Tag Archives: defense policy

Bound by the Prior Administration

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In Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, Mr Serpico had some thoughts regarding Navy Public Affairs Officer Admiral (ret) John Kirby’s, occupying a seat at Biden’s table as National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications, words on the Biden Afghanistan so-called withdrawal.

John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, said with a straight face that the Afghanistan withdrawal was executed with constraints previously set by the previous administration. In essence, it was former President Trump’s fault (“Joe Biden Isn’t Sorry About Afghanistan,” Review & Outlook, April 7).
You rarely see such an act of unashamed temerity. The Biden administration had seven months to make any changes it wanted to avoid the debacle that followed.
Are we supposed to believe that Mr Trump recommended giving up Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night? Did Mr Trump recommend that backward sequence for the removal of our Afghan partners, equipment, and personnel? Did Mr Trump recommend not telling our NATO partners that we were leaving?
Remember, it was President Biden who disregarded his internal military advice about leaving behind a residual force in Afghanistan. All of this hearkens to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s warning that Mr Biden “has been wrong on every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

What Mr Serpico said.

To which I make a minor correction: “You rarely see such an act of unashamed lying.”

And to which I add:

John Kirby…said with a straight face that the Afghanistan withdrawal was executed with constraints previously set by the previous administration.

What constraints, exactly? What Trump had set up was a series of milestones that as the Taliban met each one, the next step of our drawdown would follow, but if a milestone was missed by the Taliban, the deal was off. And that set of milestones had a residual force, large enough to be effective, remaining.

Further, that deal was no treaty; it was a President’s Executive Agreement. Executive Agreements routinely are withdrawn—entirely legitimately in process and usually for good cause, as well—by subsequent Presidents. Biden was not bound by Trump’s EA; Biden easily could have altered or rescinded it, just as he did with all of the other Trumpian EAs and Executive Orders he rescinded in the last 10 days of January 2021. He chose to ignore this one.

Biden wasn’t bound by anything other than his panic-ridden wish to get out of Afghanistan, no matter the cost, in lives, in national honor, in messaging to enemies like Russia and the People’s Republic of China.

This Should Ease the Search

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A passel (that’s the technical term) of classified documents purportedly concerning the barbarian’s war in Ukraine and a number of other items have been stolen from DoD, one or two perhaps altered, and then posted at various sites around the Internet.

The search is on for the leaker(s) and/or the security…weakness…in SecDef Lloyd Austin’s DoD and/or in CJCS General Mark Milley’s organization within DoD.

One discovery should ease that search, and shorten it, also, is this.

One of the most significant leaks of highly classified US documents in recent history began among a small group of posters on a messaging channel [the Discord messaging platform] that trafficked in memes, jokes, and racist talk.
Sometime in January, seemingly unnoticed by the outside world, an anonymous member of a group numbering just over a dozen began to post files—many labeled as top secret—providing details about the war in Ukraine, intercepted communications about US allies, such as Israel and South Korea, and details of American penetration of Russian military plans, among other topics.

That small number of individuals should make it much easier to locate who got the materials, and from that, how they penetrated DoD security, or in the alternative, from whom they got the materials.

Once that’s done, the security gap must be plugged promptly and the leaker(s), if there was one, must be publicly identified and metaphorically drawn and quartered.

Data Protections

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A couple of Letter writers in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section had concerns about a potential ban of People’s Republic of China-domiciled ByteDance’s TikTok.

I disagree with their concerns.

A TikTok ban isn’t the solution. It won’t protect our data privacy, it won’t protect children from the dangers of the internet, and it is a blatant violation of First Amendment rights.

No one is masquerading banning TikTok as the solution; that’s a strawman argument. Much more needs to be done to protect our data privacy and our children—and our intellectual and technology property—but banning TikTok is a useful step. Nor is banning it a violation of anyone’s 1st Amendment rights. No one’s speech would be barred, only a tool of the PRC would be barred.

TikTok can be an effective tool for fighting corruption within the government itself.

Not when it’s controlled by the PRC government.

…a communication tool that millions of Americans use….

Congratulations to this writer: he has successfully identified the breadth of the threat, just as TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, (accidentally) did when he pointed out the 150 million American users of TikTok.

How Do We Know?

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SecDef Lloyd Austin’s DoD section, the Department of Defense Education Activity, appears to be disbanding DoDEA’s own section focused on pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion claptrap onto our military members’ children in DoD schools. That subordinate organization, the DEI unit, was founded on explicitly racist tenets. These are from the originally selected head of that organization:

So exhausted at the White folks in these PD sessions. This lady actually had the caudacity to say Black people can be racist, too. I had to stop the session and give the Karen the business. We are not the majority. We don’t have power.

And

I am exhausted by 99% of the white men in education and 95% of the white women. Where can I get a break from white nonsense for a while?

And

If another Karen tells me about her feelings… I might lose it….

And so on. The woman, Kelisa Wing, has since been removed from that position, but there’s no reason to believe that bigotry wasn’t still imbued within that DoDEA DEI unit.

But how do know that…stuff…won’t still be inflicted on the children attending DoD schools following the DEI unit’s formal disappearance? All we’re seeing here is the disbandment of the official front organization for the ideological “teaching.”

DoDEA’s director, Tom Brady, said he will be dispersing the DEI specialists into existing units as part of a “reconfiguration of talent.”

The same person who set up the organization remains in place. The same persons he charged with executing on that organization’s ideology remain; they’re just getting new titles. There’s also this from a “Pentagon statement:”

The Department of Defense Education Activity’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts for our employees and in support of high achievement for our 67,000 military-connected students remains unchanged.

And

Within the next month, we will integrate our DEI specialists into four key divisions at headquarters: Research, Accountability, and Evaluation; Strategic and Organizational Excellent; Professional Learning; and Human Resources.

This is that “reconfiguration of talent.”

In short, we don’t know. But we have no reason to believe it won’t still be.

Idiotic

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Some otherwise reputable folks want a six-month moratorium on the continued development and improvement of artificial intelligence software.

Several tech executives and top artificial-intelligence researchers, including Tesla Inc Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, are calling for a pause in the breakneck development of powerful new AI tools.
A moratorium of six months or more would give the industry time to set safety standards for AI design and head off potential harms of the riskiest AI technologies, the proponents of a pause said.

Cynically, the six months would give the Biden administration, with its empirical preference for DEI over actual defense capability, time to manufacture a permanent “moratorium.”

Aside from that, though, our nation is in a break-neck race for supremacy—even parity—in artificial intelligence and its ability to generate ever improving software, especially in weapons and counterweapons, ever improving production capabilities, and on and on. Even a six-month delay could put us fatally behind in what is, at bottom, an exponential growth curve.

At the very least, we need to continue our own development apace, if only because our enemies are developing AI capabilities as fast as they can, and we need to understand AI capabilities in general and our enemies’ AI capabilities in particular, and we need to know what we need to defend against our enemies’ use of AI against us and to develop those tools.