrontation.

It’s long past time to disconnect economic and technological ties with the PRC altogether, to rapidly plus up the RoC’s ability to defend itself, and to increase our defense assistance to the other nations rimming the South China Sea.

Streamlining

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Recall the People’s Republic of China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law that requires all PRC-domiciled businesses, and by extension, the companies which those businesses control that are domiciled in non-PRC nations, to provide, even to actively seek out, any and all information that the PRC’s intelligence community wants those businesses to produce.

Now the PRC is moving to streamline that process.

China is set to create a new government agency to centralize the management of the country’s vast stores of data, as Beijing seeks to address data-security practices by businesses and streamline its regulatory structure.
The new national data bureau is set to become the top Chinese regulator on various data-related issues, people familiar with the matter said, in a shift from the current structure in which multiple ministries share oversight.

And this:

If established, the agency…[would] set and enforce data-collection and sharing rules for businesses, or vet the data that domestic companies plan to share with foreign business partners to check for potential national-security breaches….

Carefully omitted is that tie-back to the intelligence collection law. In addition to streamlining control of domestic data collection and dissemination, this centralized agency would streamline the intelligence community’s use of PRC businesses for espionage.

Germany Welches Again

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I wrote yesterday, in part, about Germany’s disreputable performance in supporting Ukraine in the latter’s war for existence against the Russian barbaric invasion.

Now, Germany has made the apparent decision to walk away altogether in any practical form from Ukraine in that nation’s hour of need, paying only lip service to aiding that nation.

In a landmark speech days after the invasion, [Chancellor Olaf] Scholz promised a Zeitenwende—a turning point—pledging to rebuild Germany’s military, secure alternative energy supplies, and help Ukraine fight off Russia.

Since then, according to Bojan Pancevski, in his Thursday Wall Street Journal article (at the link just above), Germany has

delivered on the latter two pledges, but a year on, Germany’s armed forces are in an even worse condition than when the war started, according to military commanders….

Pancevski is being generous, though. See yesterday’s table (at the first link); Germany’s—which is to say Scholz and his fellows in his government—have been niggardly in their…efforts…with five nations other than Poland, the US, and Great Britain contributing at least 50% more to Ukraine’s war effort on a GDP-normalized basis. Germany is doing next to nothing to help Ukraine. Only Italy and France are more miserly, throwing mere euro pennies, insultingly, at the feet of the Ukrainians.

More of Pancevski’s generosity:

On Ukraine, Mr Scholz discarded the longstanding pacifism underpinning German foreign policy to become the third-largest supplier of weapons to Kyiv after the US and the UK, according to the Kiel Institute for World the Economy. Two days after the invasion Mr Scholz lifted a ban on exporting weapons to war zones.

As yesterday’s table demonstrates, that “third-largest” sum is only in absolute terms. When the totals are normalized to each nation’s GDP—i.e., when the sums are matched to what the nations can afford to commit–Germany’s “generosity” fades to a distant 10th. And the nation further demonstrates its version of generosity by slow-walking on, and excuse-making for, its decision to delay delivery of the Leopard tanks it recently promised Ukraine.

German betrayal extends further.

By disdaining to rebuild Germany’s military establishment, Scholz has only perpetuated (not merely extended) his predecessor Angela Merkel’s perfidy in welching on the German promise to commit 2% of its GDP to military support for NATO.

Here is an outcome of that:

The country has 180,000 active soldiers and just over 300 tanks, half of them not roadworthy, down from 500,000 troops and 5,000 tanks at the height of the Cold War.

Germany had said earlier that it would create a €100 billion ($106 billion) fund with which it would rebuild and rearm its defense establishment. That, though, would need an amendment to its Basic Law, and no one in the German government has made a move toward generating that amendment so it could be put up for debate and passage.

Germany is not only betraying its fellow NATO members with those reneges, that nation is betraying its own citizens in those eastern States that were under Russian Soviet occupation via the fictitious (if narrowly, strictly legal) German Democratic Republic.