Tag Archives: foreign policy

Logistics

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Junior officers study tactics, so the military saw goes, while senior officers study strategy, and general officers study logistics.

Then there’s this.

Military spending is set to rise, with the Biden administration requesting $773 billion for the Pentagon’s next financial year, but the military is still running short of some weapons widely used in Ukraine.
Defense-company executives say they are ready to increase production of most weapons, but some experts say the Pentagon has only just begun issuing new contracts that would be required to replace some of the weaponry sent overseas.
“Industry really can’t do a lot until they have their contracts in hand,” said Bill Greenwalt, a former Pentagon official who managed the military’s industrial policy and is now a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “We are still in that limbo phase.”
The Pentagon has sent more than $3.7 billion worth of military goods from existing stockpiles to Ukraine since the February 24 invasion, from heavy artillery and tactical drones, to shoulder-fired Stingers and Javelins. But so far, the Pentagon has issued only one new contract, for Puma drones. A Pentagon official last week said the military was working to get others issued soon.

Apparently, no one in DoD, from SecDef Lloyd Austin—who used to be one of those general officers—on down, studies logistics.

Count Me Unsympathetic

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As the US and our allies ramp up sanctions against Russia over that nation’s invasion of Ukraine, companies facing ransomware attacks think their ability to resolve the attacks is being complexified. Ed McNicholas, Co-Leader of Ropes & Gray LLP’s Data, Privacy & Cybersecurity Practice, has articulated the whine, as cited by the WSJ:

[E]nsuring that ransomware payments aren’t going to sanctioned Russian entities has gotten “much harder” recently.
“The overlap of the rise of ransomware and then these pervasive sanctions against Russia has created quite a firestorm in terms of the ability to pay ransoms,” he said.

No. It’s actually not that hard. These companies need to cut out the firestorm nonsense, and stop encouraging further ransomware attacks on themselves and on other businesses by paying the hackers for their crimes. It’s perfectly straightforward. Don’t make the payments at all.

Instead, do the near-term hard, but intermediate- and long-term high payoff work of taking corporate security seriously: fill the security gaps—both electronic and human—that allow the ransomware attacks to go forward, and learn how to counterattack to eliminate the attackers (not only the attacks), both through court channels and through electronic/virtual pathways.

Coveware Inc CEO Bill Siegel, as cited by the WSJ:

[C]ompanies should be proactive about beefing up their security and run tabletop exercises to try to avoid being caught off guard by an attack.
“Most companies approach this risk for the very first time when the incident happens,” he said.

That last is not just unacceptable, that’s willful negligence, and it should get the companies’ CEOs, COOs, CIOs, and their deputies fired for cause.

Negotiating With Terrorists

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked by Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) whether the [Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps] has been asked to stop plotting assassinations. Blinken answered:

…one of the strong messages we send to them [Iranian negotiators] is they need to stop targeting our people…and they said they know what they would need to do to address this problem.

Cruz also asked whether it is the case that

the IRGC is actively trying to murder former senior officials of the US.

Blinken:

…there is an ongoing threat against American officials both present and past.

Ongoing, after the “strong messages” have been “sent.” Plainly, Iran has a different view of what the problem is and what they would need to do to address it than has Cruz. Blinken appears oblivious to the difference.

This is what Biden-Harris is begging to “negotiate” with from the kiddie table in Vienna and who he has doing the begging negotiating.

What Did They Expect?

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Russia has cut off natural gas deliveries to Poland and Bulgaria as Putin prosecutes his invasion of Ukraine.

European officials denounced the move, which threatens the continent’s energy supply, as blackmail by Russia.

This is war. What did these “European officials” expect when they made the conscious decision to create themselves dependents on the energy good offices of an enemy nation? And how could they not recognize Putin’s Russia as an enemy nation, given his years of rhetoric laying out his plans for and goal of restoring the Russian empire that was the Soviet Union—an empire that includes Eastern European nations, many of which are part of NATO, and one of which has been absorbed into a NATO member nation?

Other large European gas consumers like Germany and Italy haven’t been affected so far.

Of course not. Germany and Italy are much more compliant dependents. Germany in particular has been busily slow-walking, if not outright obstructing, weapons support for Ukraine. Never mind German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’ talk about freeing up arms shipments to Ukraine. All he’s done, despite two such rounds of word-based commitments, is talk. No concrete movement, beyond an insultingly puny shipment of helmets, has followed his chit-chat.

Latvia’s Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš is much more clear-eyed on the matter.

This is part of the war; this is how the war affects us. The Ukrainians are paying with their lives, we are paying with higher energy prices.

But, then, Latvia, along with the rest of Eastern Europe, well remember what it’s like to live under Russian jackboots. Central and Western Europe, safe and secure and rich and fat and soft three and four generations after WWII and with all those Eastern Europe nations as buffers for their comfort, have chosen to not remember.

More Russia Threats

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…if Russia’s President Vladimir Putin isn’t allowed to have his way with Ukraine.

Russia’s top diplomat said the West was engaged in a proxy war with his country that could escalate into a world war with nuclear weapons, as Western nations elevated their commitment to defending Ukraine.
“The risk is serious, real. It should not be underestimated,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in a Russian state-television interview broadcast Monday night. “Under no circumstances should a third world war be allowed to happen,” he said, adding that “there can be no winners in a nuclear war.”

Then Putin shouldn’t start one. The only one talking about a nuclear war over Ukraine or flowing out of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine are Putin and his cronies.

Lavrov went on:

Mr Lavrov said the West was increasing the risk of a bigger conflict by providing arms to Ukraine: “NATO is, in essence, going to war with Russia through a proxy and arming that proxy.”

This is a cynical and wholly dishonest extension of Putin’s fiction that Ukraine is an integral part of Mother Russia, and all he’s trying to do is to bring the wayward child back home.

This is why nothing anyone in the Russian government says can be trusted, from Putin on down through his Duma, and the only negotiation possible is for Russian forces to leave Ukraine altogether.

And how far back from the Ukraine border Russian roads and railroads must be torn up and the terrain (re)sown with farm crops or trees, along with the promptness of the return of the men, women, and children kidnapped forcibly relocated from Ukrainian cities into Russia.