Category Archives: defense policy

Deliberate?

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…China has deployed fighter jets to a contested island in the South China Sea, the same island where China deployed surface-to-air missiles last week, two US officials tell Fox News.

The dramatic escalation came as Secretary of State John Kerry hosted his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, at the State Department.

Was this deployment, timed as it was to coincide with our ineffectual Secretary of State’s hosting of Wang, a deliberate provocation, aimed at embarrassing him and our country? Or was it merely aimed at demonstrating to the nations around the South China Sea our present impotence?

Just to be sure the PRC’s message was clear, Wang added that

he hoped that “close up” military flights and patrols by US Navy ships over the contested islands would end.

“We don’t hope to see any more close-up military reconnaissance or the dispatch of missile destroyers or strategic bombers to the South China Sea.”

Hmm….

More Foolishness

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The motorboat skipper who sits in our Secretary of State’s chair and his Russian counterpart, and some carefully selected “opposition and rebel groups,” have agreed to a cease-fire in Syria that is alleged to be effective Saturday next.

However.

The truce will not cover IS, the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front, and any other militias designated as terrorist organizations by the UN Security Council. But where in Syria the fighting must stop and where counterterrorism operations can continue must still be addressed. And the five-page plan released by the US State Department leaves open how breaches of the cease-fire will be identified or punished.

In other words, there is no cease-fire. Only pretty words for the last months of a lame duck year in a lamed duck administration.

A Problem with Veterans Administration Management

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Leo Shane described one aspect of this in his piece in the Military Times. Shane centered his article on Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I, VT) role in making it nearly impossible to fire non-performing Veterans Administration executives.

Sanders—the independent Vermont senator who at the time was chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee—insisted on preserving the protection board’s appeals role, and held up reform legislation in his chamber until it was included.

That protection board is the Merit Systems Protection Board, an allegedly independent facility with a degree of judicial authority that supposedly ensures that nobody gets fired without due process. In the realization this Board, which Sanders was so desperate to protect, is a union facility that ensures that nobody gets fired.

The larger problem, though, is less Sanders’ union’s interference with the VA leadership’s inability to get rid of the trash and other non-performers in the VA leadership, than it is that inability to throw out the trash.

In recent weeks, the VA has seen a host of job actions against senior employees overturned by the Merit Systems Protection Board [see, for example, here]…. They include the demotion of two VA executives accused of gaming the department’s hiring system for personal benefit, and the dismissal of a New York VA director over patient safety concerns.

And

The appeals fight has grown into an escalating intra-administration showdown between VA leaders, who call the decisions off-base, and protection board officials, who blame bad legislative changes for the unsatisfactory rulings.

These union hacks even are trying to turn the problem back onto Congress:

They also accused lawmakers of overhyping problems within the department, saying lawmakers are conflating malice and malfeasance with mistakes made by under-trained supervisors.

Under-trained? The union hacks agree, then, that these supervisors are unfit for their positions, yet they insist these unfits must be retained, anyway. No trash out, not under-performers out, nobody out.

After all, our veterans are used to the idea of becoming casualties on a war’s battlefield. They and everyone else should just shut up, and our veterans should accept being casualties on an artificial VA battlefield, too.

Veteranos administratio delende est.

Security Tradeoffs

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Here’s one.

A federal judge has ordered Apple Inc to provide software to the Justice Department to help it unlock a phone used by one of the suspects in the San Bernardino, CA, terror attack because investigators suspect the device may hold critical details of the plotting behind the mass murder.

The government’s justification is this:

Law-enforcement agencies say companies such as Apple make it harder to solve crimes including terrorist attacks, child abuse and murder by putting security measures on phones that make it difficult or impossible for investigators to open them and examine data inside.

That’s an entirely valid concern.

The problem, though, is that forcing a back door into citizens’ communications encryption utterly destroys citizens’ privacy and security. There’s nothing to prevent Government from abusing that back door to engage in snooping on general principles and then actively and maliciously snooping in order to preserve the power of the men then in Government. The lawlessness of the present administration demonstrates that progression.

Of immediate effect, though, is that a backdoor for Government is a backdoor for hackers, whether these be script kiddies, terrorist hackers, financial or identity theft hackers, or any other sort.

The privacy and the security of our private identities, of our finances, of our health records, of any aspect of our lives we find useful to protect from prying eyes are critical to our ability to engage with our neighbors and our businesses and our government free from threats or attack.

The privacy of our communications, the security of our speech, must absolutely be preserved. There is no security at all without our individual liberties, of which speech is one, held secure.

“Law-enforcement agencies” and this Federal judge know this full well. And they know full well the truth of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s statement in his letter posted to Apple’s Web site:

We can find no precedent for an American company being forced to expose its customers to a greater risk of attack.

Maybe a Good Idea, Maybe Not

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Russian scientists are planning to tweak their ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) to target near-earth objects (NEOs), according to a report by news agency TASS. The news came from Sabit Saitgarayev, the leading researcher at the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau. The projectiles could be aimed at meteorites measuring 20-50 meters in size.

The ICBMs would need upgrades for the purpose. Also, those NEOs include our satellites—weather-watching, surveillance, and GPS, for instance.

There are, of course, cheaper and faster methods of striking satellites already extant. This sort of research, though, also is a necessary step toward developing means of targeting other systems farther out: industrial and other facilities in earth orbit (not necessarily close in, depending on the source of the factories’ inputs and raw materials), in lunar orbit or at a Lagrange point, or facilities on the moon.

Of course those facilities don’t yet exist, but Russia, and the PRC, would like to have weapons available for that eventuality, an eventuality that is coming.

Also of course, this proposed Russian development isn’t, of necessity, aimed at developing a new weapon system.

“Good idea” depends on your frame of reference.