Category Archives: defense policy

Walking Small

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With apologies to Sheriff Pusser; but the disrespect comes from the administration.  Why are we so timid in front of the People’s Republic of China?  Where did that timidity get us vis-à-vis the Soviet Union prior to President Reagan?

At the Shangri-La Dialogue conference, a gathering of the Asia-Pacific region’s national defense officials to discuss regional security questions, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ought to reassure the PRC that the new US military strategy focusing on Asia was not designed to contain them, saying

Some view the increased emphasis by the United States on Asia-Pacific as a challenge to China; I reject that view entirely.

Never mind that the PRC is an aggressive and growing threat to the US and to our friends and allies.

A PLA representative asked Panetta

My question is, sir, could you enlighten me a little more how the US plans to develop military-to-military relations with China?

Panetta responded with a list of American planned initiatives: plans to cooperate on cyber and space, creating teams to work on these difficult issues, exchanges between military commanders, and a visit to China later this summer by the secretary himself.  (And I thought President Obama had all the self-importance in the administration.  [/snark])  Notice that, though: the PRC asks what are we going to do to please them; they have no plans at all to approach us.

As Senator John McCain (R, AZ) noted after the conference,

Realities are we are retiring ships.  We are having the smallest navy since World War II.

There is great reluctance on the part of this administration to confront China’s aggressiveness toward us and our friends and allies, and shrinking capability being left to subsequent administrations who might have a greater interest in the region’s security.

Yet this timidity is part and parcel with our government’s performance in another part of the world.  While thousands of Syrians die at the hands of the Assad regime, our government sits around clucking its collective tongue and shaking its finger very firmly at Assad—and does nothing of substance.

Senator Joe Lieberman (I, CT) notes that while he thinks the administration is making progress toward a halt in the bloodshed in Syria, it “is moving too slowly.”

Lieberman went on, saying that Panetta had assured him that DoD has a series of plans that they can implement, yet:

I don’t think anybody expects that [Panetta’s claimed plans] would include American troops on the ground in Syria nor will they require the US to take on the fight against Assad alone.

So even those little vaunted and lightly touted “plans” involve nothing more substantive than continued Obamatalk—idle chit-chat and finger waving, with no intension of doing anything serious.

Then Lieberman summed up this administration’s behavior:

If we to continue to say that we won’t do anything to help the Syrian people unless there is UN Security Council authorization, that is essentially saying to the Russians, ‘you can block the world from coming to the aid of these people in Syria against your ally Assad,’ and that is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Senator McCain got right to the point:

I can’t think of a time in the many years that I have served this country in many ways that I have been more embarrassed about my country and their failure to carry out our fundamental principles.  It is shameful because the countries in the region say that they need American leadership, not American unilateral action….  It is patently obvious that this president does not believe that America leads.

And Iran.  After three years of Obamatalk, Iran now is just months away from obtaining nuclear weapons.  Even today, the administration is just sitting around talking with the Iranian “negotiators.”

We’re not even carrying Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick—nor are we prepared to use one, should one magically appear, like that McNairy County sheriff was.

China Trade Wars and the US

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The US recently imposed a 31% antidumping tariff on Chinese solar-panel makers (“green” energy devotees object to the tariff’s impact on American “green” energy prices, but those objections are irrelevant here), and of course the Chinese demur.

But we have to keep in mind the context within which the People’s Republic of China is engaging in the behaviors that required the tariff imposition, a context in which the PRC is moving aggressively and deliberately against American interests and security concerns.

The PRC already is actively prosecuting a cyberwar against us, routinely attempting to penetrate (and succeeding at an alarming rate) American companies’ information networks to gain access to and to steal those companies’ proprietary engineering data and, especially within our financial industry, to steal our companies’ fiscal data.  Even more threateningly, the PRC routinely attacks, and too often penetrates, our Defense and State information networks, obtaining critical defense and political information.  In conjunction with these cyber-attacks, the PRC, the primary global producer of rare-earth minerals, has implemented export quotas on those minerals—minerals that are at the heart of the computing and memory chips that our companies and our government use in their information networks, and on which our weapon systems depend.

Additionally, the PRC is actively looking to block efforts to inhibit Iran’s access to nuclear weapons—weapons which the Iranians will use against Israel and us, and which they will pass on to terrorist groups for use against Europe and us.  Where impediments are implemented, anyway, the PRC actively sabotages them.  This is what is behind their continued purchase of Iranian oil, rather than satisfying their needs elsewhere in the global market, and their purchase of Iranian minerals and organic chemicals.  This is what is behind the PRC’s steady shipment of nuclear reactor parts to Iran.  This also is what is behind their decision to inhibit efforts to curb northern Korea’s expansion of its own nuclear weapon establishment.

Moreover, the PRC is actively moving against American security and economic interests in the South China Sea, claiming that body for its own right up to the border waters of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Republic of the Philippines, and the other nations that border on the Sea.  This is where the PRC militarily engages the Philippine Navy as the latter moves to protect its own interests, and where the PRC militarily threatens Vietnam for objecting to Chinese grasping.  Yet these moves are not aimed at those nations, but at the US, whose interest in open seas in that body (which contains a significant fraction of the world’s commercial shipping lanes) is made manifest by our global trade imperatives (and by those of all of our allies), and so must respond or see our influence shrink further.

Against this backdrop, the PRC is threatening a trade war if we don’t withdraw our newly implemented tariff.

We fear that if these tariffs are levied in full, Chinese companies may have no choice but to exit the US market[.]

We are “urged” to

…review the facts and make the right decision without being influenced by U.S. elections….

And:

This action by the US has hurt cooperation between China and the US in the renewable energy sector, and hurt the US itself.  We hope the US will appropriately resolve this issue.

The tariff must be an opening move, and the US must respond more aggressively and with greater initiative to the Chinese conflict.

“Tin Cups,” Is It?

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An AP article certainly makes one attitude plain.

In a piece otherwise about US efforts to get other nations to help pay for the costs of developing, training, and equipping an indigenous Afghan army, the AP’s anonymous writer says,

U.S. officials have had their tin cups out for months.  Marc Grossman, the top State Department official for Afghanistan, recently hit up European nations….

While there is an element of begging in the manner of President Obama’s entreaties to other nations that they honor their obligations; it’s hardly a matter of tin cup-holding to insist that those nations do, in fact, honor their obligations.

The writer also notes that

…someone has to pay for that army in an era of austerity budgets and defense cutbacks.

It’s true enough that times are tough for everyone.  They’re tough not only for the nations that have to be begged to honor their commitments, though; they’re also tough for the women and children—and men—of Afghanistan, and they’ll be especially so after the US, NATO, and other participating nations leave.

It’s also true enough, moreover, that these straits, while not the result of the original purpose of the US’ invasion of Afghanistan, have become obligations due to the mission creep in our involvement.

A lesson here, aside from the unseemly need to press NATO and others in the present involvement to satisfy their obligations—which shame is on those who must be pressed—is to not allow such coarse mission creep the next time.  And there will be a next time, since the terrorists don’t agree that the war is over, or there will be a new Dark Age descended.

Arms Reduction

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An “advocacy group” calling its self, not at all pretentiously, Global Zero, has begun arguing that the US only needs 900 nuclear weapons: 450 deployed and another 450 “stored.”

The group also wants the reductions to occur over the next ten years

with Russia in unison through reciprocal presidential directives, negotiated in another round of bilateral arms reduction talks, or implemented unilaterally.

and the reductions should include

a de-alerted operational posture requiring 24-72 hours to generate the capacity for offensive nuclear strikes, thereby relieving the intense pressure on nuclear decision-making that currently exists[.]

Then they argue that the deterrent value of large nuclear arsenals from the Cold War add no strategic value to vis-à-vis current threats.

Finally, they insist  that defense spending tight, a (claimed) savings of $100 billion over those 10 years would result.  And they justify this with

There is no conceivable situation in the contemporary world in which it would be in either country’s national security interest to initiate a nuclear attack against the other side.

Where to begin?

When did the Cold War end?  All that’s happened is that Russia and China have replaced the USSR, and we’ve had a multi-front shooting war thrust on us by terrorist organizations and their supporting nations.  Moreover, whence this magic number of 900?  That’s not many targets against sophisticated, powerful foes with dug-in weapons systems and deep bunkers connected by thousands of miles of tunnels within which to hide additional nuclear weapons.

Next, what “intense pressure on nuclear decision-making” do these folks think a President is facing with ICBMs inbound?  The pressure of fear certainly is real—of personal death, of the destruction of our country, of the surviving population delivered into slavery to a victorious enemy.  However, the choices are simple: to retaliate—and then go onto the offensive to win, and so our nation to survive—or to surrender.  This is no-brainer, not least because, with the missiles en route, it’s already too late to surrender.

GZ supports this position with the argument that a nuclear-armed, and increasingly so, Russia (a nation that already has threatened to attack our defensive installations if we actually emplace them on our allies’ soil) and a nuclear armed, and increasingly so, China (a nation that is increasingly aggressive against our allies) are not threats.

Leaving aside the foolishness of “tight defense spending” in a time of nuclear and conventional capability expansion by our enemies, $100 billion over 10 years is chump change.  That savings could be achieved by eliminating some of the FWA that “everyone knows” is present in—pick a—government department.

They’re also assuming that nuclear weapons development, deployment, and operation have no value in countering terrorist nuclear threats from Iran, northern Korea, and the terrorist organizations to which they will give nuclear bombs.

Moreover, the “either unilaterally or through negotiations” quest is naïve: it simply means unilaterally, since the position carries within it unilateral disarmament as an option.  And this is pre-emptive surrender.

In the end, the report is naïve or deliberately misleading.  It assumes that Russia and Chinaare interested in arms reduction.  They’re only interested in US arms reductions.  They’re already in the process of upgrading and updating their military forces, including their offensive nuclear forces.  They’re already in the process of increasing the numbers of those forces.

Thoughts on Defense Spending

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Mark Gunzinger and Andre Krepinevich (with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a non-profit defense-oriented think tank), writing in The Wall Street Journal, warn of a reversal of events that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union—an arms race that they couldn’t afford and so couldn’t win.  This time, it’s Russia and the People’s Republic of China that are pursuing an arms race, this time of powerful, fast, accurate weapons that will bankrupt us countering, if we don’t change our weapons philosophy.

Russia and the PRC are actively developing high-energy lasers designed to shoot down incoming weapons, while we continue to rely on expensive—$10 million per shot—missiles and fighters—$150+ million—per to do the same mission.

Gunzinger and Krepinevich report on two types of lasers that we could field in six years, were the will extant to make the switch: solid state and chemical lasers.

Experts in the US Navy state that within six years, using technologies already developed and demonstrated in test firings, they could field solid-state lasers on warships with sufficient power to counter anti-ship cruise missiles, unmanned aircraft, and fast-attack “swarm” craft like those of Iran.  These lasers could reduce the need for warships to carry bulky—and expensive—defensive munitions, while freeing space for other weaponry.

On the matter of chemical lasers, they write

…new chemical lasers can generate much greater power outputs than their predecessors, enabling them to engage a wide range of air and missile threats, including long-range ballistic missiles. Also within six years…the Air Force and the Army could field ground-based, megawatt-class chemical lasers to help protect key bases in the Persian Gulf and Western Pacific.

And in the homeland.

But that’s just one set of game changing weapons.  Another weapon is the rail gun on which the Navy also is working.  Rail guns use electromagnetic energy rather than explosives—gun powder—to accelerate a projectile down their barrels.  As a result, such weapons can fire accurately a projectile much farther—out to 100 miles vs a current 13 miles—and the ships carrying them don’t need to commit limited shipboard space to that gunpowder, and so they don’t have to worry about all that explosive going off if the ship is hit in combat.