Tag Archives: defense

Marbles

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The Wall Street Journal confirmed what’s been widely predicted: the Governor of the People’s Republic of China’s central bank has announced he won’t attend this month’s annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund because it’s being hosted by Japan.  Instead, the PRC will be represented by Zhou Xiaochuan’s seconds, neither of whom will have the authority—or the contacts or trust—necessary to conclude any substantive agreements.  Not that the PRC is interested.

The PRC’s cancellation is just an escalation of its protest over another territorial dispute: Japan refuses to acknowledge that its Senkaku Islands in the southern part of the East China Sea belong to the PRC.  Eswar Prasad, late of the IMF with the PRC portfolio and now with the Brookings Institution, has the right of it:

China clearly does not feel the need to be subtle or nuanced in making apparent its displeasure about the escalation of the territorial dispute with Japan.  China is making it clear that it puts territorial sanctity above all other political and economic considerations.

The PRC made its intentions clear with the threat it issued through Xinhua, which the PRC government routinely uses for its public communications. In the context of the IMF cancellations, the PRC said the dispute (over the Senkakus) was “now starting to weigh on the world’s economy.”

However, if the PRC were truly serious about its territorial sanctity, it would withdraw its forces back to within its own borders.  It would cease its grab for the South China Sea right up to the borders of Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia; it would cease its occupation of Tibet; it would acknowledge the independence of the Republic of China.  No, this is just another naked power grab, part of a collection of land and resource grabs the PRC feels safe in making in the growing power vacuum developing from the American military reduction.

In the end, the IMF meeting should—and it will—proceed, concluding such agreements as were on the agenda before the PRC’s withdrawal, as though China’s substantive presence does not matter.  Because it does not.  They’ve taken their marbles.  Let them stay home and play by themselves.

Another Chinese Attack

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…this time against the White House’s computers.

White House sources partly confirmed an alarming report that US government computers were breached by Chinese hackers.

“This was a spear phishing attack against an unclassified network,” a White House official told FoxNews.com.

Spear phishing consists of attempts directed at specific individuals.  Sure enough, “This [White House Communications Agency] guy opened an email he wasn’t supposed to open,” according to a law enforcement official investigating the attack.

Most likely, this was a preliminary, probing attack, in preparation for a later, more fully developed assault.  Or a demonstration of things to come if we don’t step back.

Sure enough,

[a] White House official downplayed that report, saying that the system involved was not a sensitive nuclear system, and no evidence indicated that information was actually taken.

That’s OK, then.  The fact of the successful probe is itself no big deal.  Sure.

Defense Cuts on the Stump

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President Obama, speaking before the VFW the other day, had some interesting words to say about defense, and cuts to our defense capability that are looming.  Naturally, I have a few words to say about what he said.

People in Congress ought to be able to come together and agree on a plan, a balanced approach that reduces the deficit and keeps our military strong[.]

Indeed.  When are the President and his fellow Progressives in the Senate going to get out of the way of a bipartisan solution and allow one, instead of throwing our nation’s security away on his demand to raise taxes on his disfavored group of Americans?  After all, it’s Obama’s demand that taxes be raised, rather than spending be cut elsewhere—like in our bloated entitlement programs—that’s standing in the way of salvaging our defense establishment.

And there are a number of Republicans in Congress who don’t want you to know that most of them voted for these cuts. Now they’re trying to wriggle out of what they agreed to.

Nah—they’ve made no bones about this.  Obama held a gun to their heads and forced the idiocy of sequestration during the debt ceiling “negotiations” when he threatened to destroy our economy if he couldn’t get his tax increases, even to the point of cynically blowing up an agreement that had been reached—including revenue increases, if not tax rate bumps—with his last-minute (literally) demand for an additional $1 trillion increase in taxes.

Instead of making tough choices to reduce the deficit, they’d rather protect tax cuts for some of the wealthiest Americans, even if it risks big cuts in our military.

Again, indeed.  Instead of making tough choices to reduce the deficit, Obama is ready to impose destructive cuts on our military in order to get his taxes on his disfavored Americans, and I’ve got to tell you, Mr Obama, I disagree.

As we look ahead to the challenges that we face as a nation and the leadership that’s required, you don’t just have my words, you have my deeds.

President Obama’s deeds are especially frightening.  His “deeds” include the idle chit-chat that’s allowing Iran to get nuclear weapons.  His “deeds” include the idle chit-chat that’s allowing the Syrian boss Assad to butcher his own citizens—19,000 of his fellow Syrians—and to move his chemical weapons arsenal and prepare it for use against surviving Syrians dissidents.  His deeds include surrendering to Russian demands and throwing Poland and the Czech Republic into the teeth of the Bear and cancelling a plan to build missile defense installations in those two countries.  His deeds include surrendering American foreign policy to the veto authority of Russia and The People’s Republic of China, especially vis-à-vis Iran and northern Korea.

His deeds include his claimed end to a war in Iraq that was already won and done, with only a SOFA to facilitate American troop presence for training to be negotiated.  Without any American presence—Obama’s crowning achievement here—Iraq is falling apart under terrorist attacks and secular and religious strife, and al Qaeda is resurgent.

His deeds include winding down the war in Afghanistan with an announced withdrawal schedule and nothing left behind.  He’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, as the Taliban are still in the field and effective, while the Afghan army is neither.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman, Buck McKeon (R, CA) has the right of it:

President Obama played no small part in setting the time bomb that is sequestration.  Indeed, automatic defense cuts were included in the Budget Control Act at his insistence.  Now he owes our troops his best efforts to defuse the cuts.  Ultimatums from the campaign trail are not enough.

The challenges we face as a nation are legion, the future is near, and the leadership Obama has demonstrated and the deeds he’s done, make change imperative.

Some Thoughts on Security Leaks

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President Obama finds it offensive that anyone would accuse him of leaking classified information for personal political gain.

The notion that my White House would purposely release national security information is offensive[.]

Of course it is.  And President Nixon had some remarks along these lines, too.

Yet here is a partial list of the White House’s leaks:

  • A terrorist kill list, identifying persons whom Obama personally approves for remote control execution (and so leaves no terrorist to be inconveniently captured and questioned
  • reports of US spies infiltrating Al Qaeda in Yemen
  • stories about Osama bin Laden’s DNA and how the US got it
  • US involvement in the Stuxnet (and Flame) computer virus development and employment against Iranian nuclear facilities, including identification of the government lab that designed it
  • revealed a British asset who penetrated al Qaeda and stopped another bombing of a US-bound airliner

These leaks, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) correctly says, put “American lives in jeopardy,” put “our nation’s security in jeopardy.”  And every one of those leaks push an Obama agenda, or purport to paint Obama in a favorable light.

Oh, and the White House’s leaks about a supposed Israeli plan to use Azerbaijani bases to launch an attack against Iranian nuclear facilities—which plan, if it existed, became impossible for an Obama-disliked Israel to execute.

Yet Obama refuses to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the leaks; although Attorney General Eric Holder has named two DoJ attorneys to investigate.  While it’s true that the leaking that’s coming out of the White House is a present and clear danger and a special prosecutor investigation would take time—possibly years—such an appointment at least would move toward defusing the personal gain question.

Moreover, his CIA and his Department of Justice have announced they will not cooperate with Congressional investigations into the leaks.

I have to ask: why is Obama so bent on hindering investigations into these leaks?

Obama’s offended?  He’s not as offended as are honest Americans over them.

Arms Reduction

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An “advocacy group” calling its self, not at all pretentiously, Global Zero, has begun arguing that the US only needs 900 nuclear weapons: 450 deployed and another 450 “stored.”

The group also wants the reductions to occur over the next ten years

with Russia in unison through reciprocal presidential directives, negotiated in another round of bilateral arms reduction talks, or implemented unilaterally.

and the reductions should include

a de-alerted operational posture requiring 24-72 hours to generate the capacity for offensive nuclear strikes, thereby relieving the intense pressure on nuclear decision-making that currently exists[.]

Then they argue that the deterrent value of large nuclear arsenals from the Cold War add no strategic value to vis-à-vis current threats.

Finally, they insist  that defense spending tight, a (claimed) savings of $100 billion over those 10 years would result.  And they justify this with

There is no conceivable situation in the contemporary world in which it would be in either country’s national security interest to initiate a nuclear attack against the other side.

Where to begin?

When did the Cold War end?  All that’s happened is that Russia and China have replaced the USSR, and we’ve had a multi-front shooting war thrust on us by terrorist organizations and their supporting nations.  Moreover, whence this magic number of 900?  That’s not many targets against sophisticated, powerful foes with dug-in weapons systems and deep bunkers connected by thousands of miles of tunnels within which to hide additional nuclear weapons.

Next, what “intense pressure on nuclear decision-making” do these folks think a President is facing with ICBMs inbound?  The pressure of fear certainly is real—of personal death, of the destruction of our country, of the surviving population delivered into slavery to a victorious enemy.  However, the choices are simple: to retaliate—and then go onto the offensive to win, and so our nation to survive—or to surrender.  This is no-brainer, not least because, with the missiles en route, it’s already too late to surrender.

GZ supports this position with the argument that a nuclear-armed, and increasingly so, Russia (a nation that already has threatened to attack our defensive installations if we actually emplace them on our allies’ soil) and a nuclear armed, and increasingly so, China (a nation that is increasingly aggressive against our allies) are not threats.

Leaving aside the foolishness of “tight defense spending” in a time of nuclear and conventional capability expansion by our enemies, $100 billion over 10 years is chump change.  That savings could be achieved by eliminating some of the FWA that “everyone knows” is present in—pick a—government department.

They’re also assuming that nuclear weapons development, deployment, and operation have no value in countering terrorist nuclear threats from Iran, northern Korea, and the terrorist organizations to which they will give nuclear bombs.

Moreover, the “either unilaterally or through negotiations” quest is naïve: it simply means unilaterally, since the position carries within it unilateral disarmament as an option.  And this is pre-emptive surrender.

In the end, the report is naïve or deliberately misleading.  It assumes that Russia and Chinaare interested in arms reduction.  They’re only interested in US arms reductions.  They’re already in the process of upgrading and updating their military forces, including their offensive nuclear forces.  They’re already in the process of increasing the numbers of those forces.