Category Archives: foreign policy

A Pause that Refreshes?

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Or that refits? Or that gives new and newly placed generals time to fit into their roles?

The People’s Republic of China has reduced its airborne threats and exercises against the Republic of China to nearly zero since just before the beginning of the US-Israeli war against Iran, even while keeping its naval operations relatively steady. This is causing some confusion among RoC and US military leadership.

I have some thoughts on the matter, admittedly with a measure of conspiracy theory involvement.

One thought: the pause—if that’s all it is—is a time for rest, refitting, and rearming the aircraft, this time with live munitions, preparatory for an assault on Taiwan, on which sits the RoC. This is inconsistent, though, with PLAN Taiwan-related activities continuing at their recently usual pace.

Another thought, related, is that in that aftermath of PRC President Xi Jinping’s purge of top level generals and top level leadership of his [sic] Communist Party of China, their replacements need time not just to learn their new duties, but to become utterly facile with them and capable of quick actions.

On the other hand, Ben Lewis, PLATracker Founder, has a different view. He suggested the lull could serve as an olive branch signaling a desire for stability ahead of Xi’s meeting with Trump.

Maybe. Xi has been toughening is stance vis-à-vis the US over the last year, or so. With US combat shipping and anti-missile units transferred away from the Western Pacific to support operations against Iran, Xi has little reason to soften up.

One last thought, more remotely possible, is that the PRC’s struggling economy needs more time to fund the PLAAF’s activities. If that’s the case, look for the pause to last a while longer. If Lewis is right, look for the pause to end with the end of Xi’s meeting with Trump, or not, depending on what concessions Trump yields to Xi.

“Homilies Won’t Liberate Iran”

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That’s the headline of William McGurn’s Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, and he’s right. His laid out his case early on.

This may sound harsh, but it’s necessary to say. The Catholic Church and its last few popes have understood only the destructive force of war. They appear to have given little thought to the terrible consequences for innocent people when soft words are offered as a substitute for tough but necessary action.

Pope Leo earlier this month, proving McGurn’s point in advance:

I am following with deep concern what is happening in the Middle East and in Iran during this tumultuous time. Stability and peace are not achieved through mutual threats, nor through the use of weapons, which sow destruction, suffering, and death, but only through reasonable, sincere, and responsible dialogue.

Dialogue with whom, exactly? With terrorists who have no concern about the lives of innocents beyond their propaganda value as dead bodies? With terrorists whose agreements and commitments with others are routinely and at convenience violated? The only thing the Iranian government’s terrorists are sincere about is their desire for the destruction of the Great and Little Satans—the US and Israel. The only dialogue they’re interested in being responsible for is negotiations as stall and distraction tactic.

McGurn’s response [emphasis his]:

Stability and peace are achieved only through dialogue? Is that what history tells us? It seems more accurate to say that the kind of rightly ordered world the pope desires can’t be built by armies alone—but can almost never be built without armies and without the threat of force. Most often it is force or the threat of it that makes dialogue possible.

I branch off from that, slightly. In the end, the Pope’s teaching, the Catholic Church’s teaching, the teachings of most any Christian or Jewish faith are important to maintaining the virtuous and religious populations that a republican democratic nation (or popular democratic nation, come to that) needs in order to survive. But, morals don’t win—can’t win—wars for survival, however critical they are to maintaining the backbone and endurance necessary to persevere and win those wars.

Winning wars comes down to physical, kinetic activities of one side being better and stronger and more lethal than those of the other side. And, yes, assuredly yes, some wars are just wars, even are wars that are required by morality to be fought.

As a man asked some time ago, then, how many divisions does the Pope have? Better if, instead of generalized moralizing, he offered concrete solutions and concrete mechanisms for achieving them along with his explanations of the morality underpinning them.

Keeping a Close Watch

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Matthew Hennessey had a heads-up in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Free Expression section. His warning is summarized in his subheadline and again early on in the piece.

China is getting a good look at the precision and professionalism of the American war machine.

And

With the possible exception of Donald Trump and the Iranians themselves, no one is following the progress of the latest Middle East war more closely than China’s Xi Jinping. Not so much for the outcome, but for the scouting opportunity. Mr Xi is interested in US tactics and weaponry because he’s preparing for a war of his own.

Of course Xi is. Whatever else he (and his rump general staff, come to that) might be, they’re not stupid men.

Which brings me to my concern. Hennessey liked his football analogy throughout his piece, so I’ll expand it. The…game…between the US and Iran is like unto a start-of-the-season game between a highly ranked college team and a third or fourth tier college team, a game whose value for the ranked team is little more than another scrimmage, this time with plays and outcomes on the line.

Or, a more apt analogy: the campaign the US is executing against Iran (Hennessey ignored Israel’s role in the campaign because Xi isn’t concerned with the Israeli machine’s precision and professionalism) is little more than a live fire exercise.

Live fire exercises are tightly constrained in their activities; even when state-of-the-art systems are used, those are used under artificial constraints and only employed a very few times, as proofs of technique. I strongly hope we’re not putting our best systems, tactics, and doctrine to use against this third or fourth tier opponent, or at least limiting their use. There’s no need, in order to crush the mullahs easily, to broadly expose those for Xi’s edification.

“Better is the enemy of good enough” applies here, too.

On the other hand, there’s this bit of Hennessey misapprehension:

One thing to remember: it’s been 47 years since the PLA was involved in anything close to a real firefight—a monthlong spitting contest that it fought to a draw with Vietnam in 1979. The US military has been trading blows with real bad guys in hard places more or less constantly since 2001.

That’s true enough, and our military’s hard experience is invaluable. But would it be enough? It’s been 75 years since our military was involved in a fight with a peer or near peer enemy. And that was against the PLA in the Korean War, and absent the use of nuclear weapons, we escaped with a draw.

‘Proportionate’ responses are a thing of the past?

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That’s the claim of an Israeli opinion reader, Amit Segal, of Israel’s Channel 12 News (Firefox and Microsoft’s Edge, at least, offer an English translation on initial linking). He doesn’t seem to understand proportionality in war, though.

For years, the enemy fired rockets and Israel replied with “proportional” force. This normalized the firing on civilians, kidnapping and invasion.

This isn’t proportionality, though; it’s just a history of tit-for-tat, and that does—and has done—nothing but run up friendly casualties. This has been amply demonstrated by Iran’s years of butchery and destruction of Israeli lives and property in the aftermath of Israel’s repeated tit-for-tat responses to each of those Iranian or Iranian-sponsored terrorist acts.

Proportionality is what the IDF has only lately figured out (and too many Leftist and Progressive-Democrat Americans still fail to understand): when you respond, overwhelm your foe.

The IDF also recognized, lately, an extension of that: the enemy exists in one of two states: pursuer or pursued…if terrorists are running for their lives, they can’t make plans to take ours.

Indeed, true proportionality is to respond so destructively and decisively that the enemy cannot attack again for some long years, and to respond so overwhelmingly that the decision is reached in short order. That’s what minimizes friendly casualties in the mid- and longer-term, and it reduces over the same time frame unnecessary casualties among the enemy’s civilian population. These two outcomes are what makes true proportionality not just sound doctrine, but the more moral one as well.

Mistaken Analogy

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are correctly worried about ending the current campaign in Iran too soon, before

Iran’s navy and its missile stocks, launchers, and productive capacity are destroyed. It would also leave most of the IRGC and its Basij enforcers intact.

But they drew the wrong analogy in explaining their concern.

…George HW Bush and the first Gulf War in 1990. The coalition campaign was so successful in pushing Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait that Bush and his advisers stopped too soon and spared most of his military.

No. Bush the Younger had gained non-Iraq Arab nations’ cooperation in the campaign by promising not to go for regime change in Iraq and to limit the campaign to driving the Iraqi forces out of Kuwait decisively enough that Saddam would be unable to reinvade for the foreseeable future. Saddam’s forces were driven out, decimated badly, and their remnants driven back to Baghdad. That Bush stopped at that point and largely withdrew coalition forces was simply a fulfillment of that commitment.

After that, southern Iraq’s Shiites revolted against Saddam’s remaining Sunni forces, largely with Bush’s encouragement and were massacred, but this is a separate Bush error, having nothing to do with leaving too soon or keeping his commitment to end the fight with Kuwait’s liberation.

In reality, no analogy is needed regarding too-optimistic and -early off-ramps for the current Iran campaign. This is amply demonstrated by Iran’s behavior in response.

Iran has fired missiles or drones on Israel, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and even Oman, which was negotiating with the US on Iran’s behalf. It also launched strikes, if fewer of them, on Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and…Cyprus.
Some of its targets in these countries are US bases, but the attacks were often directed at civilian targets, including hotels in Dubai. [I add, attacks directed against Israeli apartment complexes.]

This is reason enough to finish the job in Iran before announcing victory.