Operating in a Hostile Drone Environment

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The US Army tried that in an exercise in Germany in which Ukrainian drone operators were the OPFOR. The OPFOR won that engagement very easily, and in a real world shooting fight, it would have been a disaster for the US forces.

Because of that—all of us learn more from our failures than our successes—the exercise, Combined Resolve, was a treasure trove of learning opportunities regarding ground forces operating in a hostile drone environment.

Exercises like Combined Resolve are run precisely so that forces can experience realistic combat conditions. Army leaders in Europe over recent years have taken advantage of having Ukrainian forces on hand to participate and impart their hard-won skills to US and allied troops in practice, on simulated battlefields. The expectation is that failures are educational. British and Swedish exercises have also resulted in easy Ukrainian triumphs.

The problem with this, though, is identified by Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich, Commander, United States European Command, and Supreme Allied Commander Europe:

You can’t get training like this in the United States.

Grynkewich added that after NATO forces exercise against Ukrainian forces, “The change is remarkable.”

Why can’t we get that sort of training stateside? The USAF has stateside exercises where the OPFOR fly the actual aircraft of enemy nations where we have examples of them, and uses USAF aircraft flown by pilots steeped in enemy tactics and doctrine where enemy aircraft aren’t available. The Navy’s air forces do the same.

America pioneered using long-range drones in war. The Pentagon has recently spent billions acquiring new drone and counterdrone technology and formed special units to operate it.
Still, in the Middle East this year, the US has struggled to defend against Iran’s long-range drones, which have killed and injured soldiers and destroyed aircraft.

Why don’t we have drone exercises—especially with the short-range drones optimized for attacking close-in OPFOR or OPFOR in contact with our formations—to train for dealing with, operating in, and defeating enemy forces operating under or behind their drones?

One answer to my question, I freely speculate, is that there are too many bureaucrats, both uniformed and civilian, in the Pentagon. These folks are clogging up mission development, weapons design and development, and weapons acquisition, and therewith are badly slowing down field training for this environment by denying our field personnel the requisite equipment.

Another answer, which dovetails with that Pentagon bloat (again, I freely speculate), is that there is too many politics involved in the development and acquisition of these systems. Congressmen and Senators fight for the associated spending to be done in their districts and States, too often balkanizing the whole process, slowing it down, making it less efficient, and driving up costs entirely artificially.

Clear those two, and the situation, both in the training and on the battlefield, will greatly improve.

Why Weren’t Reporters Told?

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It seems that President Donald Trump (R), on the way back from a NATO meeting in Ankara, boarded a “legacy Air Force One,” moved to a catering truck’s container that was ostensibly transferring provisions to the aircraft, via that catering container transferred to a different aircraft, and flew that one to the UK. On arrival there, he transferred to the legacy Air Force One, which had arrived at the same time, and deplaned in view of the press and onlookers, with none of them the wiser.

The press corps and a number of government officials who had accompanied Trump to the meeting had remained on that Air Force One, uninformed about the President’s having shifted to a different aircraft.

The whole business was a Secret Service response to a threat that Iranians would attempt to shoot down the Air Force One aircraft on its takeoff from Ankara, murdering the President.

The Press Precious Ones have their collective panties in hard wedgies over not having been informed of the switch and having seemingly been used as decoys, as CNN‘s Jake Tapper bleated.

An angry press is demanding answers on why reporters weren’t told of Trump’s plane transfer or whether their presence aboard the supposed Air Force One—alongside senior officials Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—put them at serious risk.

There’s this, too:

The White House didn’t plan to disclose the feint, officials said, until the Washington Post revealed it….

And this from John Kirby, who spent his Navy career in the Navy’s press-facing career track and was ex-Presidents Barack Obama’s (D) and Joe Biden’s (D) Pentagon and White House Press Secretary, had this:

They also deserved—as did the unwitting staffers on the plane—the opportunity to make alternative travel plans….

Sure. Because the sudden mass transfer of passengers from Air Force One to alternate aircraft, coming as close as it necessarily would have to the Air Force One’s scheduled departure given the timing of the decision to set up the President’s transfer, would not have exposed the Secret Service’s and the US and of Israeli intelligence communities’ knowledge of the threat. Right.

WaPo‘s exposure and Kirby’s studied disingenuousness are why the press wasn’t told of the transfer. The press cannot be trusted with information like that. Even revealing the transfer after the fact is dangerous, revealing capabilities and potentially sources as it does.

Pressmen are well aware, as much smarter and so much better informed than us average Americans as they hold themselves out to be, of that danger.

Decoys? That’s the highest value of today’s news writers.

The Answer is Perfectly Straightforward

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New York City has sent letters to folks that city bureaucrats claim are pied-à-terre home owners that contain warnings of impending tax bills on those properties. Many of those homes are primary homes clearly held by their owners, and many others are primary homes that are held in trusts or by LLCs as entirely legitimate devices those homeowners use to mitigate estate taxes and to make things easier for heirs.

Worse, the city is trying to require the home owners to prove their homes are primary residences and not secondary. This throws into a cocked hat the American requirement that government must prove its case, not the one the government is charging or the one government is billing.

It’s true enough that trusts and LLCs can confuse, for some, the ownership of the residence in question. City bureaucrats and their boss, DSA/Progressive-Democrat Mayor Zohran Mamdani, are among the some who are confused, and they’re whining about it.

City officials have said they don’t always have the information they need about a home to know whether it is a primary residence. As a result, they have sent out more notices to homeowners than the tax will ultimately apply to.
“Part of the point of this outreach from the Department of Finance is to ascertain whether or not that reflects a primary residence or not,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at a news conference last month, referring to homes owned by trusts and LLCs. “One of the reasons that this is being done now is to ensure that New Yorkers have requisite time before the implementation of the surcharge.”

New Yorkers don’t need any time at all for the city to ascertain whether or not the residence in question is a primary residence or not.

The onus is on the city to prove it is not. If the city’s bureaucrats do not have the information they need about a home to know whether it is a primary residence, then they don’t know that the residence is a pied-à-terre, and if they don’t know, they cannot claim that it is. Thus, no pied-à-terre tax is owed.

The question is answered by a simple declaration by the owner, just as with Federal income taxes, with liabilities attached to lying about the matter, just as with Federal income taxes. And just as with Federal income taxes, city bureaucrats can, after the fact, ask for more information, but they cannot be allowed to assign ownership on their own claim and demand a priori the homeowner prove the contrary.

Of course, it may take a court case to enforce this requirement.

More Ivory Tower Foolishness

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It seems too many academicians (are they any such anymore, or are there only folks who’ve gotten credentialed and now sit in those chairs?) have no contact with the empiricism of the real world outside their ivied and cloistered halls.

The University of Michigan provides the example.

The University of Michigan will drop grades for first-semester freshmen next year in an effort to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” according to the school.
Instead of a letter grade, first-semester transcripts will show “pass or no credit.” The program is designed to help students “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys,” the school said.

These Know Betters even shy away from the “fail” that is only alternative to “pass;” preferring to cower behind the euphemism of “no credit.” With their timidity, these august personages do even more harm to their charges.

This rationalization seems instructive:

The shift at Michigan, among the nation’s largest and best-known public universities, comes as schools wrestle with grade inflation and the need for remedial instruction for freshmen ill-prepared for college-level classes.

A coverup of Michigan’s reluctance to put an end to its own grade inflating practices? Maybe, maybe not. In either event, though, if the little dears are not expected to meet standards, they’ll never learn to meet standards. If they’re not required to acclimate, they’ll never acclimate. Silliness like this at Michigan only delays the inevitable, and that delay only makes the pupil’s coming crisis all the harsher when it does arrive.

Another step, done before the hold them to standards part, would further mitigate the “mental health crisis” the school’s enrollees are claimed to experience. This one is to do away with the remediation bit. If the enrollees are that ill-prepared for college-level classes, disenroll them and send them home to get themselves ready. It harms those students who are ready when resources that should be going toward their instruction are withheld from them in favor of those who can’t cut it.

In the meantime, regarding those other newly enrolled, let the student wannabes struggle. Be firm on grading, setting maximum percentages per class of As, of Bs, and of Cs. Most of the students will work through their struggles and be the stronger, emotionally and academically, for it. Those few who truly cannot make the adjustment, having had that first semester to try, would be better off sent home to try again the next year.

US Election Security

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And less-than-dedicated State election officials. An example of that lack of dedication is provided by Nevada’s Progressive-Democratic Secretary of State, Francisco Aguilar:

I feel like I’m in a UFC chokehold. Everything we do has to be perfect.

Well, yeah—with our elections at risk of tampering by foreign entities, of contamination by folks not eligible to vote voting anyway, by sloppy and repeated vote counts, and on and on, perfection in the process and the counting after the process is a requirement.

It’s true that perfection isn’t achievable, but working—hard—toward it certainly is, and that effort leads to constant improvement in election security. If Progressive-Democrats worked as hard toward that level of performance as they do against moves to improve our election security, we’d have far fewer illegal voter registrants and far less illegal voting and far lower “ordinary” error rates to the point that even the illegal vote conspiracists would have no beef, and the only conspiracists remaining would be the Left’s and Party’s with their voter suppression conspiracies.