Category Archives: defense policy

DHS Responsiveness

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House Republicans have put Department of Homeland Security management on notice to hold onto a variety of data; they’ll be investing the department if they win a majority of the House this Tuesday (and the out-days of vote “counting”).

House Oversight and Reform Committee Ranking Member Congressman James Comer (R, LA) has warned Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that Republicans would seek to hold him and his agency accountable for the ongoing crisis at the southern border should they win in next week’s midterm elections.
“We cannot endure another year of the Biden Administration’s failed border policies,” Comer and his fellow committee Republicans wrote to Mayorkas, per the Washington Times. “We have written DHS fifteen times this Congress to conduct oversight over the border crisis. Again, we request documents and information to understand the Biden Administration’s plans, if any, to secure the border.”

Here’s a thought. Republicans should withhold funding (defund, in the Progressive-Democratic Party’s favorite jargon) for the DHS other than ICE, CBP, and other border/immigration-related agencies, and the Coast Guard unless and until all documents are turned over to the new House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s satisfaction, and DHS Secretary and Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and John Tien, respectively, have resigned.

They shouldn’t just yap about having called repeatedly for documents or bark about “we’re going to investigate the Hell out of you,” knowing there’s no hope of subpoenas being enforced—they should put some teeth into their demands. They should take their own, purse string-related, steps to enforce their demands and investigations.

The Progressive-Democrat President certainly will veto such a budget, and he’ll threaten to shut down the government. However, both the Biden administration in general and Mayorkas’ DHS are prime examples of why that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Aside from that, the Obama Shutdown of 2013 is example of the harmlessness of the Federal government not operating for a time.

Putin Wants an Arms Race

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Russia threatens arms race in space if commercial satellites do not stop assisting Ukraine in war, goes the subheadline.

And:

[Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Konstantin] Vorontsov argued that commercial satellites used to benefit Ukraine in the war violates The Outer Space Treaty and warned it could start a “full-fledged arms race in outer space.”

An arms race in space.

I say bring it. The Soviet Union couldn’t handle a Reagan arms race in space; the USSR couldn’t keep up with the technology developments, and its economy couldn’t keep up with anything—military or civilian.

The Russian economy is in worse shape. Let’s have that arms race. Russia will lose this one, and just as catastrophically, even if the nation doesn’t actually disintegrate the way the USSR did.

National Defense Authorization Act

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This bill is intended to fund our national defense effort, it’s an annual bill, and the one for 2023 is being put together these days.

Here’s some of what the Progressive-Democratic Party Senators insist on including in it, things which they insist are critical to our national security.

  • an amendment to address high credit card fees
  • an amendment to exempt foreign graduates of American universities with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math from annual green card limits
  • an amendment to stop federal employees from being reclassified as political appointees without the consent of Congress

To the extent that some of these are good ideas, they should be put into separate bills and debated and voted on separately. That they’re not is a pretty clear indication that the Progressive-Democrats don’t really believe in them; they’re only using them to obstruct and to push their unrelated agenda.

“Ukraine Needs a Guarantee from NATO”

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That’s the headline of Andrew Michta’s op-ed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal. Michta is the George C Marshall European Center for Security Studies’ College of International and Security Studies Dean in Garmisch, Germany, so he would seem to speak with some knowledge.

His piece objected to the EU’s emphasis on fast-tracking (to the extent it really is) Ukraine’s membership in that body at the expense of guaranteeing Ukraine’s security by bringing it into NATO’s defense perimeter if not actually into NATO (which Michta favors).

He’s ignoring reality here, though, and so to borrow a term from a cable advertiser, Nonsense.

Guarantees of Ukraine’s security are as worthless today as they were with the Budapest Memoranda and the Minsk Protocols.

What Ukraine needs is stepped up transfers of serious weapons, ammunition, and supply—including air- and missile-defense systems, armor, and increased supply of HIMARS, including the full-range missiles that nation currently is denied.

Full stop.

EU membership and even NATO “security guarantees” can follow only on Ukraine’s successful defeat of the barbarian’s invasion and the permanent ejection of the barbarian from that nation. Absent that, there will be no nation to bring toward the West; it will have been utterly destroyed by the barbarian, which is the avowed goal of the Vladimir Putin.

“Ukraine Needs More Security Guarantees”

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That’s the position of The Wall Street Journal‘s headline writer and of Andriy Yermak and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who opined as much in their Thursday op-ed. They were actually serious, too. The position is, though, to use the technical term, a bunch of bull.

They demonstrate the foolishness of their position in their lede:

When Ukraine’s army is given the weapons it needs, it defeats Russia on the battlefield. That is the lesson the world learned as it watched Ukrainian forces quickly retake the Kharkiv region this month. Since the beginning of September, Ukrainian forces have liberated more than 2,300 square miles of territory in the south and east of the country.

However.

They want to build on this success with an international “guarantee:” a Kyiv Security Compact between Ukraine and its partners. Then they muddle their position further by insisting (correctly so, here) that Ukraine should be given modern and effective air-defense and antimissile systems—in addition, I say, to much more heavy weapons of the type currently being supplied in dribs and drabs, and with the addition of tanks and other armor.

Ukraine has already been the victim of international guarantees. The Budapest Memoranda guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity if they gave up the nuclear weapons then held by the nation following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ukraine agreed. Not too long later, Russia occupied and partitioned away Crimea and seized and occupied a significant fraction of the Ukrainian portion of the Donbas.

The guarantors’ response? Bleatings, finger-waggings, and the empty promises of the Minsk Protocols. These were followed by the barbarian’s naked invasion of Ukraine and the atrocities inflicted on Ukrainian women, children, and men, both civilian and soldier; those atrocities continue apace today. The Minsk guarantors’ response here? Russia was one of those guarantors…. The others responded by slow-walking and actively withholding weapons from Ukraine as the barbarian’s pre-invasion build-up proceeded in Belorussia and across the border in Russia near Belgorod.

When the barbarian sent in its invasion, the West’s guarantors continued to slow-walk serious weapons transfers until only lately. These worthies still won’t transfer tanks and other armor, led by Germany, which government men insist that Ukrainians—Slavs all—are just too stupid to be able learn how to operate a German tank.

No. No empty, misleading, won’t-be-enforced guarantees.

What Ukraine needs are the weapons it needs, but the full suite of them according to Ukraine’s articulation, not the Know Betters of the timid West. The barbarian’s invasion must be utterly crushed and the barbarian forced to tear up its roads and railroads some considerable distance into Russia from the Ukrainian border, with the -road beds and the flatter terrain between sown with the aptly named Russian olive. The horde must not be left able to invade again.

Rasmussen, especially, should know better. He was NATO’s Secretary General from 2009 to 2014. So should Yermak, come to that; he’s the sitting head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, and he’s living through the outcome of the empty words of those prior “guarantees.”