Tag Archives: defense policy

Maybe this will Prod

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Maybe it’ll prod us both. The People’s Republic of China has cut off export of rare earths and the magnets made from them to Japan over Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s recent commentary about Japan’s strengthening resolve to assist the Republic of China in the event of a PRC invasion.

China has begun choking off exports of rare earths and rare-earth magnets to Japan, a potential blow to Japanese companies that use them to produce components for global chip makers, car companies and defense firms.

It really is getting time, and urgently so, for Japan to pull all of its supply chains out of the PRC. Doing so would eliminate nearly all of the PRC’s economic leverage over Japan short of going to war over the sea lines of communication on which Japan depends.

The PRC’s move also should be a serious prod for us to get off the dime and move all of our supply chains out of the PRC. It’s time we proofed ourselves against PRC economic pressure, along with Japan. Nearly half of our economy’s imports flow through portions of those same SLOCs to our west coast.

Time to Respond…

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…more forcefully and farther than what the People’s Republic of China has done.

China said it banned the export to Japan of goods with potential military uses, intensifying Beijing’s retaliation against Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi over remarks she made about Taiwan.
The export ban takes effect immediately, China’s Ministry of Commerce said Tuesday.

It’s time for Japan, and the US in support of Japan, to answer the PRC’s escalation with a much sharper escalation of their, and our, own.

Japan—Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and the Diet—must state unequivocally that it will support the Republic of China in the event of a PRC invasion attempt. Japan also must make concrete moves toward developing its own nuclear weapons. The nation, given its geographic location, doesn’t need anything more esoteric than intermediate range missiles along with a small constellation of surveillance satellites. Japan also must begin taking overt defensive measures regarding its islands in the East China Sea.

Economically, Japan must begin serious and rapid disengagement of its business activities with and within the PRC.

The US must announce that we will support the RoC in the event of a PRC invasion attempt, and we must step up arms deliveries to both the RoC and to Japan. We need also to be much more forceful in defending the international waters and sea lanes of commerce in the South China Sea as well as moving to restrict the PLAN’s and PLAAF’s movements in that region.

The US must also get serious about severing our economic ties with the PRC.

There must be no petty tit-for-tat responses, and there must be no non-response. The question is whether Japan’s government men and women, and ours, have the stomach for facing down the men and women of the PRC government.

Cutting off doing business with and within the PRC will be expensive and disruptive, but it won’t be nearly as much so as acceding to PRC demands—which will only increase were Japan or us to back down repeatedly and further.

With Good Reason

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The lede lays it out, if misleadingly so.

The Western alliance between the US and its European partners has been a pillar of the global order since the end of World War II. Bonded by a common belief in freedom and democracy, it prevented major global conflict, defeated Communism, and presided over a surge in global prosperity.

More like sharing common rhetoric, not common belief, regarding freedom and democracy. Europe’s NATO members have, since shortly after the alliance’s formation, free-loaded off American treasure and promise of blood while themselves living phat and short-changing their own obligations to the alliance. Decades of “pretty please” had no effect on that. It’s only been since Trump I’s threats to leave the alliance if those members didn’t step up to their own responsibilities that those nations started to improve, or at least give less short-shift to the alliance.

The subheadline continues the misleading aspect.

As relations between Europe and the US become increasingly strained, once unshakeable allies abroad are wondering whether the rift can be repaired.

Once unshakeable? As recently as the end of the 19th century, the US and UK were at loggerheads over a number of national-level problems. In the late 20th century, key NATO member France kicked our military forces out as that nation withdrew itself from the military aspect of the alliance, only recently rejoining.

Today, the European Union is busily attacking American multinational enterprises over the EU’s effort at censorship, its inability to compete with American goods and services sold through those enterprises, its demand for ever higher taxes in the face of lower taxes in the US. In that latter regard, the EU also is busy with its determined fratricide as it attacks Ireland over its even lower tax regime.

There’s never been anything unshakeable in our relationship with Europe, nor is there any reason to take the continent seriously, whether economically, militarily, or politically.

Even now, with European NATO members beginning to recognize that they need to act in measurable, concrete support for Ukraine in its existential struggle against the barbarian from the east, they’re still looking to us for the first move on weapons and other support, to us on “peace” initiatives vis-à-vis this war. They’re still too timid to act entirely on their own, with only a few exceptions in the form of the nations bordering Russia. Brussels is even too timorous to allow the Russian funds frozen by the EU at the start of sanctioning Russia shortly after it invaded Ukraine to be used as collateral for loans to Ukraine. Belgium is more interested in whether its funds in Russia might be seized by Putin than it is in supporting Ukraine.

Even now, fully a third of NATO’s member nations continue to welch on their own financial and equipage commitments to NATO as an alliance. With that welching, they betray their own fellow alliance members by keeping themselves wholly unable to come to the aid of their fellows should any of them be attacked.

NATO, which embodies most of Europe and so stands for Europe in so many critical ways, is steadfastly rendering itself useless and by extension is rendering Europe to irrelevance.

Why, indeed, should we take Europe seriously for anything other than their weakness being a threat to our own security given the bloodily acquisitive nature of the eastern barbarian?

Deterring the PRC

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Deterring the PRC

The editors at The Wall Street Journal are correct in one respect regarding convincing the People’s Republic of China that it cannot successfully fight us at sea, but the editors fall woefully short of what’s truly necessary. And so does the Trump administration, although it is taking more serious steps regarding our national defense and our national security than has any administration since Reagan.

Today’s 296-ship Navy isn’t large or capable enough to prevent a war in the Pacific while deterring bad actors elsewhere. China is amassing military power with one adversary in mind: the US. This threat demands a diverse mix of firepower, including more stealthy submarines, longer-range aircraft, a deep cache of long-range missiles spread across more ships, and an unmanned fleet to deter an invasion across the Taiwan Strait.

Our Navy badly needs that, but it needs much more than that. It needs more combat ships, building rapidly to at least a 500 combat ship fleet, it needs more cargo ships capable of replenishing at sea those combat ships of everything from ammunition of all types, fuel, and such consumables as potable water and food. It needs better ship- and fleet-wide defenses capable of much earlier detection of incoming fires and countering those fires, including the PRC’s ship-, air-, and ground-launched hypersonic missiles. It needs hardening against EMP attacks and cyber attacks against shipborne software. It needs improved capability against PRC ECM measures. It needs its own ECM capability to isolate PRC shipping—surface and subsurface—from its command centers and from each other. It needs countermeasures capable of blinding PRC aircraft and missiles. It needs longer range and better detection systems against the PRC’s growing and increasingly capable submarine fleet.

Our Navy needs also to be backstopped by other services and measures, especially in cyber warfare and in space. When the PRC attacks our fleet, we need to be able to counter those attacks, at least in part, from space, kinetically and electronically. We need to fragment with cyber measures the PRC’s onshore energy distribution infrastructure. We need, with cyber measures, to isolate the PRC government from the PLA, and we need fragment the PRC government, preventing the several branches from talking to each other electronically.

And one more major improvement.

New battleships for the US Navy will “help maintain American military supremacy, revive the American shipbuilding industry, and inspire fear in America’s enemies all over the world,” Mr Trump said Monday. “We’re going to start with two” ships and “quickly morph into 10,” he said, with lasers, guns, missiles, and more.

We need all those things, but we need them now, not in 10 or 15 years. We need to get rid of the development and acquisition bureaucracy that infests DoD and replace it with personnel and procedures that streamline the process and get systems from the drawing board into production much faster than that. In conjunction, design and mission creep must be put to an end, with both frozen early rather than being allowed to continue past laying down keels.

2027 is two years off, and that’s when PRC President Xi Jinping intends to begin his war of conquest against the Republic of China, and in support of that, that’s when he will have the PLA attack our Navy. Nor will his attack be limited to that. His announced goal is to dominate us, and the PLA’s doctrine is total war across the entire spectrum. This has been clear for more than 20 years, since publication of Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui’s Unrestricted Warfare, China’s Master Plan to Destroy America in 2002.

Time’s a-wasting, and our freedom, every bit as much as the RoC’s, is in the wind since what we have in being is not much deterrence.

Right Idea, Wrong Plan

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Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer, German Marshall Fund of the US President, says three things must occur in order to redress Europe’s defense situation, a situation which I believe currently threatens its ability to survive a war as a collection of sovereign, independent nations. Some of these steps apply to us, and we are also, I believe, in the same war-losing peril of our own sovereignty and independence.

First, Europe must rearm, and fast.

Indeed. But even today, I see little stomach for that in too many of the continent’s nations critical to the continent’s survival against a Russian attack. Both France and Germany are in financial crisis and are showing no political will to correct that. The UK is even worse off; its political management doesn’t even seem aware of the depth of its failure. Until they do gain the awareness and the will to act—and then act—they’ll be unable to be serious about rearming, much less hardening their digital and material (water, fuel, and heating distribution) infrastructure against cyber attacks. Only those nations still fresh from the Russian boots on their necks—Poland, the Baltics, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova—remember what that life was like. Poland and the Baltics are serious about rearming, but they’re smaller even than Ukraine compared to the barbarian’s hordes and equipage. And they have a knife poised at their back in the form of Hungary, which is busily toadying up to Russia in its own effort to mitigate the consequences of being conquered again. Rearming is necessary, but it doesn’t seem promising, much less occurring any time soon.

Second, defense innovation must become a shared transatlantic mission. Neither side of the Atlantic can out-innovate geopolitical rivals alone.

De Hoop Scheffer fleshed this one out a bit; however, she’s mistaken in her proposed execution.

The US leads in emerging technologies, but Europe brings industrial capacity and advanced manufacturing. Joint work on protecting critical infrastructure, countering hybrid threats, and developing secure telecommunications and next-generation defense technologies must continue regardless of political noise.

Yes, and no. The US certainly can out-innovate our enemies alone. That’s how we ran the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics out of existence. We can—and we must—do so again, for all that we’re facing an aggressive Russia and an innovative People’s Republic of China. Our economic players’ freedom to innovate as they see fit gives them, and us as a nation, much more flexibility, and the ability to profit from their innovations, gives them much more incentive to innovate and to run the risks necessary for innovation than can any centrally planned process.

We need, though, to do our own manufacturing. Europe can never be an arsenal of democracy, especially with respect to modern weapons and cyber and space threats. Additionally, the industrial powerhouse of Europe, Germany, is not that anymore. Their industrial capacity is shrinking, and it’s becoming ever more expensive and unreliable as the German government insists on unreliable and expensive “renewable” energy sources while disdaining cheap, reliable oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy sources.

Aside from that, we’re too likely to have to fight two or three wars simultaneously; we need our own manufacturing capacity to meet those equipment expenditure needs.

That doesn’t mean we should not share innovations with our friends and allies; of course, we should and they should with us. Accumulating best practices speeds innovation. We just need to guard against becoming dependent on others. Our dependence on the PRC for far too many items critical to our economy, our health, and our defense capability demonstrates the destructive folly of that. Friends and allies may be less likely to cut us off at critical moments, but that’s a non-zero proposition. See, for instance, an earlier France kicking our military out of that nation. See the German bureaucracy getting in the way of serious training exercises, including joint exercises.

Nor does that mean we shouldn’t buy European manufactures, also. We just can’t be dependent on them. Aside from the continent’s incapacity, two world wars showed vulnerability of US weapons flowing to Europe. That threat applies to the flow of manufactures from Europe to us in the event of another shooting war.

Third, Washington and European capitals must accept that their alignment is no longer automatic.

This is especially true given that fully a third of the European NATO members continue to welch on their financial and equipment obligations to NATO (and in so doing betray the other members of NATO) and continue to freeload off American money and our promise of American blood in defense of NATO Europe, legitimate members and scofflaws alike.

They need to build flexible coalitions outside the usual trans-Atlantic circle based on shared benefits, not only historical ties.

This is especially true for us. We need to stand up a new mutual defense arrangement that incudes the nations of the Three Seas Initiative, us, and the UK; although the latter’s inclusion should depend on its getting its fiscal house in order and then plussing up its defense establishment to something firmer than a secondary school football team. Absent both of those, the UK would be a net drain and so should not be considered.