Category Archives: defense policy

Why Do the Workaround?

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NVIDIA Corp is busily looking for ways to circumvent newly enacted rules barring export of computer chips and chip technology to the People’s Republic of China.

Nvidia Corp has begun offering an alternative to a high-end chip hit with US export restrictions to customers in China, after the new rules threatened to cost the American company hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.
Nvidia said the new graphics-processing chip, branded the A800, meets US restrictions on chips that can be exported to China under new rules rolled out last month. The chip went into production in the third quarter, the company said.

On the other hand,

According to a memo Nvidia sent to its channel distributors last Thursday, the A800 has the same computational performance but a narrower interconnect bandwidth, the capacity of a chip to send and receive data from other chips, crucial for training large-scale AI models or building supercomputers.

It’s not the data rates, though, that matter; it’s the computational techniques and the technology used to implement those techniques that are important.

NVIDIA claims,

The A800 meets the US government’s clear test for reduced export control and cannot be programmed to exceed it.

This is disingenuous. The chip can be reverse-engineered to learn how the computational techniques are achieved. Indeed, simply programming the chip—accepting, arguendo, NVIDIA’s claim about programmability—would be a useless enterprise when the goal is to gain the technology itself.

It’s true enough that it takes some little time to relocate manufacturing/assembly sites and to move supply chains. However, why should NVIDIA or any American company, especially our technology-based companies, do business with any PRC company beyond a—adjusted apace—period of transition away from that nation?

Why would an American company be so willing to transfer, or risk transferring, American technology to an enemy nation by doing business with that nation or any business domiciled in it?

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.