Category Archives: defense policy

Nuclear Disarmament

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Pope Francis wants it—completely, totally, for any purpose, even deterrence (assuming, for now, that this can be done verifiably and verifiably maintained).  The Pope thinks an arms race involving nuclear weapons adds to the danger of their existence, never minding the race, at least on the US’ part, is for self-defense and the defense of our friends and allies—the very purpose of NATO stationing nuclear weapons in Europe, for instance.

The Pope, though, avoided addressing how a non-nuclear nation with a small conventional military establishment would defend itself against an aggressively acquisitive non-nuclear nation with a large military establishment.  Like, say, the Soviet Union against the nations of Europe, individually or collectively. Or like, perhaps, the People’s Republic of China against the Republic of Korea or Japan—or us.

He appears unconcerned that this might lead to a conventional arms race and conventional military building-up race, a race whose deterrence exists only in the ability to conduct a follow-on mobilization race to the frontier—sort of like what turned out to be the first steps of European wars in the latter half of the 19th century and of two global wars in the first half of the 20th.

Of course, in the case of the PRC, the Pope already has abjectly surrendered control of the Catholic Church and of Catholicism—the Universal Church and universal religion—to the PRC government inside the PRC.

Maybe he expects the rest of us to meekly surrender politically, like he has done religiously.

No, I’m not going to turn the other cheek to conquerors and slavers. Not even St Augustine suggested that, for all that he decried preemption.

Outside…Commentary

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It turns out that Navy Secretary Richard Spencer tried to cut a deal with Trump without authorization to do so, a deal that would have allowed a Navy board follow through on its desire to review whether CPO Edward Gallagher would be able to remain a SEAL, and then Gallagher would retire with his Trident. SecDef Mark Esper fired Spencer over his insubordination.

I am deeply troubled by this conduct shown by a senior DOD official[.]

In the end, the Navy will not hold its board, and Gallagher and the Navy seem to be done with the matter.

The Dalily Kos concluded its news article by quoting Eric Carpenter, a Florida International University Professor of Law and former military lawyer:

The Navy leadership is saying they need to get back to basics and that outside interference undercuts that.

This is the other matter of importance in this affair, at least to me: that outside commenter, a professor with experience as a military lawyer, needs to answer the following questions:

Trump is the Commander-in-Chief of our military. In what way is a boss telling the organization of which he’s the boss what it must do “outside interference?” Is Carpenter saying, or saying that the military is saying, that the military’s legal system not part of the organization of which Trump is CINC?

Boeing and Foolish Questions

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In a Wall Street Journal article on the tortuous path to criminal prosecution that prosecutors would have in bringing Boeing to criminal trial over its 737 MAX crashes, Andrew Tangel, Jacob Gershman, and Andy Pasztor asked what seems to me to be a very narrow, short-sighted question.

Should prosecutors weigh Boeing’s importance to the economy and national security when deciding how to proceed with a criminal case over the 737 MAX crashes?

Of course prosecutors should—must—not. What’s truly important is the concept of weighing the risks to liberty and to national security of criminals being too big to be punished. We can never allow such a thing to enter even the run-up to criminal prosecutions.

If criminal actions can be seriously alleged against Boeing—based on the company’s behaviors—the company must come to trial. Only if found guilty, so there’d be a criminal sanction phase, could Boeing’s importance to our economy and our national security legitimately be considered—and then, not on the magnitude of the penalty(s), which absolutely must fit the crime(s), but only on the penalty(s)’s schedules of application, with interest accruing on any fiscal penalties not paid “promptly.”

The question of criminal trials for various individuals of Boeing’s management (and its aircraft testing function?) is an entirely separate matter.  The company’s importance to anything is wholly irrelevant here; the company can easily survive any number of its managers being locked up in a Federal hoosegow.

Policing the World

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D, HI) had an interesting campaign advertisement op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.  One campaign promise she made in it jumped out at me.

A Gabbard presidency would mean the end of trying to police the world….

Who does Gabbard think would police the world if we don’t? Can she really believe that a police-less world would be benign, or that our enemies won’t divide up the policing among themselves explicitly for their benefit and just as explicitly for our detriment?  Or that their squabbling among themselves over the spoils won’t spill over into serious regional or even global conflict?

PRC Personal Savings Rate

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James Areddy had an extensive article on this in a recent Wall Street Journal.  It seems that the personal savings rate of People’s Republic of China’s citizens peaked around 2010 and has been trailing off ever since.  Areddy posited a number of reasons for this, and why it’s likely to continue.  Chief among them is the usual suspect of an increasingly less poor, if not increasingly prosperous, population wishing to live better rather than save more.  Another major reason seems to be the PRC’s one-child policy, lately relaxed legally, but not socially.  With fewer kids in the family, there’s less reason for parents to save against those kids’ future.

I see another reason, though, for the continuation of the fall-off in savings rate, and that continuation running to disastrously low levels, from a national economic perspective.  This is the aging of the PRC’s population.

That aging is driven by a couple of things. One is that folks get old before they die (duh), and today’s PRC population being healthier than yesterday’s, these folks are living longer.  The bookend to this is the shrinking—across generations—of the population of working age citizens.  This stems from that one-child policy, emplaced explicitly to shrink a population that had severe trouble feeding and housing itself and from the continued social lack of desire for more than one child in a family, and from the desire to live better materially today, now that folks are better off (or at least not so bad off).

With fewer folks working relatively to aging and retiring, this means there’ll be less public money to pay for old folks’ retirement (and retired) needs, so the old folks will need to spend their savings even faster than might be the case otherwise.

Another feedback loop likely is inflation.  This will accelerate the fall-off in personal savings. This inflation will be driven by that same shrinking labor force, this time reducing production output—the availability of goods and services—even as spending increases across all age demographics: a classic case of (relatively) too many yuan chasing (relatively) too few goods.