Category Archives: defense policy

Leaks

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Leading off a Wall Street Journal article alleging Pentagon internal lawyers’ concerns regarding the Trump administration’s targeting of drug boats in international Caribbean Sea waters, there’s this:

Some military lawyers and other Defense Department officials are raising concerns about the legal implications of President Trump’s expanding military campaign against Latin American-based drug cartels, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

Leave aside the worries about the legality of destroying boats and the crews on them that are targeting American citizens with those poisons. Of course, there’s nothing illegal about destroying those attacks in progress.

The larger question is this: who are those people with knowledge? They’re speaking without authorization, discussing in public matters of national security, and they’re doing so in direct violation of their terms of employment by the government, and depending on who they are, perhaps in violation of their oaths of office.

Some defense officials and career military lawyers have provided written and verbal legal opinions to decision makers inside the Pentagon, but believe they are being ignored or deliberately sidelined, according to one of the people.

This is pretty dispositive—in the WSJ‘s own words—of these people’s deliberate violation of their employment parameters. And all because these wonders actually think they run the show, and are quite cross that they’re not being heeded on the spot.

These are people—these are leakers—who need to be identified and fired for cause.

Not Biden’s and Zelenskyy’s War

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President Donald Trump (R) is dead [sic] wrong on this one.

This is not Trump’s war (it would never have started if I was president!), it is Biden’s and Zelenskyy’s war[.]

No, this is not Zelenskyy’s war, either. This is, plainly, Biden’s and Putin’s war. It’s especially Putin’s war—he’s the one who invaded, and compounding his responsibility, he sent the invasion in utterly without provocation. Ex-President Joe Biden (D), played a critical role in Putin’s decision to invade when Biden gave Putin permission to do so, saying that a small incursion would be OK.

On the other hand, Ukraine, led by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is fighting for its existence as a sovereign, independent nation that is responsible for its own existence.

Trump is right, though, on this much:

[I]t would never have started if I was president!

Inadequate

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Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, and International Atomic Energy Agency’s Director General, Rafael Grossi, say they’ve reached an agreement wherein IAEA inspectors would be allowed to visit Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities sites.

The “agreement” is a chimera and a further example of the Iran government men’s penchant for talking superficials while agreeing nothing substantive and doing nefariousness.

The agreement doesn’t say when inspectors would be able to visit the sites, including the enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow and a nuclear complex at Isfahan, diplomats said. Iran must compile reports on the status of the sites and its enriched uranium stockpile before inspectors can go to verify the information.

No. The only serious agreement in this environment would be for IAEA inspectors to go where they wish, when they wish, for as long as they wish, and without any prior notice. The inspectors need to compile their own reports, without having their inspections colored by Iranian prior commentary and without having their inspections and inspection targets “guided” by Iranian inputs. That’s the only way the inspectors would have any sort of chance to conduct a serious, in-depth inspection of any facility in Iran, much less all of them.

What, Me Worry?

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President Donald Trump (R) authorized the US Navy to destroy a drug smuggling boat in international Caribbean Sea waters. The Left and their Party politicians are in an uproar. Trump has said that the drug smuggler was a threat to national security.

But that claim was sharply disputed by legal experts and some lawmakers, who said that Trump exceeded his legal authority by using lethal military force against a target that posed no direct danger to the US and doing so without congressional authorization.

Last bit first: Trump—any President—has constitutional authority to address threats to our nation’s security, including using lethal force. That’s at the core of the President’s job.

Then there’s this from Frank Kendall, ex-Biden SecAF:

The casualties “weren’t engaged in anything like a direct attack on the United States….” “Frankly, I can’t see how this can be considered anything other than a nonjudicial killing outside the boundaries of domestic and international law.”

The bit about the drug smuggling boat being no danger to the US is, at best, disingenuous in the present environment. That environment consists of drugs being smuggled into our nation on the scale it is, the movement of particularly lethal drugs like fentanyl and their precursors (the latter sourced from an enemy nation) into the hands of drug cartels in Mexico and Venezuela (among other receiving nations), and the resulting scale of American deaths directly from those drugs and indirectly from the smuggling operations. To insist that a single smuggling boat is no threat to our national security is akin to insisting that a single enemy combat ship in the course of a different type of ongoing conflict is no particular national threat and so, don’t worry about it, we shouldn’t sink it.

Abandoning Proportional Retaliation

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Israel hit a Houthi leadership conference and succeeded in killing a dozen or more of the Houthis’ top leaders, including their “prime minister” and “foreign minister” while injuring several other attendees. In the Wall Street Journal article describing the attack and its implications, the news writers noted that

Until Thursday’s strike, Israeli retaliation for Houthi attacks had largely been limited to infrastructure like ports and power stations.

Then they quoted Oded Ailam, ex-Mossad official and currently of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs:

Israel has abandoned the old formulas of proportional retaliation[.]

As it should. The old formulas had nothing to do with proportionality, for all that their users insisted so. Those old formulas centered on tit-for-tat responses, which did nothing to deter future attacks, but did succeed, very effectively, at running up casualties, especially civilian, on both sides as a result of repeated and escalating tit-for-tat exchanges of retaliations.

There’s nothing at all proportional in a strategy that increases casualty rates rather than reduces them.

True proportionality is much more than retaliating in the moment after an in-the-moment attack. Proportionality done correctly, which includes serious consideration of the morality of the response, takes a longer view and considers how a current retaliation would impact future attacks by an enemy and so impact the civilian casualties associated with those future attacks as aggregated to the damage done—civilian as well as military—by a proximate retaliation. A truly proportional retaliation would mitigate, if not preempt, those future attacks by being sufficiently heavy and not immorally tit-for-tat.