Tag Archives: foreign policy

When?

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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has agreed to transfer some retired armored anti-aircraft guns to Ukraine to support that nation’s fight against Russia’s invasion.

Antiaircraft cannon tanks known as Flakpanzer Gepard, or Cheetah, that have been decommissioned by the German armed forces will now be refurbished and sent to Ukraine, Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said Tuesday.
Germany will provide about 50 of the German-made self-propelled guns in what will mark a major delivery of non-Soviet weapons systems by a Western country to Ukraine, two government officials said.

When will they be provided?

The decommissioned anti-aircraft tanks currently are stored by their manufacturer, Krauss-Maffei Wegmann GmbH.

“Our tanks are in good shape, and they can be delivered very, very quickly,” a KMW spokesman said.

How quickly? When?

[The] complexity [of the systems] means providing training and maintenance logistics to enable the Ukrainians to effectively use the Gepards would take longer….

How much longer?

When will the systems actually arrive in Ukraine?

I only ask because Scholz’ predecessor in office had been foot-dragging on German defense responsibilities for years, and Scholz has been foot-dragging, when he’s not be actively interfering with, military arms support for Ukraine since Putin began his pre-invasion buildup on Russia’s and Belorussia’s borders with Ukraine.

German Duplicity

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It continues. Recall then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s promise to boost German spending on NATO to 2% of GDP. She welched on that promise with her very next budget submittal to her Bundestag.

Now there’s current Chancellor Olaf Scholz. He opened Germany’s response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s naked invasion of Ukraine by blocking transfer of German-originated arms from all of the Baltic States to Ukraine and by not allowing British aerial transfer of weapons to overfly German territory.

Scholz later pretended to alter his position, promising to step up German defense spending and sending—count ’em—5,000 helmets to the Ukrainian army while promising more robust arms transfers.

Now he’s welched on that promise. And in a most despicable way. He opened his latest betrayal by promising Germany would reimburse Ukraine for any arms purchases it might make from German manufacturers.

However, Bild reported that Scholz’s office had crossed all heavy weapons off the list submitted by Ukraine. The combined value of the items on the inventory eventually approved by Scholz’s office was €307 million, less than a third of the €1 billion of equipment that the chancellor had previously promised. After the chancellery was finished “consolidating” the list, the document had shrunk from 48 pages to 24, the paper said.

Worse [emphasis added],

Ukrainian officials had sent a list of 15 types of urgently needed equipment to the German Ministry of Defense, which included tanks and artillery. Scholz’s government only agreed to three of these, including a radar system. Andrij Melnyk, Ukraine’s Ambassador to Germany, told the German public broadcaster ZDF that “the weapons we need aren’t on the list.”

Because…?

[M]embers of the [German] government argued that it would not be easy for Ukrainian forces to learn to use this western equipment.

Dumb Slavs just aren’t capable of understanding serious weaponry. Never mind that even the Americans think the Ukrainians are fully capable of learning—quickly—how to use American arms, and that training is going on pursuant to the US’ latest transfer of American howitzers.

This is not NATO ally anyone can rely on.

Trump is Wrong

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Former President Donald Trump (R) wants Ukraine and Russia to negotiate an agreement in their war before it is too late.

He warned that if the countries fail to soon reach a peace agreement, “there will be nothing left but death, destruction, and carnage.”

On this, Trump couldn’t be more wrong. There already is death, destruction, and carnage, all inflicted by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s barbarian army wherever it has occupied parts of Ukraine—it’s only necessary to see the butchery of civilians and civilian hospitals, residential neighborhoods, the bodies left lying in the streets of Russian occupied towns around Kyiv, like Bucha, and the occupied parts of Mariupol; and the ongoing carnage as the barbarian continues to target civilians, particularly including women and children, in cities like Kharkhiv, Chernihiv, Mariupol (still), and on and on in southern Ukraine and in the Donbas; and the barbarian’s explicit efforts to raze to the ground major Ukrainian cities like Mariupol and Chernihiv and Kharkhiv; and the barbarian’s agreeing to civilian evacuation corridors and train runs, only to then specifically attack those corridors and trains as soon as they are filled with evacuating civilians.

Trump went on:

The solution can never be as good as it would have been before the shooting started, but there is a solution, and it should be figured out now—not later—when everyone will be DEAD!

On this, Trump is correct, but not in the way he envisions. With only a little exaggeration about the “everyone,” many more Ukrainians will die if Putin succeeds in his effort to conquer Ukraine—see, for instance, his capture and exile into the Russian interior of some 40,000 civilians in what’s left of the barbarian-occupied parts of Mariupol.

There is, indeed, a solution, and it would be, in many ways, better than before the shooting started, even if in other ways, it would not be—cannot be—as good.

That solution is to apply the only negotiation possible between Ukraine and Russia: Putin’s agreement to remove his barbarian army from all of Ukraine, along with Putin’s payment of (not merely agreement to pay) reparations for the death and destruction he’s inflicted.

The former would be an improvement, since it would be a restoration of Ukrainian territory to Ukraine and an acknowledgment of Ukraine’s existence as a separate, independent nation and of its associated national sovereignty. The latter would be a necessary item but the deaths can never be restored, and the destruction will take years to rebuild—years that are lost to the status quo ante bellum Ukraine forever.

Border Removal

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The latest example of President Joe Biden’s (D) move to erase our nation’s borders is this: exemptions to Title 42 health restrictions, which Biden plans to implement in the next few days, and which will largely make elimination of the Title 42 restrictions themselves, or their retention, irrelevant. The exemptions apply, in particular, to illegal aliens; legal immigrants remain held to different standards.

The exemptions certainly sound pretty:

…a physical or mental illness, disability; pregnancy; lack of access to safe housing or shelter in Mexico (under 21 years old or younger or over 70, including families); and an indication that an individual has been threatened or harmed in Mexico.

All of these, though, with the exception of the pregnancy, are easily claimed by the illegal aliens, knowing our border agents are in no position to verify the claims.

Nor is any of this relevant to Title 42’s health restrictions or to the state of the Wuhan Virus in the US. Those restrictions are to protect the US from entry by immigrants who are coming from countries with serious outbreaks of infectious disease(s), not just a Wuhan Virus outbreak. Biden and his Progressive-Democrats (and too many Republicans who argue against Title 42 restriction lifting from a different perspective) know this full well.

This is a move to not bother stopping anyone from entering our nation from anywhere, for any reason, no matter who they are or what diseases they might bring with them—if any.

There no longer are any meaningful health checks under Biden-Harris, so we won’t know how healthy or unhealthy these illegal aliens are.

Cyber Wargames

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NATO is running its annual cyber wargame, Locked Shields, hosted in Tallinn, Estonia. The wargame centers on cyberattack exercises that test teams have to fend off under time pressure. The players include

cyber defenders from different NATO bodies and member countries with specializations such as communications, digital forensics, legal expertise, and recovering systems damaged from an attack[.]

And

This year’s exercise will focus on the “interdependencies between national IT systems….”

These are extremely useful, but especially in view of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an additional element should be added, or an additional set of games developed, hopefully by the time of next year’s games. There must be a military element, or separate wargames set up that include the military, in order to emphasize and exercise the close integration of cyber and modern military systems.

That tight intertwining puts a premium on exercising the timing of a cyber attack with a military attack and the criticality of protecting the defending military’s cyber systems from being disrupted or knocked off line, as well as getting any of the defenders’ off-line cyber systems back on line. All of that must be achieved without serious disruption of the defenders’ ability to detect, respond to, and defeat the military attack. That’s the time pressure that matters.