Category Archives: defense policy

Some Biden Admin Officials are Correct

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Correct Beef, Inadequate Correction

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.