Category Archives: defense policy

Correct Beef, Inadequate Correction

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Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR) and Congresswoman Ashley Hinson (R, IA), in their 27 December Fox News op-ed, correctly identified a critical problem with our military as deconstructed by the Progressive-Democratic Biden administration: Commander-in-Chief Biden’s and DoD’s preference for wokeness in over combat effectiveness of our military service men and women. As they put it,

[T]he US Air Force Academy had cadets participate in a seminar that instructs them against using the word “terrorist” and to avoid gender specific phrases. When we’re training cadets how not to offend terrorists rather than how to destroy them, we need to seriously review our priorities.

However, the corrective action they suggested is wholly inadequate.

When Republicans take control of Congress next year, we must return the military’s focus to its core mission. We should start by firing every last Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer on the Department of Defense’s payroll. All unnecessary and onerous administrative training, especially so-called “extremism” trainings, should be eliminated.

Leaving aside the erroneous claim of “control of Congress”—Republicans will have a majority only in the House of Representatives—the Cotton-Hinson proposal can be no more than Step 3. Eliminating those personnel will by itself change nothing; the individuals would be promptly replaced by others of similar ilk by the managers at the top.

The first step in return[ing] the military’s focus to its core mission is the Critical Item. The personnel in the Office of the Secretary of Defense must be fired—every single one of them, from SecDef Lloyd Austin on down. At the same time, all of the incumbent personnel in the Offices of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard also must be fired.

The second step is another Critical Item, and it must deal with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Every officer and senior NCO in the JCS beginning with CJCS Mark Milley and his staff and including each of the Service Chiefs and their staffs must be relieved and either retired or reassigned to the Combatant Commands to serve in situ in actual line jobs—whether combat, supply, or maintenance.

Without a complete replacement of the current crop of managers—they cannot be called leaders—removing the subordinate personnel will have no effect.

To those who warn that such a sweeping, essentially simultaneous turnover of the top management of our military establishment will leave our military rudderless and without direction, consider: the Combatant Commands remain intact (so far—the damage being done hasn’t materially harmed those Commands, yet). And: with the current crop of managers at the top, our military establishment already is without direction and has been—dangerously so—for the last two years.

Mistaken Goal

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French President Emmanuel Macron says the West must give Russia security guarantees as part of a peace settlement regarding its invasion of Ukraine.

This is, to use the technical term, a crock.

Macron needs to stop parroting the barbarian chieftain’s claims of security risks and, instead, say explicitly what security threats actually face the barbarian. He cannot because none exist that are unrelated to the barbarian’s invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine needs security guarantees (which Macron so kindly conceded along with his “must give”), and those guarantees must be real, not the sham/con job that was the Budapest Memorandum that was centered on Ukraine.

The Russian barbarian, on the other hand, will receive his security guarantee in the form of his removal of his hordes from Ukraine—all of Ukraine. From that moment risks to, threats against, the barbarian will virtually cease to exist.

The reason for expanding NATO, for bringing into any sort of Western alliance nations bordering on the Russian Federation, is wholly defensive—to increase the security of those nations against the barbarian’s expansionism, an acquisitiveness empirically demonstrated by his denial of Ukraine as an actual nation followed by his invasion of that nation. When the barbarian leaves off from his expansionist policy, risks and threats regarding him will cease to exist entirely.

Russia has, after all, exactly nothing (which is to say nada, zilch, zip, zero) which anyone in the West wants that can’t be gotten far more cheaply through threat-free, peaceful, mutually beneficial free trade exchanges.

Even one so enlightened as Macron knows this.

Biden and His Iran Nuclear Weapons Deal

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He’s still after one, one that would give the Mullahs hundreds of billions of dollars in return for their delaying, briefly, development and production of nuclear weapons. This despite the Mullahs’ avowed goal of destroying Israel, its empirical history of spending billions of dollars funding its terrorist clients and their terrorism, and the Mullahs’ current terrorism against their own subjects for those subjects’ heinous crime of protesting the Iranian government’s murder of a young woman Iranian “police” had arrested and had in police “custody” at the time of her murder.

Biden refuses to change his goal vis-à-vis that deal. Refuses to, not cannot, change. Gabriel Noronha, ex-special adviser on Iran for the State Department offered this:

Biden officials feel that to announce an end to negotiations would be admitting failure, and that snapback also signals the end to the JCPOA[.]

This is just a silly rationalization, though. It would be easy enough—and highly effective—to say words to the effect of “Worth a shot, didn’t work due to Iranian government intransigence, we’re ending negotiations.”

Acknowledging that something hasn’t worked out as planned and changing to something else is the stuff of successful business, and it’s the stuff of successful politics.

But Biden, the great Senator deal maker, is desperate for his deal. And that’s to the detriment of our national security and to that of Israel and to that of our other allies and friends.

What Biden’s Border Policy Has Accomplished

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Here’s the flow of fentanyl into our nation that President Joe Biden (D) and his administration is so actively permitting with his No Southern Border policy. (For both graphs, Left-Click|Open-in-New-Tab to get a larger view.)Nor is the death and destruction limited to our southern border States.

Biden is permitting the attacks throughout our nation with his refusal to deal with our southern border.

Beyond that, it’s not just the Mexican drug cartels that the Biden administration is actively allowing to flood our nation with fentanyl through his policy. The cartels are getting, free-flowingly and cheaply, the precursor chemicals for manufacturing fentanyl from the People’s Republic of China.

Not only is the Biden administration refusing to secure our border—especially against the importation of this murderous drug—the Biden administration is refusing to take action against the PRC to put an end to its active role in poisoning Americans.

Boris Johnson is Mistaken

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Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson advocates—absolutely correctly—that the West must step up its aid to Ukraine in order to accelerate an end to the barbarian’s invasion on terms favorable to Ukraine.

But early on in his Wall Street Journal op-ed he wrote a serious mistake.

Russian forces must be pushed back to the de facto boundary of Feb. 24.

Johnson’s heart is in the right place, but he’s badly mistaken here.

Johnson wrote in his immediately preceding sentence,

The war in Ukraine can end only with Vladimir Putin’s defeat.

The barbarian must be fully expelled from every inch of Ukrainian territory; that’s the only outcome that actually would be a defeat for Putin. Agreeing the 24 Feb line of more-or-less control only would agree stalemate while actively accepting the premise that put the barbarian that far into Ukrainian territory in the first place: that a Russian Anschluss is legitimate.

There is no alternative to the barbarian’s complete expulsion.

Full stop.