Category Archives: defense policy

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.

Why Not?

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Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo (D) doesn’t want the US to decouple our trade or our trade relationship with the People’s Republic of China. It’s sufficient, she claims in all seriousness to safeguard [our] technology to ensure [our] economic competitiveness.

It’s important that we get the bilateral economic relationship right, not just by protecting but also by actively promoting our economic interests in trade. We are not seeking the decoupling from China.

Why not? There’s a broader concern here, that Raimondo and the Biden administration at large, carefully ignore than merely protecting our technology and technology advantages. That larger concern is our independence of action on the world stage in “competition” with a nation with the avowed goal of overtaking and supplanting the US in the world—of conquering us, whether overtly or functionally.

That goal, that threat is given concrete, measurable effect by the PRC’s

  • flooding the US with fentanyl and flooding Mexico with the components of fentanyl so that nation can flood US with fentanyl
  • our dependence on PRC for Critical Items in our supply chain
    • rare earths, which the PRC already has used in an attempt to extort Japan
    • lithium
    • cobalt
    • intermediate components in assembly of computer chips, computers, cell phones
  • overt threats against friends and allies, , Republic of China, Japan and Republic of Korea (East China Sea), nations rimming South China Sea
  • 2017 National Intelligence Law that makes every PRC company a spy for the PRC government and for the CCP
  • support for the barbarian’s invasion of Ukraine

Trade with the PRC funds their military development against that goal of replacing us.

The PRC is an enemy nation, and we should be doing nothing at all to support its economy, its economic adventurism around the world, its intelligence-gathering efforts, its own technological development, its military expansion and expansionism.

That requires decoupling altogether.