Tag Archives: defense policy

“Defense or Democracy?”

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That’s the question the Biden administration is worrying about in Chad.

The Biden administration is in a bind over whether to provide military aid to Chad, one of Africa’s most reliable bulwarks against the spread of Islamist militants and an opponent of Russia’s growing influence in the Sahel region.
Chad’s longtime president, Idriss Déby, was killed in battle two years ago and quickly replaced by his son, violating the line of succession laid out in the Central African country’s constitution. Now, the US government is struggling with the question of whether the ruling junta is too brutal and undemocratic to merit US assistance, or whether the country’s value as a military ally trumps those concerns.

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Two “Whys”

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Carefully—cowardly—anonymous Biden administration officials have leaked to the press that

A drone attack on the Kremlin earlier this month was most likely orchestrated by Ukraine, which has conducted a series of attacks on Russian targets, US officials said.

Why is the Biden administration even talking publicly about this? Who conducted the strike would seem to be a national security matter, for us and for the nation—if there was one—that conducted the strike, especially when that nation, supposedly, is heavily supported by the US. The leak and its claimed attribution of who did it seem especially egregious in light of the nature of the attack: it was blatantly amateurish and so wholly inconsistent with the quality of operations which the Ukrainian military has otherwise executed.

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Department of State Gaslighting

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This time it’s in the arena of foreign military sales. Arms sales to our friends and allies are approved by Congress and they’re carried out by DoD.

[State] is set to release a 10-point plan to retool its oversight of the process to make it more effective at a time of strategic competition, especially with China, State Department officials said. It calls its new plan “FMS 2023.”
The State Department plans to develop more creative and flexible financing for countries, expanding the view of arms sales to take a more regional approach instead of weighing each country’s request on a case-by-case basis, and prioritizing some cases when they fit squarely into broader national security goals, according to department officials.

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Stepping Up

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Great Britain is sending Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine. British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has said that the missiles are now going into or are in the country itself, although it’s unclear how many are being sent or whether there are more in the pipeline.

The export version of the cruise missile (which I ass-u-me is the version being sent) has a range of 155 miles, cruises at 100 feet above ground, and carries a 1,000lb warhead.

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The US Navy under this Commander-in-Chief

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Iran has seized another oil tanker, this on in the Strait of Hormuz, less than a week after the pirates seized another oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman, just outside the Strait.

A dozen small Iranian naval boats swarmed the 360-yard-long Niovi after it left Dubai en route to the United Arab Emirates port of Fujairah early Wednesday morning, the navy said. The Iranian boats forced the [Panama-flagged] Niovi to reverse course and head toward Iran’s coast.
The seizure came six days after Iranian forces in the Gulf of Oman used a helicopter and boats to seize the Advantage Sweet, a Greek-owned, Marshall Islands-flagged oil tanker bound for Texas.

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Sustainability

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In commenting on the strongly negative impact that the Environmental, Social, and Governance mentality is having on European and European Union investment in national and EU defense, Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries Association of Europe Secretary General Jan Pie offered this warning:

European banks and investors have picked up the signal that Europe would be about to say defense is not a sustainable activity.

In one respect, that signal is correct. A defense establishment that is not adequately sized, armed, and trained will be unsustainable, as nations possessing such an inadequacy will be overwhelmed and conquered by nations that believe the best defense is a good offense, or that merely have better sized, armed, and trained military establishments.

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Funding PRC Research

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Senator and Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Ranking Member Roger Marshall (R, KS) and his staff have released their Muddy Waters report concerning the origin of the Wuhan Virus—which he concludes happened via two likely leaks from the PRC’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab not equipped to do virus research at the depth to which it was handling the Wuhan Virus. One of the conclusions of his report is that the US government was funding gain-of-function research in that lab.

I have a couple of thoughts.

Marshall said about the PRC research,

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“Hurting Relations”

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The People’s Republic of China greatly reduced its export of addicting drugs for the criminal trade into the United States after former President Donald Trump (R) pressured PRC President Xi Jinping to do so. Under Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden, Xi has resumed and vastly increased his nation’s addicting drug export, particularly of fentanyl and of fentanyl precursors into Mexico for transshipment and Fentanyl manufacture and shipment into our nation.

The fact that Xi so greatly increased his export of this drug and of its precursors, targeting us, is a clear illustration of Xi’s attack on us without going kinetic. He’s already supported, just in the two years of the Biden administration, the export into our nation enough fentanyl to completely exterminate us, were it not for the Biden-undermanned CBP.

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The Only Party Governing

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Helen Raleigh, of The Federalist, wants President Joe Biden (D) to clarify his Taiwan policy to the American people and America’s allies.

Anyone who believes that the US should remain strategically ambiguous about whether it will help defend Taiwan so as not to “provoke” China doesn’t understand the thinking of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and especially its current leader, Xi Jinping.

She went on:

Although the CCP never ruled Taiwan, its obsession with the self-governing island is rooted in the party’s insecurity—the CCP wants to be the only party that governs China and sees Taiwan as a threat to the party’s legitimacy.

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“Help Ukraine Defeat Russia, Then Make Friends”

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That’s the headline on (ex-acting CIA Deputy Director of Operations) Jack Devin’s op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

Help Ukraine Defeat Russia, Then Make Friends

That might be useful on the international stage from a purely political perspective, but consider the cost.

What we’re seeing in the atrocities the Russian “soldiers” and “officers” are committing in Ukraine—bombing civilian bomb shelters carefully marked as civilian—and child—shelters, bombing or missile-attacking hospitals, raping women and children(!), torturing civilian men—these soldiers may be in the lower tiers of Russian society, but their officers are from the middle and upper tiers, and they’re all representative of Russian culture.

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