Category Archives: defense policy

Accesses to Classified

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SecDef Pete Hegseth has revoked the security clearance of Frank Kendall, ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) Secretary of the Air Force. Kendall had been quoted in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal as saying that the Air Force One jet gifted to President Trump by the Qatari government lacks the defensive capabilities of the traditional jets that fly the president.

Kendall is all wide-eyed innocence.

“I’m mystified,” Kendall said in a text message when asked for comment. “I’ve been extremely careful to not say anything that could be classified, and as far as I know I have not said anything classified.” He added, “So far no one has told me what I’m supposed to have revealed.”

Revealing the defensive capabilities of the aircraft flying as Air Force One is perfectly jake?

This is Kendall pretending to not understand the requirements of OPSEC. Or he’s cynically standing on the legalist distinction between classified material vs OPSEC material. That’s assuming, generously, that he didn’t reveal actual classified information—and I would be amazed if information regarding the military capabilities of our President’s transport aircraft were unclassified.

It’s good that Kendall has lost his accesses. More retired or resigned officials should lose their accesses.

The problem could be mitigated greatly if all employees, government or private, automatically lost their clearances as well as any other accesses when they leave the job in which they had those credentials. This needn’t be stigmatic; it should be routine: those people no longer have any need for a security clearance, and so it’s automatically revoked.

Limited Incursions

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The US intelligence community is beginning to wake up to the possibility of Vladimir Putin having Russia engage in a limited incursion into NATO territory in an attempt to relieve Western pressure on him regarding his invasion of Ukraine. (That invasion, keep in mind, he was explicitly permitted to carry out by ex-President Joe Biden, so long as Putin kept it to a small one.)

The likelihood of the most extreme scenario—a limited land incursion—is low, but gets higher as time goes on, according to the reports.

It’s a threat that needs to be taken seriously and to be prepared for.

Putin’s military doesn’t need to be up to snuff to embark on a limited invasion of NATO territory. His military just has to be better than the forces he’d face, and depleted as his military is, they are, strongly so. Likely he couldn’t run all the way to Dunkirk, but he could run all the way to the Baltic Sea. Nobody in Europe, individually or in the aggregate as an alliance presently has the wherewithal to defeat a Russian invasion.

The authors suggested a grey area type of invasion/incursion, and doing so, they missed the larger picture.

The possible threats range from a cyberattack on a NATO country….

Do the authors mean like the cyberattacks Putin has been running all along against the Baltic States for some years?

They posed this bit of ignorance as if it were a serious deterrent:

Such a move [armed invasion] has always been considered extremely unlikely because it would trigger NATO’s Article 5, which commits members to collective defense.

This is a chimera, at best. There’s nothing in Article 5 that requires an armed response by NATO members. The nations’ Foreign Ministers shaking their fingers very firmly at Putin, or Prime Ministers and Presidents issuing strongly worded statements objecting to the invasion, would satisfy the Article.

Hold Who Accountable, Again?

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Over the last month, or so, there has been a spate of cyber attacks against our nation’s infrastructure, culminating in a series of attacks a variety of water distribution networks causing shutdowns of several cities’ water supply, primarily in Minnesota, but spread also across seven States.

It’s not like these attacks came out of the blue, though. Ever since Colonial Pipeline, the executive management teams of utilities—of all private enterprises, come to that—have been on clear notice that well that cyber attacks were a thing; they would occur; and by the success of that attack, they were encouraged by Colonial’s—at then-President Joe Biden’s (D) pressure in his own abject meekness in front of Russia—weak-kneed payment of the demanded ransomware, matched by Biden’s surrender to Russia regarding Nord Stream 2.

And yet, these latest attacks occurred and successfully shut down those physical networks.

The failure of these management teams is reprehensible, given their apparent cavalier attitude—criminally negligent attitude, in my opinion—toward cyber security and securing their networks against cyber intrusion, cyber vandalism, cyber-instigated shutdown. This lack of effort by those managers should result in stern sanction, including jail, against them.

Their decision to not bother with any serious security measures is a failure of their fiduciary duty toward their shareholders. More than that, their failure, especially in the water distribution cases, puts their customers who depend on them for water at serious risk. Above even that, their negligence represents a threat to our nation’s security. The one is criminal, if proven, and the others are unpatriotic and especially unacceptable.

And yet, to date, no one is being looked at for sanction or even civil liability.

Victory vs Diplomacy

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The headline laid out the…dilemma.

Trump Pivots Back to Diplomacy as Iran Victory Eludes Him

This is a false dichotomy, and it’s leading to exceedingly higher costs in weapons expenditures, dollars, destruction, and casualties.

Per Clausewitz, war is merely the continuation of policy by other means. What gets left unsaid is that policy—diplomacy—is merely the continuation of war by other means. What gets missed as a result of missing the unsaid is that war and diplomacy can occur simultaneously. That’s especially true when politicians, particularly President Donald Trump (R), recognizes that war and diplomacy are the same thing operating through different tool sets.

That’s where Trump is going wrong in the conflict with Iran, and it’s where politicians of both parties have been wrong all along. Victory is not eluding the US or Trump, but it’s being delayed by Trump’s either/or procedure in this conflict with Iran. He needs to do both, simultaneously, and with our own maximum effort all across the kinetic and cyber spectrum. Likely, too, he’ll need to do both until Iran is completely disarmed with no remaining physical ability to act kinetically at all. That’s what will produce the maximum pressure on the terrorists reigning over Iran.

A Success from which to Learn

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This bit, regarding Ukraine’s battlefield success flowing from Ukraine’s achieving drone dominance in the barbarian’s invasion lays out the success in question:

Ukraine’s rapid adoption of drone technology in warfare, as well as its rapid manufacturing build-out to produce them, is a success that US military officials wish to learn from in order to boost America’s own production and prepare its troops for future conflict.

Some factors of that success obtain in Ukraine that don’t exist in the US. One, that overarches the rest, is Ukraine’s smaller size, relative to us.

Another is that Ukraine’s government has—with that nation’s existence on the line and so clarifying many minds at the top—far less bureaucracy in the way: no acquisition bureaucracy in contrast with our Pentagon’s acquisition satrap whose bureaucrats seem more interested in protecting their bureaucratic turf than they are in getting weapons for our military, no contracting bureaucracy in contrast with our Pentagon’s contracting satrap whose bureaucrats seem more interested in protecting their bureaucratic turf than they are in getting effective weapons contracts signed to produce weapons for our military, a design bureau (for lack of a better term) that produces, authorizes, and encourages input ranging from ideas to developed designs from soldiers at the combat front and the supply and logistics front, in contrast with our Pentagon’s design satrap whose bureaucrats seem more interested in protecting their bureaucratic turf while being, at the same time, entirely too malleable by large defense contractors who constantly evolve their designs in order to plus up their contracts and the income from them, than those bureaucrats are in getting quality designs for our weapons and then freezing those designs for actual production.

Then there’s the political aspect. Ukraine’s size isn’t conducive to balkanizing supply chains and production facilities in response to its politicians’ push to get those projects for their districts. American politicians are infamous for holding up, even killing, useful weapons projects if they can’t get some or all of a project’s production set up in their State or district.

These are obvious lessons, easily learned, but they won’t be easily implemented.