Category Archives: defense policy

At Whose Cost?

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The Federal courts, in the person of Judge Robert Conrad in his capacity as Director of the Administrative Office of the US Courts, wants that office to take control of and responsibility for the physical Federal courthouses around the nation.

This request is a long-standing Judicial Conference position, originally adopted in 1989, and reaffirmed again in 2006. This position is being sought now because the condition of many buildings housing the Judiciary has reached a crisis point after decades of inadequate management and oversight.
This has led to over $8 billion worth of delinquent infrastructure repairs that have created risks to safety, security, and court operations. The recent unilateral actions and reorganization of GSA have only exacerbated these conditions[.]

Whether that last is accurate is a separate question. It’s nevertheless a valid beef, but my questions here are these: who will produce those $8 billion, the AOUSC through some sort of fee structure (levied on whom), some sort of GSA-/Congressional-mandated fee structure (levied on whom)? A line item in one of Congress’ appropriation bills? Something else?

Next, is this a one-time fund, or is it ongoing? At what sustainment level?

Then, who will administer the fund, whether it’s one-time or ongoing? Will this be an AOUSC function, or will it be GSA, Congressional, …?

Finally, who will let, agree, and administer the upgrade/maintenance contracts? Again, would this fall to the AOUSC, to GSA, to someone else?

Deterrence and the Need for It

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In the present…negotiations…between the US and Iran, the US wants

…Iran’s nuclear programs eliminated, regional proxy forces disbanded, and ballistic missiles dismantled. Iran is seen as unlikely to agree to the last point, because it doesn’t have much of an air force and relies on missiles as its main deterrent.

Iran won’t agree to eliminating its nuclear programs, most especially its nuclear weapons development and (future) production programs, either. Nor will it agree, in practice, to disbanding its proxy terrorist entities, no matter how much the mullahs and their negotiating representatives might lie about agreeing to do in any agreement.

The bit about deterrence is what’s important in this post, though. One component of this failure to agree is on the US’ negotiators. Iran has no serious fear of attack by its neighbors, and so no real need of deterrence, since Iran has nothing in the way of resources, either in raw materials or in production output, that any nation might want that can’t be gotten far more cheaply and far more beneficially for both that (those) nation(s) and for Iran through freely achieved trade agreements than from invasion, conquering, and occupation. Not even from putative adversaries like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, or Pakistan. Not even in tit for tat, blood for blood honor vengeance attitudes in the Middle East.

The US needs to make this case directly. President Donald Trump (R) already is hinting at it with his trade deal commentary, but he needs to be bluntly explicit about it.

A Proper Response

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People’s Republic of China’s President Xi Jinping is looking to bully President Donald Trump (R) into stopping arms sales to the Republic of China in order to ease Xi’s coming invasion of the RoC. Xi has ordered the PLA to be ready for the invasion by 2027, and the arms sales to the RoC are critical in forestalling that invasion or defeating it should it come.

As the Wall Street Journal‘s editors note,

giving in to Mr Xi’s threats on Taiwan would send a dangerous signal about America’s reliability as an ally. The Taiwan Relations Act obligates the US to supply defensive weapons to the island. If Mr Trump abdicates on that obligation, China will immediately use it to tell the Taiwanese people that America can’t be trusted to defend them. Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines will also get the message that Mr Trump’s priority in the Pacific is China, not their mutual defense.

It also would tell Xi that the US is a paper tiger, easily cowed, and his pressure on us would only increase.

The proper responses to Xi’s bullying attempt are two. One is to increase the sales of weapons—including offensive weapons, now—and to greatly accelerate their delivery. The other is to increase our own combat suites in and around the South China Sea and the island of Taiwan, with particular attention here to the Taiwan Strait. Every time Xi waxes angry and threatening, we should up the ante further, each time much more than the prior increase.

Mistaken Emphasis

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A letter-writer from the Hudson Institute in The Wall Street Journal‘s Monday Letters section tried to make a case for Europe’s ability to defend itself against a Russian invasion based on Ukraine’s capability.

Despite Russian air superiority and numerical advantages, Ukrainian forces and local volunteers slowed, halted, and ultimately rolled back Russia’s assault on the capital. They did so because they were fighting for national survival, and, in many cases, defending their homes and families as the Russians advanced.

They did so, also, because Ukrainians, individually and as a population, didn’t hesitate to enter a stout defense–The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride. As the letter-writer misconstrued the wargame exercise, Germany did hesitate in the wargame, with fatal effects on the attempted defense against the Russian invasion.

Furthermore, that part about fighting for national survival as well as defending individuals’ homes and families does not obtain in Germany or France. Far too many of those nations’ citizens—including their younger generations and members (of all ages) of their major political parties—would rather not fight even to defend their nation.

Next, much of the reason Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine failed, despite apparent superiority in numbers and equipment, was its mistaken assumption that the invasion would be a walkover. Russia has learned the lesson of that failure, and it won’t underestimate the level of resistance capability of its next target, whether Germany’s and France’s reluctant citizens or the Baltics’ and Poland’s willing but small populations.

And this: the runup to WWI in the aftermath of an Archduke’s assassination was one of a race to mobilize and to achieve a mobilization level conducive to successful attack vs a level conducive to deterrence or to defeat of an attack. In that race, both sides proceeded from substantially equal baselines of military capability and mobilization ability. In the realization, the race ended in a substantial tie, and the German invasion of France, after initial gains of the sort that nearly always accrue to the first aggressor, was brought to a standstill.

That substantial mobilization capability equality does not obtain in today’s Europe.

Russia already has combat-hardened (even if of uncertain quality) troops, a war materiel production capacity already in place and growing, and force buildups occurring, low-key, in Belorussia and in Kaliningrad. The Baltic States and Poland, stipulate arguendo, have similar per capita capacities, but they’re already maxed out due to their small populations and limited, even operating at maximum output, industrial capacity. Behind those front line nations, though, Germany has no serious troop establishment and it cannot even field a combat-ready brigade of armor. Its industrial capacity is not capable of producing materiel in war deterring, much less fighting, much less at mobilizing rates before 2030. Italy and France are little better off.

In a mobilization race today, Russia wins. And that, coupled with the incapacity for defense that even the most dedicated nations have, means Russia wins the war, too.

What He Said

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Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR), wrote of the need for modernizing and expanding our nuclear weapons capability across three dimensions: numbers of warheads and systems to deliver them, the quality of those warheads and systems, and the range of threat—tactical, theater, and strategic—against which those warheads and systems are optimized.

He closed his piece, though, with the most important Statement of Need of his piece:

[T]o those who fear an arms race: The race has already begun. Russia and China have been running it for more than a decade while we sat on the sidelines. The question isn’t whether there will be competition in nuclear forces, but whether America will show up to compete.

To which I add: if we don’t compete, we cannot compete successfully. If we cannot compete successfully, we will find ourselves very quickly faced with nuclear blackmail or a nuclear war that we will certainly lose. In either of those cases, we will see ourselves completely subjugated to our enemies.