Category Archives: defense policy

The Truce of the Barbarian

Posted on by
Reply

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a cease fire truce for the three days covering its victory in WWII celebration, and then he increased his attacks on Ukraine. Then he offered low level talks between his underlings and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s subordinates, supposedly for this Thursday in Turkey, basing his offer on renewal of the same talks he pretended to engage in 2022 in Turkey to address his claimed underlying cause of his invasion of Ukraine: ending Ukraine’s continued existence as a fully independent and sovereign nation and exposing it, in that newly and drastically weakened state, to renewed invasion and final conquering and occupation.

Zelenskyy responded,

demanding that Russia start a cease-fire on Monday [yesterday], and saying he would be waiting for Putin “personally” in Turkey on Thursday.
“There is no point in prolonging the killings,” Zelensky wrote on social media. Later in his nightly address, the Ukrainian leader reiterated his intention to go to Istanbul for talks. “And I hope that this time, Putin won’t be looking for excuses as to why he ‘can’t’ make it,” he said.

If Putin is a no-show in Istanbul Thursday, Europe and the US—this means President Donald Trump (R)—need to stop slow-walking weapons, ammunition, and logistical support for Ukraine, and start delivering them in the numbers and at the pace the Ukrainians have said they need in order to succeed in defending themselves against the barbarian’s threat to their existence.

It isn’t possible to negotiate with a barbaric entity who only understand conquer and enslave. His truces, his commitments, cannot be trusted. Ever.

In the end, the only way to achieve Trump’s—and Zelenskyy’s—goal of “ending the killing” is to destroy the barbarian invasion and drive the barbarians out of Ukraine.

Still too many Leakers

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s the lede and second paragraph:

The US is stepping up its intelligence-gathering efforts regarding Greenland, drawing America’s spying apparatus into President Trump’s campaign to take over the island, according to two people familiar with the effort.
Several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a “collection emphasis message” to intelligence-agency heads last week. They were directed to learn more about Greenland’s independence movement and attitudes on American resource extraction on the island.

This was a classified message.

There is no excuse for blatting about to other nations our national security efforts, efforts that must by their nature be secretive. These are two persons who must be tracked down, fired for cause, and investigated for the potentially criminal nature of their “leaks” and for their mishandling of classified document(s).

Occupying Gaza

Posted on by
Reply

Israel has developed a plan to do this as a necessary step to finally destroying Hamas. Israel had done that some decades ago, but it was an incomplete occupation, and so it ultimately was a failure. One of the reasons for the failure  was that Israel intended only on controlling Gaza with no intent to destroy Hamas, hence it was an incomplete occupation.

The current plan has that as the goal and purpose of the planned occupation. I think the plan could work and not even be very long-term, if a couple of additional factors are included (and I have no idea whether they are or are not).

The IDF would need to completely isolate Gaza along its borders and seacoast to keep the terrorists from escaping out the sides and back. If they can do that, then occupying successively seized territory, whether contiguously seized or in separate chunks as the tactics and real-time situation require, then the Israel wouldn’t need to maintain the occupation of all of Gaza for any longer than it would take to satisfy themselves that all the arms and supply caches have been seized, the tunnels plugged, and Hamas functionally exterminated rather than leaked away.

The other factor is the formation of an Abraham Accord collection of Arab states plus Egypt that would emplace a governance function in Gaza. At that point, Israel could withdraw from the strip.

A New US International Trade Regime

Posted on by
Reply

As thought of by me.

The beauty of it, if I do write so myself, it that it’s wholly independent of tariffs, whether foreign policy or protectionist.

The idea, at a level of generality, is this. Congress, the President, and his Cabinet Secretaries develop a list of all goods and services critical to our national defense. The list must necessarily include dual use goods and services, those items that can serve both the private economy and our defense systems.

Then Congress and the President draw a hard line and require that 15% (to pull a number from the æther) of everything needed for production of those critical goods and services, from ore through intermediate components to the last components needed for final assembly or service provision, be produced entirely domestically. This would serve two purposes. One is that it would relieve our dependence on other nations, particularly enemy nations, for any of those goods or services, the denial of any one of which would stop our economy and our ability to defend ourselves beyond stocks already in place—a few weeks to a couple of months worth in an active shooting conflict.

The other purpose is that it would give us an extant production core from which we could surge production and expand production facilities much more quickly than if we had to attempt to start from scratch just to begin to surge.

The last step is to require a review of the list of goods and services every five years, de novo, adding to/removing from the list as necessary to keep it current. Every five years to relieve the review cycle, at least a little bit, from political cycles while keeping the update rapid enough to keep up with evolving technologies.

Of course, this will cost more than a classical Ricardian free trade, Smithian free market environment, but that’s the cost of national security. If we can’t protect a capacity for self defense, we’ll pay a far higher price.

There should be No Question

Posted on by
Reply

SecState Marco Rubio thinks Iran could have peaceful, energy-producing nuclear reactors so long as Iran uses only imported uranium already enriched for the purpose. Iran insists on doing its own enrichment.

There should be no discussion of this.

For Iran, not having its own enrichment capability is a deal breaker. For us, Iran having that capability should be a deal breaker. Iran has shown itself wholly untrustworthy with its enrichment program, rapidly enriching already to 60%, despite the fact that the 2015 accord expressly limited Iran to 3.7%-ish, and that accord remains in effect. Our withdrawal from it is irrelevant; all the other signatories, including Iran, remain nominally within its confines. Iran, despite its obligations under that accord, continues to deny inspectors access to facilities those inspectors want to see, and it demands untenable advance notice for those few facilities to which it has allowed access.

For all that, apparently unaddressed is what to do about the plutonium that lots of peaceful energy-producing uranium-fueled nuclear reactors produce. Plutonium can be recycled through peaceful energy-producing plutonium-fueled nuclear reactors, but critically, plutonium also can be used separately in nuclear bombs.

It’s rapidly approaching time for a kinetic solution to the Iranian nuclear problem.