Category Archives: defense policy

This Should Not Be

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Iran is saying that it’ll negotiate—”this time we really mean it”—if the US stays out of the Iran-Israeli war whose current stage is in progress.

In the midst of a ferocious Israeli air campaign, Tehran has told Arab officials it would be open to returning to the negotiating table as long as the US doesn’t join the attack, the officials said.

I’ll leave aside the mullah’s cynical non sequitur that our participation in the war or not is a negotiable matter.

The mullahs of the Iranian government have welched on every agreement they’ve made with us, with Israel, with the West in general. Their word is worthless. It would be worse than a waste of time to pause the fighting now in favor of more Iranian dissembling under the guise of negotiating. It would cost even more friendly lives as Iran stalls, recovers it ability to build nuclear weapons, and then delivers them.

Apart from that, in addition to it, the US should play a limited offensive role. Iran’s Fordow nuclear weapons plant is under a mountain. Israel does not have the bombs or the delivery systems needed to attack it beyond (temporarily) closing its entry/exit points and, if they can spot them, the air vents. The US has the Massive Ordnance Penetrators capable of getting down to and destroying the Fordow facility, and we have the delivery systems. It would only take 3-5 of these MOPs to destroy that facility. If it isn’t destroyed, Iran would be able to resume building its nuclear bombs after the current stage of its war on Israel is concluded regardless of any other damage the Israelis could inflict.

The US should deliver those MOPs.

What He Said

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This quote isn’t the main point of the Power Line post, but it’s spot on in its own right.

Trump had said over and over again that he would not allow Iran to get a nuclear bomb. He said he’d prefer to do it the easy way, through diplomacy, and he let Steve Witkoff offer the Iranians the most generous terms they were going to get. He held the Israelis back until he had given the talks a chance to run their course. But he gave the Iranians a clear deadline, and he also said again and again that if they didn’t agree to his deal, he’d have no choice but to do things the hard way.

The Tablet article from which the above is cited in Power Line is behind a paywall, so h/t Power Line for bringing this much out.

In any event, Park MacDougould, the author of the Tablet piece, is spot on.

Maybe Don’t Count the Chickens Just Yet

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Celebratory paeans abound. The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are typical.

a decapitation. Nearly the entire top echelon of Iran’s army and Revolutionary Guard has been killed, and the longer Iran takes to regroup the more of its ballistic-missile and nuclear programs it loses.

And

The Middle East war Iran started is becoming an historic defeat.

There are these two especially:

The subheadline:

We don’t know exactly how successful the raid was, but the era of diplomatic nonproliferation is over.

Or not. Because, in part, this:

We don’t know yet how successful the Israeli raids were. Getting past the blast doors and shock-wave buffers at the underground Fordow enrichment site would have been no easy feat. Ensuring that the 100-yard-deep Pickaxe Mountain plant doesn’t come online will require continuous surveillance and perhaps further raids on quick notice.

Getting into those facilities would seem to require bigger bombs than Israel’s fighters can carry over those distances, even with aerial refueling. Smuggled in drones would be too small for the task, unless and until holes were blown in those blast doors and shock-wave buffers big enough for a nearby controller to fly them in through.

The next opinion writer giddily claimed that it’s Morning in Jerusalem. The Israeli raids do take the nation far along towards the dawn of a new day (to extend that overused metaphor), but it’s far too soon to claim that the sun is up. Contradictorily, this opinion writer even acknowledged as much in the body of his piece.

How things will end is unclear….

The current battle likely is an historic defeat for Iran, but the war is not at all lost as far as the Iranian government is concerned. The lesson the Carthaginians learned too late and to their everlasting chagrin, Israel must learn much more quickly to preempt a similar chagrin. Iran isn’t dead yet, so they haven’t lost yet. As Adrian Goldsworthy wrote in his The Fall of Carthage,

The Romans expected a war to end in total victory or their own annihilation…. This attitude prevented the Romans from losing the war and ultimately allowed them to win it.

The ayatollahs running Iran also will refuse to accept defeat or even to acknowledge it. Israel, and the West, need to be fully aware of that. As Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former President of Iran, said,

If one day, he [Rafsanjani] said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons]—on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.

This is the price the ayatollahs are willing to pay: Iran’s annihilation for Israel’s total annihilation.

There is much too much optimism for this early in the game. As a great American philosopher once said, “it’s not over until the fat lady sings.” The fat ladies of the Iranian mullahs haven’t sung, are not singing, and will not ever sing.

A Reason to Help the PRC

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President Xi Jinping set a goal, which he called in typical PRC cutesy fashion, Healthy China 2030, to raise PRC citizenry life expectancy to 79 by 2030, a goal he achieved in 2016. He also wants to improve health care so that all mainland Chinese can live longer, healthier lives in their dotage.

This is a goal well worth us supporting the PRC on.

This is, after all, a nation with a fertility rate of 1.55, which compares with a replacement birth rate—the rate needed just to maintain a nation’s population at its current level, but not growing or shrinking—of 2.1.

This is a nation with a currently aging population, and that will continue to age due to that broadly inadequate fertility rate.

This is a nation with an elderly dependency rate—the ratio of the elderly population per 100 people of working age—of 20.7 and growing rapidly.

The is a nation with a potential support ratio—the number of working-age people for each elderly person—of 4.8 and shrinking rapidly, the inexorable effect of that very low fertility rate.

Helping the PRC to help its elderly to live longer and more healthily not only is a moral imperative, it’s a strategic political objective, too. The growing old folks population with its increasing longevity, coupled with that shrinking labor force, makes the aging population increasingly dependent on government handouts. That shrinking labor force, though, produces increasingly less output and so sends increasingly less revenue to government to redistribute to its aging population. It’s an open question whether automation and robots can maintain or increase production enough to produce the revenue needed for that redistribution.

We should be helping that population grow ever older, healthier, and longer-lived. That will speed the economic dislocation from that aging, and possibly push it into economic collapse. That’s an outcome for an enemy nation that wouldn’t be all bad for us.

It’s Not Only Airbases

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Holman Jenkins is negatively excited, justifiably, by some implications of the Ukrainian Drone attack that has so severely damaged Russia’s LRA bombers, which comprise a major component of the barbarian’s strategic nuclear triad.

“Hoo boy” was my first reaction to the outpouring of commentary treating a Ukrainian drone attack on parked Russian aircraft as the greatest military revelation since the Trojan horse. The US had been warned, warned, warned, and warned by events on its own shores of this turn in military tactics. In February, I cadged assurances from the leadership of Barksdale Air Force Base, home to many of America’s irreplaceable B-52s, that it was employing countermeasures against the drone threat.

It’s not just exposed aircraft on airbases, either. Our missile siloes are at risk. And no, the missiles don’t need to be dug out of their siloes to be successfully attacked. Nor do the silo lids need to be blown and rain debris down onto the missiles–they just need to be jammed from opening. An attack on the operating mechanism—the hinges for those silo lids that swing up to open, the slides for the lids that slide away, etc. A sealed-in missile is just as functionally destroyed.

Certainly it would take horsier drones to deliver explosives big enough to jam the doors than the small quadcopters that were adequate to damage or destroy exposed, neatly parked aircraft. (Did the barbarian learn nothing from an Israeli raid on Egyptian airbases in an earlier war? Or did he really think distance was enough protection?) Horsier drones are as well developed on mature technology as the quadcopters, and they can be just as easily assembled in situ for their short, one-way missions.