Category Archives: defense policy

Other Implications

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Automakers are starting to adjust their level of dependence on Just in Time manufacturing, a technique whereby manufacturers vastly reduce inventory holding costs by having the relevant inputs—car parts, for instance—arrive at the factory just before they’re needed. In some of the more extreme cases, that includes arriving on the moving assembly line just before it’s needed for addition to the growing product.

The hyperefficient auto supply chain symbolized by the words “just in time” is undergoing its biggest transformation in more than half a century, accelerated by the troubles car makers have suffered during the pandemic. After sudden swings in demand, freak weather, and a series of accidents, they are reassessing their basic assumption that they could always get the parts they needed when they needed them.
“The just-in-time model is designed for supply chain efficiencies and economies of scale,” said Ashwani Gupta, Nissan Motor Co’s chief operating officer. “The repercussions of an unprecedented crisis like Covid highlight the fragility of our supply-chain model.”

That’s true, and it’s also good that that fragility finally is being taken seriously.

There are two other factors in JIT supply chain fragility beside those largely innocent ones. One is the fact that an enormous amount of trade goods, including raw materials and components for assembly into larger components or finished products, passes through the South China Sea. A large majority of Japan’s inputs and trillions of dollars of value for the US pass through the that Sea. Those shipping lanes are at increasing risk from an increasingly aggressive and acquisitive People’s Republic of China.

The other source is supply chain disruption by union strikes. Strikes generally and supply disruption by strikes are ways in which unions extort concessions out of manufacturers.

Inventory on hand, rather than on trucks or rail cars, helps manufacturers get through those deliberate disruptions.

Walls

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Who’s building them? President Joe Biden (D), within days of being inaugurated, ordered construction of physical walls along our southern border halted.

We have an exploding—and still expanding—crisis on that southern border, one that centers on illegal aliens inundating our facilities (and Mexico’s) and that has a second center involving accompanied children (children; let’s not hide behind the soft-pedaling euphemism “minors;” these unfortunates are as young as eight or nine), many of whom have been abused, repeatedly to the point of being a routine matter, on their way to that border.

Nevertheless:

Biden has refused to visit our southern border, and he won’t even discuss any plan to visit it in his term, much less at any time soon.

Vice President Kamala Harris (D) laughs at the idea of visiting our southern border, even though she’s been charged with responsibility for dealing with that crisis. She’s also more widely traveled domestically than her partner in this administration. She’s been to California to discuss Governor Newsom’s (D) plans for handling the State’s Wuhan Virus situation. She’s been to Chicago for a Chicago-style piece of German chocolate cake. She’s been to Connecticut to push her partner’s spending plan. She’s been to North Carolina to push her partner’s “infrastructure” plan. She’s been to New Hampshire on a 2024 campaign preparatory trip. Now she’s going to Milwaukee on a Progressive-Democrat agenda touting trip.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (D) actually has been to our southern border, but only to visit within the safety of the interior of a CBP/ICE facility; he’s never actually been to the border itself, away from those facilities.

It’s almost as though the Harris/Biden (Biden/Harris?) administration has erected its own wall—the purpose of which is to keep administration officials, including the two top dogs, away from the border.

Progressive-Democrats’ Immigration Newspeak

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Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has announced that the Federal government will no longer

fine illegal aliens who fail to depart from the US and it plans to pursue the cancellation of any currently outstanding debts for people who previously incurred such financial penalties.

After all, he says,

We can enforce our immigration laws without resorting to ineffective and unnecessary punitive measures.

We can enforce our laws by not enforcing our laws….

John Kerry, Secret Agent?

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Perhaps for the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps?

If what Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif said, in what he thought was a secret interview intended for posterity’s sake and to be held by an Iranian Presidency think tank, is true, maybe.

Buried in a leak of three hours’ worth of a seven hour interview was this bit:

Former Secretary of State John Kerry informed him that Israel had attacked Iranian interests in Syria at least 200 times, to his astonishment, Mr Zarif said.

I sure hope Zarif is dissembling again. But he’s talking, he thinks, in secret, and none of what he said in the leak is particularly self-aggrandizing, so his motive for lying is unclear at best.

Of course, it also could be the case that Kerry isn’t a foreign agent. It’s at least as likely that it was Kerry’s self-absorbed superiority complex that led him to betray Israel and our nation. Zarif’s astonishment would certainly be a nearly addictive ego stroke for a man like Kerry.

“In two-war scenario, could US forces prevail against powerful enemies?”

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That’s a question Just the News‘ Susan Katz Keating asked in her recent article.

One of the “Pentagon war-planners” she interviewed had this to say about our military’s considerations of that sort of question.

We hold modeling scenarios about this on a regular basis. We work out the likelihood of what would happen in a multi-front war. In the scenarios, we do well.

Frankly, I’d have to see the scenarios before I could think this believable.

I wonder if any of their scenarios include cyber attacks on our national energy and water infrastructure and our financial centers, coupled with EMP strikes against our fleet afloat and against our land force command units and bases, coupled with attacks against our orbiting GPS and com assets, coupled with “kinetic” attacks on those sea and land—and air—forces and against our homeland.

I’d then like to see them run a scenario where we’re attacked in that broad spectrum way by two geographically separated enemies at least roughly simultaneously.

I note with dismay the emphasis (elsewhere in the article) on “major conflict” with little apparent consideration of “total war.” The war gamers also seem to limit their perception of our enemies’ goals to their desiring victory in limited war—a badly outmoded concept. Are they considering that our enemies don’t think like we do, have different value sets than we do?

The gamers simply seem oblivious to the likelihood that our enemies have different views of what constitutes victory than we do, that their war goals aren’t merely to force us to give them something, but rather to conquer us and occupy us. Or to destroy us altogether as a society, much less a polity; not considering that we have anything of value to give them but our deaths.

Regarding Russia and the People’s Republic of China in particular, another of Keating’s interviewees had this:

The two prospective opponents “conveniently pose very different military problems, allowing the United States to allocate some of its assets to one, and the rest to the other,” Farley wrote in an essay exploring whether the US could survive concurrent wars.

A conveniently posed scenario, with convenient assumptions built in.

All of that comes against the backdrop of our last several administrations eroding—deliberately or through disinterest or plain incompetence—our military capability:

The US previously approached multi-war scenarios with a doctrine to “defeat; defeat; deny” up to three enemies. Under that approach, US forces would defeat two opponents and block a third. Now, according to the Pentagon war-planner source, the aim is to “defeat; deny.”

What was that about one is none, two is one, three is backup? Now we’re down to one and a hope.