Tag Archives: defense policy

Bad Deal

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As I write on 12 December, Hamas appears to have agreed to a deal, put together by the Egyptians and supported by the Biden administration, that would see a 60-day cease-fire in Gaza, Israeli troops remain in Gaza “temporarily,” and that would release 30 hostages, including some Americans. In addition, Israel would release an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners and allow greater humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza. Israel has not agreed, so far.

That last bit regarding humanitarian aid is a clear red flag regarding this…proposal. Any agreement by Israel to this condition would be an Israeli admission that they are the ones doing the restricting. Israel isn’t the one restricting aid flow, though; the terrorists are stealing the aid and deliberately endangering aid deliverers by using them as shields against IDF responses. Hamas is restricting aid flow.

There’s also this bit of Hamas disingenuosity:

Hostages could be freed shortly after signing the deal, and more time would be given to Hamas to establish the names of remaining hostages, their whereabouts, and their state of health[.]

The terrorists don’t need any time for that: they know full well where they’re holding all of the hostages and all of the murdered hostage bodies: the terrorists are the ones who grabbed them, and the terrorists are the ones who’ve been moving them around.

This is a bad deal. Any “cease-fire” must include Israeli forces remaining in Gaza for as long as the Israelis deem necessary along with the release of all of the hostages, including the bodies of the dead hostages. Anything less than all of the hostages, by itself, must be a deal breaker. Beyond that, while there might be a cease fire, the war Hamas has been inflicting on Israel cannot end short of the utter destruction of the terrorist entity. As long as Hamas exists, it will be a terrorist threat to Israel.

Yet Another Reason…

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…for moving our supply chains out of the People’s Republic of China, and for no longer doing economic business at all with the PRC. In response to the Biden administration’s lately decision to further restrict the export of advanced computer chips to the PRC, that nation has restricted the export of critical computer-related minerals to us.

China announced Tuesday the banning of exports to the United States of chemical elements and other essential high-tech materials, in apparent retaliation for the US limiting semiconductor-related exports.

Those elements include gallium, germanium, antimony and certain other extremely hard materials to the US. So far, that’s just the ordinary progress of war, including the economic war the PRC has been waging against us for years.

However.

We shouldn’t be dependent on an enemy nation for materials critical to our economic function or our national security. That we are was driven home by the supply chain disruptions caused by the Wuhan Virus Situation; that this administration has chosen to do nothing about it, that our private enterprises have chosen to do nothing about it—each is shameful in its own right. That continued dependency only facilitates the PRC’s war against us and our economy.

We have these elements, along with nearly all of the rare earth elements and other extremely hard materials, in the ground within the political boundaries of our nation as well as within the boundaries of friendly nations. If it costs more to supply from those sources—and it will cost a pretty penny at this stage to guts up the necessary mines—that’s the cost of national defense and of our status as a free and sovereign nation.

It’s Worse Than That

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Seth Jones, President of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Defense and Security Department, is worried about our ability to deter war with the People’s Republic of China.

[M]y colleagues and I led members of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party in a simulation of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The goal was to understand how the US defense industrial base would perform in a protracted war with China and to assess the implications for deterrence. The results weren’t reassuring.
The simulation began with a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan in 2026. Both sides suffered heavy losses, but the US defense industrial base was severely stressed. The US military spent its entire inventory of Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles by the end of the first week and ran out of Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range missiles after a month.

Running out of critical ammunition in the middle of a war means we no longer even can fight that war. With the PRC well aware of that likelihood, Jones is correct that we’re losing our ability to deter the PRC.

It’s much worse than that, though, and it’s surprising that Jones didn’t take the next step in his analysis. Such a military strait means we’re losing our ability to defeat a PRC attack, and unlike Japan after its devastating attack on us at the outset of our participation in WWII, the PRC has the wherewithal and the will to follow up its initial attack(s), win outright the war—proximately over the Republic of China, but really a proxy war against us—and impose its will on us.

Audit Failure and a Target for Reduction in Force

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The Pentagon has failed, again, the audit of its finances. This makes seven in a row, and it calls into question how hard the relevant officers and civilians are trying, along with their level of competence.

A total of 1,700 auditors worked on the 2024 audit, which cost about $178 million.
A breakdown of the audit found that 15 of the 28 standalone financial audits received a failing grade….

Pentagon Comptroller Michael McCord:

…the Department has turned a corner in its understanding of the depth and breadth of its challenges[.]

After seven years.

As Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy look around the Federal government for places to cut, and as SecDef nominee Pete Hegseth (assuming he’s confirmed, even as the Left and their Progressive-Democrats ramp up their smear campaigns) looks into the Pentagon establishment he’d be overseeing, here is a lucrative, target-rich environment to enter.

A RIF is a Reduction in Force, a move whereby the military branches occasionally winnow down their ranks of officers and enlisted that each branch deems excess to its needs. The financial types—both military and civilian—in the Pentagon’s budgeting and acquisition sections, from supervisors on down, have by their successive and apparently determined failure to perform have self-selected for RIF. Start with McCord and his disingenuosity.

The RIF shouldn’t be limited to these folks, though. To the extent they’re getting bad, or merely slow, data with which to work, Pentagon training staff (and training is at the center of the Pentagon’s mission), branch Secretaries and Chiefs of Staff, and their financial staffs should be similarly targeted, over and above the Secretaries and Chiefs themselves being fireable by the incoming President for reasons suitable to the President.

Nor should it stop there. The Combatant Commands and the supporting commands—supply, transport, personnel, and so on—need to be closely scrutinized with a view to assessing the quality and timeliness of the data they’re sending to the Pentagon. Those personnel, again both military and civilian and again regardless of rank or position in the hierarchy, need to be RIFed also.

No doubt, this will lead, if carried out with sufficient breadth and depth, to a large reduction in the personnel complement of the Pentagon and of those additional establishments.

That opens up a twofer. Many of the critics of Hegseth’s nomination stew openly about his lack of experience in leading so large an organization as Defense. One approach for dealing with that is to shrink Defense. These RIFs would go a long way in that direction.

Part of the Task

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President-elect Donald Trump (R) is, supposedly, drafting an Executive Order that would create a warrior board whose purpose would be to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership. The board would consist of retired general and noncommissioned officers.

The draft order [if it’s actually being drafted] says it aims to establish a review that focuses “on leadership capability, strategic readiness, and commitment to military excellence.” The draft doesn’t specify what officers need to do or present to show if they meet those standards.

Such a review and removal has been needed for some time. Flag rank is a political rank as well as a military one, but for some years, now, the political has taken precedence over the military in the minds of too many flag-ranks. Nor do the officers need to do or present anything to show whether they meet those standards; the board, presumably, would have access to the officers’ personnel records, and the board would have in front of it those officers’ recent empirical performances in the staff and command positions they’ve been holding.

There are a couple of additional steps, though, that remain to be taken. One is that the board membership needs to be lined up, if less publicly than Trump’s Cabinet and staff picks, and ready to be appointed in the minutes after the EO is signed.

The other step is to set up a similar board to review the senior civilian posts and their incumbents with a view to removing those personages who fail to have the requisite leadership capability, strategic readiness, and commitment to military excellence. This board also should review all of the civilian positions with a view to identifying those positions not actually needed. Those incumbents should be returned to the private sector along with those civilians who failed the explicit leadership review. The latter, however, should be returned without opprobrium or stigma.

It’s time DoD was put back into the role of building, maintaining, and supporting a lethal military establishment capable of taking on our enemies in two and a half simultaneous wars and defeating those enemies so decisively they cannot attack us again for a long time. Two and a half simultaneous wars? That was the DOC of our military at the height of the Cold War, and Russia, the People’s Republic of China, and Iran are bent on another Cold War against us, with two of them already engaged in hot wars against a friend and an ally, and the third threatening and girding itself for a hot war against another of our friends.

Time’s a-wasting.