Category Archives: defense policy

“Reconsider”

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Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has rejected a Trump administration offer to let Iran enrich uranium for a short time, and then end its domestic enrichment altogether. As the WSJ put it in the lede of that article, this forc[es] the White House to reconsider its approach as tensions mount over Iran’s nuclear program. Iran already has been blocking inspector access to its nuclear development facilities almost since the signing of the Obama-Kerry travesty of an agreement

It continues to obfuscate and outright lie about those facilities, including denying the existence of some that the intel sources of a number of nations have detected. Meanwhile, enrichment toward weapons grade purity goes apace, and Iran is capable of producing enough weapons grade uranium for 10 bombs within a few weeks. Converting that purified metal into functioning bombs won’t take that much longer.

The goal of the Trump administration and that of many of our friends and allies is to deny Iran any access to nuclear weapons. If they’re serious about that goal, it’s time to stop wasting resources—including time—on debating the matter with Iran. That nation is never going to give up on developing and producing nuclear weapons; those are its path to achieving its sworn-to goal, the extermination of Israel and damage to, if not destruction of, us, along with selling nuclear weapons to its terrorist proxies in the Middle East and Europe.

Here’s a reconsideration: it’s time for a joint mission by the US and Israel to physically and cybernetically attack and destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities and other installations involved in the development and production of nuclear weapons.

Hindsight and Foresight

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“Four major automakers” are worried about having to shut down some production lines, even whole factories, as a result of the People’s Republic of China’s cutting the US off from rare earths and processed rare earths produced in the PRC.

The hindsight is that these companies and so many other American companies, including those producing for our national defense systems, should have, years ago, moved their supply chains out of the PRC. There are lots of sources of rare earths, plenty of them domestic, and many companies outside the PRC that process rare earths into things like magnets. Hindsight includes the US government, which just as long ago, should have removed regulatory and other impediments to moving supply chain production into the US. These impediments include in the present case, restrictions on mining rare earths and restrictions on factories to process mined rare earths into useful products.

In the present, though, this is what those auto companies are contemplating:

Ideas under review include producing electric motors in Chinese factories or shipping made-in-America motors to China to have magnets installed. Moving production to China as a way to get around the export controls on rare-earth magnets could work because the restrictions only cover magnets, not finished parts, the people said.

This is abject, begging for mercy on bended knee, surrender to a nation that is an enemy of ours, committed to replacing and dominating us. Suck it up, buttercups. The PRC is waging economic war against us and has been for years. It’s time to stop bowing and scraping to it and fight back.

In May, industry groups representing most major automakers and parts suppliers told the Trump administration that vehicle production could be reduced or shut down imminently without more rare-earth components from China.
“While efforts are underway to bolster supply chains and suppliers of these elements outside of China, this will take additional time and will not alleviate the immediate shortage of elements vital for automotive components used to produce vehicles here at home,’ said the letter, which was signed by the heads of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation and MEMA, the Vehicle Suppliers Association.

“Efforts are underway.” What efforts, exactly? If any of those efforts are serious, push the pace on the transition.

The foresight is that our government must close that gaping loophole and cut off all imports from the PRC. The cutoff of rare earth exports to the US by the PRC, in contravention to last month’s deal that got tariffs on the PRC reduced so drastically, is a clear demonstration that the PRC’s commitments are worthless. It’s time to stop relying on them.

The shift of our supply chains out of the PRC will be disruptive and expensive, as the auto companies are discovering in the aftermath of their years of chasing the PRC market and productions. That’s only in the near-term, though. Foresight includes considering the disruption and expense of our nation being economically (and so politically) dominated by the PRC.

“Tit-for-tat”

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Commenting on tit-for-tat, former People’s Republic of China People’s Bank of China Governor Yi Gang offered this at an economic forum in Tokyo last December:

Tit-for-tat trade retaliation [he said] is “never a good choice” from an economic perspective…. “But there’s not much policymakers can do about that.”

He’s right on the first of that, but tit-for-tat is a terrible tactic in any venue, economic, military, political or other. The far better move, the only serious move, is to retaliate through escalation, escalating far higher and far faster than the enemy can adapt and respond. And keep on with that until the enemy adjusts his ways in manners suitable to us.

Yi is mistaken, though, in his claim that policymakers can’t do much. Of course, they can: they’re the ones who push the tit-for-tat retaliations and who should push escalatory retaliations.

An American general once said about getting into a fight: “Bring a gun, and bring all your friends with guns.” Use overwhelming force—economic, political, military, whathaveyou—to end the conflict the most quickly and the most favorably to you. Not a fair fight? Irrelevant. What’s not fair is losing the fight and having our national, economic, international behaviors dictated to us by the winner of that fight.

It’s time to get off the dime and move, promptly and at pace, to cut all economic ties with the PRC, whose stated goal is to overwhelm, replace, and dominate us. The PRC has already made its opening moves, cutting us off from the rare earths we need to manufacture our national defense systems, from weapons to computers, and flooding Mexican cartels with the precursors of fentanyl for the latter to produce and ship into the US along with mixing into what used to be legitimate medicines produced in Mexico.

It’s time to stop selling rope to the PRC.

Why So Slow?

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The  International Atomic Energy Agency says that Iran hasn’t been cooperating with inspection efforts and that it has continued to greatly enrich uranium, increasing its stockpile of 60%-enriched uranium to 408.6 kilograms from 274.8 kilograms in early February. That’s enough to produce 10 nuclear warheads. That compares with my estimate of the number of nuclear bombs that, if used and they worked, would destroy Israel as a nation and as a people: 4-5.

It would take only two weeks to enrich those ~400kg to the 90% purity needed to make a nuclear warhead.

The slowness problem as I see it:

The IAEA has said it can’t verify that Iran’s nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

And

The report is an important steppingstone in the European powers threat to reimpose the sanctions lifted from Iran under the 2015 nuclear deal.
…
European diplomats have said if Iran failed to cooperate with the agency, they would follow up Saturday’s report with a push to declare Iran in noncompliance with its obligations as a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. …
A noncompliance resolution could be voted on at the coming meeting of the IAEA board of member states, which starts June 9.

And this bit of unconscionable dithering:

European officials have said they will decide by the summer whether to press ahead with the so-called snapback of sanctions on Iran at the UN Security Council, if Tehran doesn’t start to fully cooperate with the nuclear probe. The option of reimposing the sanctions expires in October under the 2015 agreement.

9 June is a week off—half the time Iran would need to produce nuclear warheads. Then the European government men and women will dither and hem and haw through the summer before they think about taking action—and that predicated on whether Iran merely begins to cooperate. Then these Wonders would go argue the matter at the UN, knowing full well that the Security Council doesn’t have the votes among the veto-capable members. And: even were sanctions snapped back via a miraculous Security Council decision, it would take days to weeks to implement them, and it would take months for them to start to interfere with the Iranian economy—while never reaching the impact level necessary actually to stop enrichment and production.

Keep in mind these two things, also: the Iranian government men have sworn to destroy—exterminate—Israel, and those government men care not a single dinar about their own people; sanctions won’t be a practical impediment.

Time is nearly up. Iran needs to receive a kinetic elimination of its nuclear weapons development program, and it needs to receive it promptly.

More Foolishness

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This time, it’s in a letter to the Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section by Isaiah Wilson (USA Col, Ret):

Understanding social dynamics in combat, including race and identity, is necessary for effective leadership and unit cohesion.

The problem with this claim is that in combat, logistics, maintenance, any other support function and in training for these, race is irrelevant, and identity is strictly and solely American. Subdividing our American military members, as it does in civilian life, only divides those members from each other, thereby creating…division, and that works disastrously against preparation and against execution.

Then Isaiah compounded his error.

Perhaps the reason America has struggled in combat is that we have underestimated the role of identity-centered understanding in military operations.

To the extent our military has struggled in combat, there has been too much emphasis on identity-centered understanding and the intrinsically racist and sexist divisions that emphasis creates. For all that, though, our military has not struggled in combat all that much. Our political leadership, though, has struggled mightily with combat, and that has gone to our detriment in nearly every conflict we’ve fought since WWII.

Keep the social justice claptrap out of the foxhole and out of our military in general, and return the training and operational focuses to producing the most lethal soldiers and the most lethal military establishment in the world.