Category Archives: defense policy

Indications of the Extent of the Exposure

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A Rapid City city councilman, Jason Salamun, wants to ban TikTok from city-owned devices and networks, and to prohibit city agencies from using the app. A councilwoman, Laura Armstrong, opposes the proposed ban, claiming Rapid City has bigger problems to solve, such as crime and drugs. Yet that just illustrates how easily the ban could be enacted compared with solutions to those bigger problems.

Armstrong also claims—and she’s serious—that TikTok isn’t a threat. Never mind that TikTok is wholly owned by People’s Republic of China-domiciled ByteDance, and that under the PRC’s national intelligence law, ByteDance can be required by the nation’s intelligence apparatus to conduct espionage on American government and business entities and on individual Americans. That espionage would be done through TikTok.

Armstrong did some of her own research on the matter.

Among the things she found, the city’s exhibition center could lose business because contracts with musicians require the venue to promote gigs via TikTok, she said.
The city’s fire and police departments use TikTok to recruit, and the Solid Waste department has an official TikTok account….

That demonstrates how widespread the city’s exposure is, yet Armstrong is arguing, and again she’s actually serious, that far from demonstrating the threat, this exposure demonstrates only the difficulty of ridding the city of the threat.

Go figure.

Projecting

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That’s what Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is doing vis-à-vis the United States.

Washington went the furthest. … Some “unnamed officials” from the Pentagon actually threatened to inflict a “decapitation blow” on the Kremlin, but, in fact, it is a threat to physically eliminate the head of the Russian state[.]

This is the Russian thinking out loud about what he and/or his BFF and boss Russia’s President Vladimir Putin have in mind regarding our own government.

Another bit of Lavrovian projecting:

It is no longer a secret to anyone that the strategic goal of the United States and its NATO allies is “victory over Russia on the battlefield” as a mechanism for significantly weakening or even destroying our country.
…
…Washington is also solving an important geopolitical task—to break the traditional ties between Russia and Europe and to further subjugate the European satellites.

This, again, is the Russian thinking out loud about what the men of the barbarian government has in mind for themselves regarding Europe and Putin’s lost (and to be recovered and then expanded) empire. He’s also assuming that because the barbarian would do such a thing, other nations, per force, must be intent on those things.

More Destruction

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I alluded earlier to the destruction the current crop of DoD managers are wreaking on our military establishment.

Here’s a specific example, all too canonical.

The upstate New York military academy [West Point] is removing 13 items that reference the Confederacy, including a portrait and bust of General Robert E Lee, its superintendent before the Civil War, the Washington Examiner reports.

This revision of our nation’s military history is being done on the express approval of SecDef Lloyd Austin. Because erasing history, including critical military history, is the best way to teach military principles, successes, and failures to our future military officers.

We can’t get rid of the SecDef and his syndicate in the Office of the Secretary of Defense soon enough.

Some Biden Admin Officials are Correct

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I’ve written about the dangers of TikTok to American children’s safety and to US security before. For two years, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US has been dickering with TikTok about ways to wall the app off from the government of the People’s Republic of China as a criterion for TikTok’s continued operation in the US.

Of course, a wall-off has no hope of success: its owner, ByteDance, would remain a PRC company and so wholly responsible to the PRC government’s intelligence community to commit espionage on demand. With TikTok still owned by ByteDance, any firewall must necessarily fail in the face of any PRC intel demand.

As a result of that, some members of CFIUS, in particular, DoD and DoJ folks, are becoming more interested in requiring TikTok be spun off by ByteDance into a separate entity. It’s an interesting idea; although I wonder about remaining sub rosa connections in the form of ByteDance-affiliated persons remaining in TikTok’s management structure, along with the risk of allegedly ex-ByteDance persons still in TikTok’s management.

Treasury has its own concerns regarding a forced sale.

[T]he Treasury Department, which chairs the panel [CFIUS], is worried that such an order might be overturned in court, and is looking for other possible solutions, according to a person familiar with that department’s thinking.

Treasury’s concern is easily enough preempted, along with my concern about ByteDance-related persons in TikTok employ: ban TikTok altogether from the US.

Another Contemptuous Dismissal

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By the barbarian.

The Ukrainian government has proposed a summit at the UN regarding the barbaric Russian invasion of Ukraine, suggesting it could occur within the first two months of the new year, immediately following the barbarian’s being hauled before the bar for his war crimes.

Russian Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Polyansky responded.

What can be a “peace summit” without Russia? It’s very easy to imagine it without Ukraine[.]

This is nothing but a repetition of Vladimir Putin’s dismissal of the concept of nationhood for Ukraine as the barbarian chieftain insisted early on that Ukraine isn’t a real nation, but only a part of Russia. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on the other hand, does the barbarian the courtesy of recognizing his status. Otherwise, there’d be no entity to bring before the bar.