Category Archives: defense policy

Cost Is Too High?

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Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s terms for negotiating with Russia an end to the barbarian’s invasion of is nation begins with the barbarian being driven completely out of Ukraine. Which raises a question that shouldn’t even be a question.

[P]ushing Russian forces out of the entrenched positions they hold in more than 15% of Ukraine’s territory will require an even greater flow of military support—possibly more than the West is willing and able to bear.

This timidity is especially rampant in President Joe Biden’s (D) administration.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken told The Wall Street Journal last Monday [4 December] that the US would support Kyiv in recovering territory Russia has grabbed since launching its large-scale invasion on Feb. 24, suggesting that Washington might not back Ukraine militarily in retaking areas that Russia seized in 2014, including the Crimean Peninsula.
Other Ukraine allies are adamant that Kyiv must win back all its lands.

Those others are correct, and it’s especially embarrassing that our own administration doesn’t understand that. Sweden’s Foreign Minister Tobias Billström put the matter succinctly:

Anything less than a Russian defeat in Ukraine will embolden Moscow and other authoritarian powers[.]

Those other authoritarian powers include the People’s Republic of China and Iran. Encouraging the PRC puts the Republic of China at direct risk as PRC President Xi Jinping has said openly and often that he intends to absorb the RoC into the body of the PRC, and at gun point if necessary. The mullahs of Iran will be encouraged to push their domination over Iraq, and they’ll be encouraged press their Yemen war even more zealously to weaken Saudi Arabia and then to dominate that nation.  Which puts Israel at deadly risk.

Those aren’t the only costs, either. Russian President Vladimir Putin has often said that Ukraine isn’t really a nation; it’s part of Metropolitan Russia, and he intends to erase that nation and absorb it. He’s also said he intends to recreate the Russian empire, which puts the Baltic States, Poland, and the nations on the western shore of the Black Sea at risk. Even what used to be the German Democratic Republic will be at risk. All that’s required is the barbarian’s victory in Ukraine. Even his merely holding the 14 February already occupied oblasts would only encourage him.

Go back to the PRC. Xi’s successful conquering of the RoC would cement his control over the South China Sea and all of its fisheries, undersea oil and natural gas fields, and all the rare earths on the sea floor. It also would give him control over the sea lines of commerce on which the Republic of Korea and Japan utterly depend—and through which at least 40% of the economic value shipped to the US sails.

Biden and his affiliates need to find some backbone vis-à-vis Ukraine. The problem here is, in the end, not a matter of cost—the cost of failure is far greater, and it includes the non-economic cost of the erasure of at least two independent nations from the Earth.

The problem here is the degree of political will.

Lloyd Austin’s, Mark Milley’s Woke Military

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A concerned mother posted on her Facebook page an objection to posters at her 7-yr-old child’s elementary school, posters that depicted different kinds of sexuality, including the virtues of being “polysexual.”

Lt Col Christopher Schilling, of Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst—McGuire AFB—responded with threats and by siccing his Joint Base security and the local town’s police on the mother for her effrontery.

The current situation involving [the mother’s] actions has caused safety concerns for many families. The Joint Base leadership takes this situation very seriously and from the beginning have had the Security Forces working with multiple state and local law enforcement agencies to monitor the situation to ensure the continued safety of the entire community.

To make even worse this assault on a mother expressing legitimate concerns about what elementary school officials are exposing young children to,

The Joint Base confirmed to Fox News that it notified law enforcement about the social media exchange….

And North Hanover Police Chief Robert Duff followed up on that “notification” and told the mother to delete her post.

This is what SecDef Lloyd Austin and CJCS General Mark Milley are wreaking on our military establishment.

Aside from Schilling desperately needing reassignment—perhaps to an American base on the Arabian Gulf—Austin and Milley need to be cashiered. Soonest.

A Simple Solution

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Even if it might be politically difficult and short-term expensive.

Recall that EU member Lithuania expressed support for the Republic of China and in naked retaliation, the People’s Republic of China imposed a nearly complete trade embargo on Lithuania and blocked import of any other EU member’s products that contained Lithuania-originated parts.

Now, a year later, the EU is haling the PRC into the WTO in a suit over that embargo. Be still, my heart.

There’s a better and more effective and permanent solution to this sort of behavior from the PRC.

A year later, Lithuania has learned that it can get along without trade with the PRC, and by that example, so has the EU (and so have the US and non-PRC Asia, come to that).

The solution includes these straightforward steps.

  • The rest of us increase our trade with Lithuania
  • The EU in particular, and the rest of us as well, stop trading with the PRC
  • All of us increase our trade with the RoC

Sadly, the parties involved make such moves politically difficult with their own fear of PRC retaliations. And certainly, through the middle-term, it would be economically expensive to locate and develop alternative markets and to move supply chain steps—from dirt in the ground to component parts to finished products—completely out of the PRC. However, once those transfers are completed, we’d all be better off politically and economically from no longer having our economies dependent on the good offices of an aggressive and acquisitive enemy nation.

The PRC’s behavior toward Lithuania and its attempt to extort Japan through withholding shipments of rare earths to that nation are just two examples of that benefit.

Supporting Ukraine’s Ability “to defend themselves”

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Against the backdrop of three probably Ukrainian attacks on Russian defense facilities well inside Russia, Secretary of State Antony Blinken “assured” one and all that

the US was determined to make sure the Ukrainians had “the equipment that they need to defend themselves, to defend their territory, to defend their freedom.”

That is, to use the technical term, a crock from the Biden administration.

A Critical Item in defending themselves, defending their territory, defending their freedom is a Ukrainian ability to attack the barbarian’s launching sites, including those inside Russia proper, that the barbarian uses for the missiles and drones being fired on civilian targets like apartment buildings; hospitals; and electricity, natural gas, and water distribution nodes.

Yet this administration demurs from facilitating Ukraine’s ability to do that. It has supplied Ukraine with HIMARS crippleware, artificially modified to prevent those systems from firing into Russia, it continues to block delivery of fighter aircraft, and it continues to jawbone Ukraine against attacking into Russia.

What the Biden administration also continues to do is refuse to explain why Russia should be a sanctuary state, even as it prosecutes its barbaric war against Ukraine.

Shouldn’t Be Anyway

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In a Fox News piece on the refusal of Russia to continue negotiations on the mutual inspection clause of the current New START treaty that purports to limit the size of the Russian and American nuclear arsenals, there was this from Arms Control Association Executive Director Daryl Kimball regarding the breakdown:

If there’s not a negotiation on some sort of replacement treaty, there will be no agreement for the first time since 1972 that limits the world’s two largest nuclear superpowers arsenals[.]

Kimball is ignoring—worse, President Joe Biden (D), his Secretary of State, and his Secretary of Defense are ignoring—the absence of the world’s third largest nuclear superpower in any sort of nuclear arms control negotiation.

If the People’s Republic of China, which is expanding its nuclear arsenal and modernizing with state-of-the-art equipment its delivery systems for that arsenal, is not an active and good faith participant in any such negotiation, than any arms limitation treaty between the US and Russia will amount only to the US’ unilateral disarmament relative to the PRC—and relative to Russia, which is rapidly becoming economically dependent on the PRC and which can rely on it in any nuclear war.

That growing disparity in military capability between the US and the PRC, keep in mind, comes against the backdrop of PRC President Xi Jinping’s avowed goal of “supplanting” the US as the sole world power.

We need to accept Russia’s decision, via its current refusal, to begin a new arms race. It’s a race that our survival as a free and independent actor in the world depends on winning, and it’s a race that we can win with our—so far—economic and technological superiority, just as we did vis-à-vis the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The time is now, though, to join and to push that race—the PRC already has been in it for lots of years, and that nation is far more economically and technologically capable than the USSR ever was.