Category Archives: defense policy

Foolish Risks

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Great Britain has decided to let the People’s Republic of China’s Huawei—which by PRC law must cooperate with the PRC government whenever that government requires it—to play a role in Britain’s development and deployment of its 5G telecommunications network.

Great Britain says Huawei role will be limited, but in a computer network, such limits lie somewhere between chimera and pipe dream.

The Brits say that Huawei, and “high risk vendors” generally, would be excluded from the network “core.”

The Brits say they are

taking steps that would allow it “to mitigate the potential risk posed by the supply chain and to combat the range of threats, whether cybercriminals, or state-sponsored attacks.”

And that

high-risk vendors would be subject to a 35% cap on access to even non-sensitive parts of the network.

Thirty-five per cent. That’s a broad penetration of a network’s “non-sensitive parts,” a network’s periphery.

This is foolish.

Mitigating risks is not the same as preventing them. This isn’t a matter of the Internet going down for a bit, and our not being able to post our blog articles or do a Bing search for this or that. It’s not a matter of losing a cable connection so we can’t watch TV for a few minutes or an hour, nor is it a matter of a temporary drop of cell phone access.  This is a matter of national security, and the difference between mitigation and prevention is critical.

It takes only a single opening in a network’s outlying accesses to enable a nefarious entity to insert malware into the network. Once inserted, that malware can proliferate on its own, even penetrate the core, and then that malware is positioned to allow the entity to engage in cybercrime, cyberespionage, cyber-triggered sabotage of other infrastructure.

Even were the core adequately protected, malware in the periphery still can render the core impotent by isolating it from the periphery—much as biological damage can isolate a body’s core, its brain, from the body.

“Credible Military Capabilities”

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The European Union needs some, says Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President.

In order to respond to crises, the EU needs “credible military capabilities,” the leader of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen said at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday.
The bloc has already “set up the building blocks of a European defense union,” the former German defense minister said in her speech.
“It is complementary to NATO and it is different,” she added. “There is a European way to foreign policy and foreign security policy where hard power is an important tool […] but it is never the only one.”

Well, NSS.

This is much of what President Donald Trump has been saying since he began campaigning for office in 2015. It’s part of his long push (which is beginning to have some success) for NATO’s European member nations to quit freeloading off our treasure and blood and actually honor their NATO commitments with more of their own money and blood.

It’s also a clear indication that those nations, whose prosperity appeared and grew under American protection, can—and have been able to for a long time—do more for NATO than they have been. After all, it will cost much more to develop an additional defense establishment with the building blocks of a European defense union that is complementary to NATO and…is different.”

Von der Leyen says the EU can afford both.

Empty Rhetoric

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More of it, this time from European signatories of the failed-at-birth Iran nuclear weapons deal. Iran has announced that it’s going to disregard entirely the deal’s limits on Iran’s production of weapons grade uranium, and in response, Britain, France, and Germany have said they’re going to trigger the dispute resolution mechanism that’s written into the deal.  That mechanism, on a finding of serious violation, involves getting the UN Security Council to reimpose UN-originated sanctions on Iran.

Of course, Britain, France, and Germany know full well that two other members of the Security Council, Russia and the People’s Republic of China, will veto any meaningful resolution, making the three’s decision meaningless chit-chat, intended for nothing more than dishonest virtue signaling (excuse the redundancy). The three also said, in the same statement, that

they weren’t joining Washington’s “campaign to implement maximum pressure against Iran.”

And so the three continue to duck away from meaningful action against a nation that attacks its own people, funds and instigates terrorism around the Middle East and Europe, and is bent on getting a nuclear weapon with which to “wipe Israel from the map.”

Hmm….

Contradictions?

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Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D, MN) condemns our sanctions against Iran—sanctions against that nation’s government, various members of that government, and against that government’s oil sales and other business’ international activities.

calling them “crippling” and asserting they would “starve the Iranian people.”

Of course, the crippling nature of the sanctions is the point of them: to convince the men of the Iranian government to change their ways, to in President Donald Trump’s words, stop trying to kill Americans, stop trying to kill our friends and allies, and to stop trying to get nuclear weapons. If sanctions were not crippling, they’d have no effect. Omar knows this.

And, no, the sanctions won’t starve the Iranian people. Iran produces most of its own food, and food trade is not sanctioned. Omar knows this.

And this:

First he canceled our best shot at avoiding armed conflict—the Iran nuclear deal.

The Iran nuclear deal, on the contrary, transferred $150 billion in lifted sanctions and unfrozen assets to the Iranian government, and it transferred billions of dollars—$400 million of it in cold cash in the dead of night—to the Iranian government—money which went directly to funding Iran’s terrorism-by-proxy efforts throughout the Middle East.  The Iran nuclear deal, further to the point, had no hope of avoiding armed conflict—it actually guaranteed it. This “deal” codified Iran’s “right” to have nuclear weapons after a very few years’ delay, and Iran, true to its word, would have used them to destroy Israel. Omar knows this.

Omar also actively supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which designed to destroy the Israeli economy and to starve that nation into submission. Which submission would bring about Israel’s extinction at the hands of enemies sworn to effect that destruction: Hamas and Hesbollah, Iranian terrorist satraps, and Iran itself, which wants to wipe Israel from the map—a major aspect of Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons.  Omar knows this.

Omar also claimed

Since he [Trump] got into office, the president of the United States has been goading Iran into war….

Because objecting to Iran’s terrorist activities throughout the Middle East and in western Europe is goading Iran.

Because objecting to Iran’s attacks on oil tankers in the Arabian Gulf is goading Iran. Because objecting to Iran’s shoot-down of a drone in international airspace is goading.

Because objecting to Iran’s seizure of a US Navy small craft that, with engine failure had drifted a small way into Iranian water, and humiliating the sailors on board is goading Iran.

Because objecting to Iran having its Popular Mobilization Forces militia in Iraq assault and vandalize our embassy in Baghdad is goading.

Omar knows better.

And this:

Sanctions are economic warfare[.]

Of course they are. Would she prefer a shooting war?

No, not contradictive at all.  This is the face of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

A Shootdown

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Iran shot down a Ukrainian civilian airliner as it departed a Tehran airport, with the loss of all aboard.  The shootdown occurred shortly (a few hours) after Iran had launched some missiles at Iraqi facilities on which were based a number of American soldiers.

Stipulate the shootdown was accidental.

It also was an example of monumental incompetence: ill- to nonexistent discipline on the part of the antiaircraft missile crew and breathtaking lack of situation awareness by every single individual in the crew’s chain of command from the operational commander all the way to the top in the Iranian military establishment.

Consider.

Iran, expecting a kinetic response (to coin a phrase) to the missile launches it’s about to execute, put its air defense units on alert. That would include the units defending that Tehran airport: Iran would cavalierly attack civilian airports, so of course everyone else would.

One of those alerted units detected an aircraft climbing and flying away from the airport-as-target, assumed it was hostile, and fired on it.  Never mind that no ordnance had been expended against that target, no damage had been inflicted on that target.  That’s the ill-discipline.

Meanwhile, not one unit, not one sensor, in the entire Iranian military establishment had detected any inbound hostile aircraft in any direction.  Our, and our allied nations’, aircraft are capable of remarkable stealth, but they’re not invisible, not proof against detection.  From that total lack of detection of a single inbound hostile aircraft, there was no reason to believe that the Ukrainian airliner might, by any stretch of imagination, be hostile.  Yet no one in the firing unit’s chain of command, not a single officer at any level of the command hierarchy from the junior officer in charge of the firing unit on up, thought about that.  The loss of control over the unit was the command hierarchy’s own lack of discipline.  The lack of understanding of the situation and of the likelihood of the aircraft’s hostility is that utter absence of situation awareness.

That’s incompetence.

Further to this:

He [Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard’s Aerospace Force] said missile-system operators were told to fire at U.S. or other enemy warplanes without seeking permission from senior commanders.

The missile system operator in this case was a junior officer at the missile site that fired on the airliner. This degree of decentralization (which by itself is normal in wartime, such as the war Iran is prosecuting against the US) puts a premium on the juniors being able to think for themselves and on their having SA. The decentralization is not indicative of loss of control or ill-discipline. The lack of information being pushed down to junior levels to facilitate their SA and the lack of training in the use of coordination facilities is illustrative of ill-discipline.

Further to that SA–both the junior officer’s and that of the officers in his chain of command–are things like the airliner’s IFF/SIF signals, electronic signals that identify the aircraft to air tracking systems including anti-aircraft missile sites, and coordination with civil air traffic control, another of those air tracking systems–neither of which seems to have been used by the Iranians or to have been effected by the Iranians.

That obvious lack illustrates the incompetence.

The US Army’s anti-aircraft missile site operators have some aphorisms, things like “if it flies, it dies,” and “shoot ’em all down, and let God sort ’em out.” For us it’s black humor; for Iran, it’s just black.