Author Archives: eehines

Understanding our Constitution

Posted on by
Reply

Professor Emeritus Michael Polelle, of the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Law, in his letter to The Wall Street Journal, disagreed with Justice Samuel Alito’s originalist view that the words of our Constitution should be understood to mean what the public would have taken them to mean when they were adopted.

The problem is that the Constitution wasn’t adopted by an Athenian democracy where all citizens were lawmakers. … Legislatures appointed the Framers. It follows that the most relevant and practical frame of reference is what the Framers….

I disagree with Polelle. The Framers didn’t ratify the Constitution; they only wrote it. Their final draft, also, was flawed enough in the view of the population outside of and much larger than those Framers that the debates about it—the Federalist Papers and the less well organized Anti-Federalist Papers—extracted an agreement for the people to ratify that draft if a series of Amendments—the Bill of Rights—were passed by Congress and put to the people for additional ratification or rejection.

Then most of the States artificially expanded their franchise so a larger subset of We the People could vote on ratification. That ratification vote was on the basis their interpretation of the words of the Constitution, not the Framers’. And so was the subsequent ratification of the Bill of Rights.

It’s entirely appropriate for our Constitution’s words to be understood to mean what the public would have taken them to mean when they were adopted.

Another Mistaken Response

Posted on by
1

This one from NATO’s military boss, General Alexus Grynkewich. In responding to the Russian threat to Europe, he made this remark:

NATO could “match any enemy move up the escalation ladder….”

What about, instead, getting out in front (get higher, to stick to the metaphor) in the escalation sequence and by being in front—escalating farther and faster than Russia can respond—block any further escalatory efforts by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin? Surely American military leadership learned the blood-soaked folly of tit-for-tat reactive moves, which only extend the conflict and greatly increase the friendly casualty butcher’s bill.

He had this, too:

Grynkewich laid out a “block, blunt, and break” strategy for defeating an invading force. The alliance’s superior data and sensing ability means Mr Putin wouldn’t have the luxury of surprising the West.

This is incredibly naïve for so senior a military officer. I was stationed in West Germany at the height of the Cold War, and one of things that we worried about and tried to train against was the ability of Spetznatz to infiltrate and lie low until the USSR decided to come over the fence. At that point, those infiltrated and secreted agents and small teams—4-5 agents—would act to sabotage key communications and radar nodes, interfere with Army crashout ops, blow or at least damage key bridges, and so on.

Today, the ability of Russia’s modern-day and evolved Special Operations units to infiltrate and secrete extends much farther than human agents. It includes smuggled-in and hidden until The Day drones (of which Ukraine has already demonstrated the catastrophic consequences) and malware inserted into key communications nodes and fuel, water, and electricity distribution infrastructure chokepoints not doing anything until activated on The Day.

Russia already is collecting a plethora of intelligence with its campaign of drone incursions and cyberattacks, which, far from being intimidation or warning moves, are in their essence reconnaissance probes.

Points of Fundamental Economics

Posted on by
Reply

President Donald Trump (R) has ordered a conversion of the Navy’s carriers from electronic catapults to steam catapults for launching its aircraft. There are a couple of points about that.

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle:

If we were to go back to steam and hydraulics with the elevators, we need to really understand the total cost of that. That will be a significant design change.

Absolutely. Any design change, especially one done after production has begun, has costs, beginning with the cost of removing the hardware or the complete system that’s being changed, designing the replacement hardware or system to fit into the space—or more expensively, also altering that space to accommodate the replacement—and building and installing the replacement. In the present case, an added cost results from the fact that no one makes steam catapult systems anymore. These have to be gutsed up from scratch, including (re)building the factories that make them.

On the other hand, it’s critical to not be married to sunk costs in considering a change. Those costs are sunk for a reason: they’ve already been incurred and won’t be recouped. They’re expensive to walk away from, but it can be even more expensive to continue sinking money into a suboptimal system just because money has already been spent on it.

Better is the enemy of good enough is certainly true, but there’s an equally valid flip side of that: good enough can’t be allowed to be the end game; better really is an improvement. Existing sunk costs can’t be allowed to be in the way of better. What matters is long term performance of the two systems, the good enough vs the better. Cost is only one component of that assessment, and cost is more than just dollars. In the present case, cost includes which system gets more aircraft—manned or unmanned—into the air at the faster rate with the longest time between breakdown and the shortest time to repair.

And a bonus point, about which Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao had this in his memo to the Navy:

To be clear, the debate on whether we do this has ended. Our task now is to provide the plan on how to implement.

Slow-walking the implementation or other forms of passive resistance can only run up the costs of the implementation, and it should get those resisters dismissed from the Navy or fired from their civilian DoD jobs.

Choices

Posted on by
Reply

The august editors of The Wall Street Journal oppose SecDef Pete Hegseth’s decision to live stream the execution of Nidal Hassan, the terrorist who shot up Fort Hood ‘way back in 2009.

It’s about time for the terrorist to die at the hands of the government whose soldiers he butchered, and while the editors agree, sort of, that his execution should be public, they insist that the execution be done

quietly with few witnesses beyond officials and the families of the victims who wish to attend. This consigns him to history with ignominy but no fanfare. Mr Hasan has said “I would still be a martyr” if executed, and that he killed those soldiers because they were “going against the Islamic Empire.” A livestreamed death, complete with some incendiary last words, is what he wants.

Those learned editors add

Mr Hasan and his ilk understand they are likely to die. That is part of their fevered calculation. They imagine that by their violence they will contribute to the bloody caliphate they hope to build on earth.
A public death by firing squad would give Mr Hasan that publicity in perpetuity. It would assist the cult of death promoted by the perversion of Islam….

Those editors, though, ignore the enormous white elephant in the execution chamber: the publicity for which Hasan yearns, the public execution assistance to the terrorists’ death cult, exists only because the press of which these wondrous editors are card-carrying members chooses to hype the execution, it means of carrying out, and the live streaming of it solely for their own ripped bodice wallowing and the clicks it will “earn” them.

The US doesn’t need to execute Mr Hasan on live TV to send a deterrent message. It needs to win the war against jihadists around the world….

That second sentence is true as far as it goes. But it’s much harder for the US to win any war or conflict when a mendacious press chooses hype and exaggeration over cold, nonpartisan reporting and then blames the outcome of its mendacity on the government.

An honest press, one given to objectivity and—as the WSJ editors pretend so righteously to demand—denial of the spectacle that Hasan demands for his so-called martyrdom, would simply note the fact of Hasan’s execution by firing squad with the execution attended by government officials and victims’ families, and then move on.

Unfortunately, these editors and their brothers and sisters of the press wear their blinders not along the sides of their eyes to limit their peripheral vision, but flat across the front of their eyes to limit their vision.

Cowardice of Euphemisms

Posted on by
Reply

Last Saturday, Houthi terrorists fired missiles at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing 12 and injuring more than 300. The terrorists then repeated their claim that humanitarian flights to and from Riyadh would be permitted only with their prior authorization.

Almost as perfidious, though, are the reactions of Canada and Ireland.

Canada said military activity there had disrupted flights. Ireland’s embassy called it a serious incident.

Terrorist actions are not “military activity,” nor are they “serious incidents.” They’re terrorist actions, and nothing else.

As long as these two governments cannot bring themselves to name a terrorist activity for what it is—or worse, if they cannot recognize a terrorist activity when it occurs—these two governments cannot be trusted with anything.

Full stop.