Tag Archives: defense

Gun Control and the Purpose of Guns

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Governor Mario Cuomo (D, NY) has demanded we “end the madness now” and surrender control of our firearms to government.

No one hunts with an assault rifle.  No one needs 10 bullets to kill a deer.

The tragic events of just the last few weeks in Newtown, CT, and West Webster, NY, have indelibly taught us guns can cut down small children, firefighters, and policemen in a moment[.]

A couple of things about this.

First, government doesn’t get to dictate to us our purpose in owning firearms or our purpose in owning magazines with capacities of our choosing.  Leaving aside the reason for the 2nd Amendment in the first place, which was to allow a population to protect itself from an overreaching government more than to put victuals on the table, this goes beyond the 2nd Amendment.  If we let government determine our reasons for owning or not owning a thing, it becomes a very short step to letting government determine what me must own or not own, what we must buy or not buy.  Like health insurance.

Second, Cuomo is right that guns can “cut down small children, firefighters, and policemen in a moment.”  When the murdering begins, and help is summoned, the responding police will be only minutes away.  In those intervening moments, though, the killing of the unarmed, including unarmed adults also on the scene, continues apace.  It’s the folks present at the start who are in the best position promptly to interfere with the killer, but when they’ve been carefully disarmed by a Know Better government, they’re as helpless as those children.

China’s Aggressiveness, America’s Response

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China recently announced guidelines, effective January 1, for its maritime “police” to board and seize foreign vessels in waters around the Paracel Islands, which are also claimed by Vietnam.

And

Chinese fishing boats ha[ve] cut the cables of [Vietnam’s] seismic survey ship last week.

And

Philippines Foreign Minister Albert del Rosario revealed…that China had communicated its intention to station ships permanently at the Scarborough Shoal….

Never mind that the Republic of the Philippines, with the support of international law, claims this area.

Indeed, the PRC claims, with a straight face, fully two-thirds of the South China Sea as its sovereign territory.

And

Beijing also continues to challenge Japan’s control over the Senkaku Islands….  Chinese maritime surveillance and fisheries vessels loiter outside the 12-mile territorial limit, occasionally crossing inside to force the Japanese coast guard to respond.

The PRC also objects to the US’ rotating token units of Marines through a basing facility in Darwin, Australia.  Such a move is an affront to Chinese sovereignty, you see.

Yet President Barack Obama is bent on gutting American defense capability by $500 billion, beginning next month, despite his own Defense Secretary’s warnings of the consequences.  Which gives new meaning to the phrase “leading from behind.”

Incompetence

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Fox News had this little tidbit buried in an article about a related matter—the fact that we knew who one of the Benghazi terrorists was in time to have him detained in mid-escape at a Turkish airport, and we let him get away.  The tidbit is this:

[T]he two Predator drones deployed over Benghazi the night of the attack were both unarmed. The first Predator was redirected from Darnah in eastern Libya, where Al Qaeda has active training camps that the US military has been watching for some time….  It arrived in Benghazi about an hour after the attack began, suggesting the first hour of the attack was not fed back to officials in Washington.

That drone was running low on fuel, so a second Predator, also unarmed, was deployed from Sigonella, Italy, to provide back-up.  It is not clear why the second drone left Sigonella unarmed after the attack had begun.

“While some may think that armed drones could have made a difference in Benghazi, that’s altogether unclear,” a senior defense official tells Fox News.  “You need good intelligence to drive the use of armed drones.  It’s not like you can just send hellfire missiles into a relatively crowded area when you don’t know precisely where the enemy is.”

First, keep in mind that real-time and near real-time data were flowing to State and to the White House via telephone from the consulate’s TOC and via email.

The “senior defense official” ‘s explanation for launching the second (weapons capable) drone into a combat zone unarmed is…inadequate.  The purpose of the drones was not to bore holes in the sky, but to observe the doings and to identify targets.  Perhaps even to launch on one that was being lased from the Annex rooftop later in that fight.  The claim of not knowing “precisely where the enemy is” is a reason for holding fire, not for launching unarmed.

This is really beginning to smack of an appalling paralysis under pressure by the small-time amateurs in the White House and Defense, if not of outright incompetence.

Sometimes

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It’s important to note that the last two Americans to die in the terrorist attack on our Benghazi consulate weren’t killed until several hours after the attack started.  Gary Bernsten, retired CIA officer, had this on our real-time response to the attack (i.e., while our State Department officials were listening to the attack-in-progress*) and this administration’s decision to take no meaningful response during the several hours it was going in:

You find a way to make this happen.  There isn’t a plan for every single engagement.  Sometimes you have to be able to make adjustments.  They made zero adjustments; they just stood and they watched, and our people died.

It’s also sometimes necessary to act entirely ad hoc.  But it takes a measure of courage and a willingness to run risks and a willingness to step into the unknown to do these things.

 

*This is from the State Department brief on 9 Oct:

I neglected to mention from the top that that agent from the top of this incident, or the very beginning of this incident, has been on the phone. He had called the quick reaction security team, he had called the Libyan authorities, he had called the Embassy in Tripoli, and he had called Washington. He had them all going to ask for help. And he remained in the TOC.

And from the Chicago Sun-Times:

We now know that the State Department had real-time communications with Benghazi during the attack….

Our Computers, Our National Security

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First it was Russia and the People’s Republic of China.  Now it’s…Iran?  How far behind are we falling in cyberspace, the core of a modern society?  Now we’re hearing from The Wall Street Journal that Iran has been conducting an active cyberwar against us for some months.  (Notice that: we didn’t hear about this war voluntarily from our government, but from a newspaper which had to tease it out of our government.)

Iranian hackers with government ties have mounted cyberattacks against American targets in recent months, escalating a low-grade cyberwar[.]

The Iranian effort culminated in a series of recent attacks against US banks as well as electronic assaults this year on energy companies in the Persian Gulf.  The attacks bore “signatures” that allowed US investigators to trace them to the Iranian government, [US government] officials said.

Here are some of the battles waged in this war since the start of the year:

  • January 2012: Potent but smaller-scale denial-of-service attacks against US banks
  • July 2012: Cyberattack at Saudi Arabian Oil Co. unleashes a virus called ‘Shamoon,’ destroying data on 30,000 computers
  • August 2012: Cyberattack at Rasgas, a Qatari natural gas company, disabled websites and email system
  • September 2012: A group called “Qassam Cyber Fighters” announced plans for cyberattacks on US banks.  Powerful denial of service strikes hit Bank of America Corp, JP Morgan Chase & Co., US Bancorp, PNC Financial Services Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co
  • October 2012: The Qassam Cyber Fighters issued announcements, followed by cyber strikes, involving other US banks, slowing or interrupting consumer websites

A “senior defense official” said,

They have been going after everyone—financial services, Wall Street.  Is there a cyberwar going on?  It depends on how you define “war.”

How very Clintonesque of him.

My own speculation is that these relatively small attacks are just probes, both to test us and to test Iran’s developing cybersystems.

How well prepared are we to defeat a serious, concerted cyberattack, and how well prepared are we to go over to the offense and crush our attacker?  Apparently not very well.  Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said this:

An aggressor nation or extremist group could gain control of critical switches and derail passenger trains, or trains loaded with lethal chemicals.
They could contaminate the water supply in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country.
The most destructive scenarios involve cyber actors launching several attacks on our critical infrastructure at once, in combination with a physical attack on our country.  Attackers could also seek to disable or degrade critical military systems and communications networks.
The collective result of these kinds of attacks could be “cyber Pearl Harbor:” an attack that would cause physical destruction and loss of life, paralyze and shock the nation[.]

Panetta says the US is putting in place systems to defeat such cyberattacks, but I have to ask: how does that work in the face of Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s trillion dollar cuts to our defense establishment from the combination of his spending cuts for Defense and his sequestration of further Defense funds scheduled for the turn of the year?