Category Archives: defense policy

Naivete

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JCS Chairman Mark Milley wants to deepen the level of military-military communications between the US and Russia.

Army General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the US and Russian militaries need to expand and deepen their communication and stressed that dialogue between the two adversaries could help de-escalate a future crisis.

Milley went on, paraphrased by The Wall Street Journal:

[A]dding to existing communication channels already in effect would help each side understand the other’s plans and moves.

He wants the same with the People’s Republic of China, also.

The problem with this tension-defusion concept is that it depends on the participants, in particular our DoD’s Russian and PRC counterparts, being truthful with each other. Why, though, should we believe that a military buildup opposite the Balkans or the Republic of China, is just a training exercise, just because the relevant Russian or PRC generals say so? Or why should they believe that about us?

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer really only works if the enemies aren’t armed to the teeth.

Ransomware Shame

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Corporate executives openly confess that they would aid and abet ransomware criminals by paying them for their crimes.

  • 78% of C-suite executives claim that they would be willing to pay a ransom
  • 56% would be willing to pay over $100,000 to resume operations

That’s deliberately hanging a target on their enterprises.

And this…

  • 74% of executives with hybrid work environments believe their in-house IT and security teams lack the capability to defend against ransomware
  • 60% of executives believe their employees could not identify a cyberattack

…indicates that those executives aren’t even trying seriously to train their IT and security teams or their employees, or to enforce security measures by their work-from-home employees.

Worse than that, they actively cover up their crime enabling:

well over half (61%) of business owners admitted to concealing a breach

This willingness to reward hackers for their hacking not only endangers their own companies, it endangers other companies, as well, by making the crimes routinely lucrative—which these executives are smart enough to know.

That willingness to pay the fee-for-hacking-services aggregates into a threat to our nation’s weal and security. After all, where are the hackers so willingly rewarded located? In our nation’s enemies: 82% of the attacks come from within Russia and the People’s Republic of China, split evenly between the two.

In Which I Disagree

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There is a bipartisan bill afoot that would cut all taxpayer-based funding for any gain-of-function research into any virus or bacterium for at least next five years.

I disagree.

As the Wuhan Virus, which the People’s Republic of China government released onto the world (whether by design or by incompetent lab carelessness) demonstrates, we need, desperately, to understand such plussed up biologics, whether they’ve been…enhanced…for politico-military use, as our enemies are surely researching, or they’ve naturally jumped from their animal origins to human infectiousness.

That requires gain-of-function research because that’s the only way we’ll be able quickly to understand and then to respond to a new disease. We just need to do the research entirely domestically rather than relying on, or paying, our enemies to do the research for us.

Did He Do It?

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Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley stands accused by the journalists Bob Woodward and his co-author Robert Costa of having made apparently treasonous calls to his counterpart in the People’s Republic of China government to assure them that an attack was not imminent and promising to give them a heads up if the US were about to attack.

He’s also accused by these journalists of having illegally inserted himself into the chain of command, instructing the generals involved to not act on the Commander-in-Chief’s (i.e., the President of the United States) order to launch our nuclear weapons under any circumstance without first involving him, Milley, in the decision.

These are plainly treasonous actions, and Milley deserves serious sanctions, as do those Generals who meekly went along with his illegal actions.

If Milley did the deeds.

However, the accusations are made by journalists who chose to cite only unnamed, carefully hidden, sources. Two hundred of them.

Which raises the question, as put by Huntsman, a logistician and founder of Fortis Analysis:

I want to know about the 200 sources who apparently corroborate this account about Milley and the PLA…
….And subsequently didn’t step forward to report it.
They leaked to Woodward, but didn’t say boo until now?
Something is way off here.

In addition to that, I want to know why Woodward and Costa, individually or together, chose to sit on these seemingly treasonous actions until they were ready to release their book and make some bucks.

Maybe the something is that the “sources” don’t exist. Maybe the something—8-10 months after the supposed deeds occurred—was intended to keep alive the Irrational Trump idea that is the lead conspiracy theory of the Left. And a source of book sales.

 

H/t Ralph Schwartz

Failure

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A letter writer, in his 10 Sept Wall Street Journal Letter, quoted from former President George Bush the Younger’s Decision Points (scroll to the last letter).

Ultimately, the only way the Taliban and al Qaeda can retake Afghanistan is if America abandons the country. Allowing the extremists to reclaim power would force Afghan women back into subservience, remove girls from school, and betray all the gains of the past nine years. After the Cold War, the United States gave up on Afghanistan. The result was chaos, civil war, the Taliban takeover, sanctuary for al Qaeda, and the nightmare of 9/11. To forget that lesson would be a dreadful mistake.

What Bush said.

The letter writer added his own codicil:

Prophecy fulfilled.

What he said, too.