Category Archives: defense policy

Failure

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A letter writer, in his 10 Sept Wall Street Journal Letter, quoted from former President George Bush the Younger’s Decision Points (scroll to the last letter).

Ultimately, the only way the Taliban and al Qaeda can retake Afghanistan is if America abandons the country. Allowing the extremists to reclaim power would force Afghan women back into subservience, remove girls from school, and betray all the gains of the past nine years. After the Cold War, the United States gave up on Afghanistan. The result was chaos, civil war, the Taliban takeover, sanctuary for al Qaeda, and the nightmare of 9/11. To forget that lesson would be a dreadful mistake.

What Bush said.

The letter writer added his own codicil:

Prophecy fulfilled.

What he said, too.

It’s a Start

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In acknowledgment of the fiasco associated with 2020’s voting machine accessibility from/to the Internet, the Election Assistance Commission, an independent Federal Government facility (and unaffiliated with the Federal Election Commission), has moved to bar any connection with the Internet by a voting machine.

Going forward, vote systems cannot be connected to any digital networks, and wireless technology must be disabled too.

And

The new requirements provide a much more draconian ban on external access to the Internet or other computer networks, a security provision otherwise known as an “air gap.” The commission specifically cited the potential threat posed by foreign adversaries to meddle in elections.

It’s a good start, but it’s insufficient. That air gap can be penetrated, also, by any party interested enough to do so. Computers—any electronic device—emits electromagnetic radiation, particularly radio frequency radiation, and those signals can be received and read. For this reason, our National Security Agency has developed TEMPEST requirements to prevent these signals to be receivable by our foreign adversaries. Of interest here, TEMPEST requires electronic equipment containing or processing information of sufficient security interest to be enclosed inside glorified Faraday cages, which block those electromagnetic signals from escaping the equipment facility.

For the most part, such requirements would seem overkill for a voting center—except for that bit about foreign adversaries looking to meddle in an election. That risk is potentiated by the existence of a potentially highly contentious election, which gives one or another party an interest in…influencing…an election’s votes.

Our voting centers need to address that air gap vulnerability, also.

 

The EAC’s new requirements, in their entirety, can be read here.

And We Thought Obama Was Bad

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…with his penchant for finger-wagging in lieu of concrete action.

Here are the Houthis, demonstrating their utter contempt for the Biden-Harris administration and its diplomatic mouthpiece, SecState Antony Blinken (D).

First, President Joe Biden (D) cut off arms sales to the Saudis, hoping the Houthis would appreciate the gesture and play nice. The Houthis’ nice play was a drone attack on a Saudi civilian airport that wounded eight and damaged a commercial aircraft.  Blinken

“strongly” condemned the attack, adding that “we again call on the Houthis to uphold a ceasefire and engage in negotiations under UN auspices.”

After that condemnation, the not very chastened Houthis fired missiles into eastern Saudi Arabia, damaging homes and injuring children.  Blinken responded in no uncertain terms. Sort of.

This is completely unacceptable. These attacks threaten the lives of the Kingdom’s residents, including more than 70,000 US citizens.
…
The Houthis must begin working toward a peaceful, diplomatic solution under UN auspices to end this conflict[.]

Or else what, Blinken? What are you—or your boss, Biden-Harris—going to do if the Houthis remain unresponsive to porch dog yapping?

On the other hand, all that’s left for the Houthi management team to do is to turn their backs to Biden-Harris-Blinken and moon them.

What Biden’s Afghan Job Well Done Looks Like

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Ambassador Kelley Eckels Currie, former US ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues:

Currie’s group organized buses to take roughly 700 Afghans, women and their families, to the [Kabul] airport, maintaining communications with the State Department, vetting the evacuees in advance and sharing passenger lists for the buses.
“The State Department was aware of the groups we were trying to assist,” Currie said. “I was told that this information had been raised at the highest levels; we had very senior people reaching out to State leadership.”
That included at least one message sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, she said. And she personally wrote a note to Undersecretary of State for Management Ambassador John Bass.
Authorities told the group to wait in a staging facility for 24 hours before the State Department reversed course and said it couldn’t help fly them out.

Those women remain stranded, abandoned by President Joe Biden’s team.

And this:

Taliban supporters in Afghanistan holding a mock funeral while hoisting coffins draped with flags from the US and other NATO countries.

None of this counts the hundreds (thousands?) of Americans Biden also has stranded—abandoned—in Afghanistan.

These represent the victory of which Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, JCS Chief General Mark Milley are so proud of accomplishing.

Escalating

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First (well, almost first, but the early large), President Joe Biden (D) surrendered in Afghanistan, and he did it so abjectly that he abandoned Americans (he was correct when he said through his Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, that he wasn’t merely “stranding” them), allies’ citizens, and Afghan partners in his desperation to meet the terrorist Taliban’s deadline.

Then Baby Kim has resumed northern Korea’s weapons grade plutonium-producing nuclear reactor—and not even troubling to conceal that effort.

Now this.

In a move that could have ramifications for the free passage of both military and commercial vessels in the South China Sea, [People’s Republic of China] authorities said on Sunday they will require a range of vessels “to report their information” when passing through what China sees as its “territorial waters,” starting from September 1.

And

[The PRC] claims under a so-called “nine dash line” on its maps most of the South China Sea’s waters, which are disputed by several other countries, including the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

And by Japan and most of the rest of the world, including—used to be, anyway—the United States.

It’ll be instructive to see how the Biden/Harris administration responds to this demonstration of contempt for their timid fecklessness. Compare their response, then, with the prior administration’s reaction to the PRC government’s declaration of an ADIZ that encompassed significant swaths of the South and East China Seas airspaces and tried to require all air traffic to check in with the PRC. (Spoiler: that administration ignored the PRC’s demand, and so did most of the rest of the world.)

It’s shaping up to be a disastrous period of American headlong retreat under this Progressive-Democrat administration.