Category Archives: defense policy

‘Proportionate’ responses are a thing of the past?

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That’s the claim of an Israeli opinion reader, Amit Segal, of Israel’s Channel 12 News (Firefox and Microsoft’s Edge, at least, offer an English translation on initial linking). He doesn’t seem to understand proportionality in war, though.

For years, the enemy fired rockets and Israel replied with “proportional” force. This normalized the firing on civilians, kidnapping and invasion.

This isn’t proportionality, though; it’s just a history of tit-for-tat, and that does—and has done—nothing but run up friendly casualties. This has been amply demonstrated by Iran’s years of butchery and destruction of Israeli lives and property in the aftermath of Israel’s repeated tit-for-tat responses to each of those Iranian or Iranian-sponsored terrorist acts.

Proportionality is what the IDF has only lately figured out (and too many Leftist and Progressive-Democrat Americans still fail to understand): when you respond, overwhelm your foe.

The IDF also recognized, lately, an extension of that: the enemy exists in one of two states: pursuer or pursued…if terrorists are running for their lives, they can’t make plans to take ours.

Indeed, true proportionality is to respond so destructively and decisively that the enemy cannot attack again for some long years, and to respond so overwhelmingly that the decision is reached in short order. That’s what minimizes friendly casualties in the mid- and longer-term, and it reduces over the same time frame unnecessary casualties among the enemy’s civilian population. These two outcomes are what makes true proportionality not just sound doctrine, but the more moral one as well.

Mistaken Analogy

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are correctly worried about ending the current campaign in Iran too soon, before

Iran’s navy and its missile stocks, launchers, and productive capacity are destroyed. It would also leave most of the IRGC and its Basij enforcers intact.

But they drew the wrong analogy in explaining their concern.

…George HW Bush and the first Gulf War in 1990. The coalition campaign was so successful in pushing Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait that Bush and his advisers stopped too soon and spared most of his military.

No. Bush the Younger had gained non-Iraq Arab nations’ cooperation in the campaign by promising not to go for regime change in Iraq and to limit the campaign to driving the Iraqi forces out of Kuwait decisively enough that Saddam would be unable to reinvade for the foreseeable future. Saddam’s forces were driven out, decimated badly, and their remnants driven back to Baghdad. That Bush stopped at that point and largely withdrew coalition forces was simply a fulfillment of that commitment.

After that, southern Iraq’s Shiites revolted against Saddam’s remaining Sunni forces, largely with Bush’s encouragement and were massacred, but this is a separate Bush error, having nothing to do with leaving too soon or keeping his commitment to end the fight with Kuwait’s liberation.

In reality, no analogy is needed regarding too-optimistic and -early off-ramps for the current Iran campaign. This is amply demonstrated by Iran’s behavior in response.

Iran has fired missiles or drones on Israel, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and even Oman, which was negotiating with the US on Iran’s behalf. It also launched strikes, if fewer of them, on Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and…Cyprus.
Some of its targets in these countries are US bases, but the attacks were often directed at civilian targets, including hotels in Dubai. [I add, attacks directed against Israeli apartment complexes.]

This is reason enough to finish the job in Iran before announcing victory.

Foolishness

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US intelligence estimates and experts outside government are busily downplaying Iran’s ability to launch ICBMs, much less to do so against American targets.

To build effective ICBMs, which soar out of the atmosphere and into space, Iran would have to overcome hurdles including developing a re-entry vehicle with heat shielding that can survive a fiery descent into the atmosphere, and a guidance system to keep the missile on target.

Iran has been launching satellites into orbit for years. Developing a reentry capability is a straightforward engineering task that lots of nations worked out decades ago, including such allies of Iran as Russia and the PRC. Indeed, Iran’s ballistic missile launches against Israel, as pointed out by ralflongwalker in another venue, already gives it most of the heat-shielding capability it needs for reentry after intercontinental flight. It’s an engineering refinement, now, not a de novo capability.

Iran’s ability to put its own satellites into orbit on its own rockets—much less its ability to target those Israeli sites—gives it already most, if not all, of the guidance system it needs, especially given the large footprint of its targets–our population centers.

 

Those downplayers plainly don’t understand the men of the Iranian government. In order to destroy us—the Great Satan—it would be necessary only to destroy our major cities with their populations and financial centers. Or even more easily, simply to detonate nuclear-driven EMP over us.

I Know Something You Don’t…

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….so trust me. Of course. That’s the self-important claim of Virginia’s Progressive-Democrat Senator, in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, regarding the ongoing US/Israeli campaign against Iran and its nuclear programs, missile and drone launching and production facilities, and the nation’s chief terrorists at the top of the Iranian government. His opening claim:

As a member of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, with access to ample classified information about threats from Iran and others, I can state plainly that there was no imminent threat from Iran to America sufficient to warrant committing our sons and daughters to another war in the Middle East….

Maybe, maybe not. It’s awfully convenient to cite “information” that’s hidden from us average Americans, almost as convenient as citing those childhood imaginary friends masqueraded as “officials familiar with the matter” of which news writers are so enamored. There’s no more reason to believe Kaine’s claims than those other claims.

He went on.

To be sure, Iran is a bad actor, oppressing its own citizens and fomenting violence outside its borders, including attacks against US troops in the region.

Of course, in his mind, attacking our forces and the civilians and militaries of our friends and allies presents no cause for kinetic response. Do diplomacy again. Continue those decades of failed diplomatic efforts. This time is different. He means it.

And this, from his claimed history that the rest of us, not nearly as learned as his august self, do not know:

The US and Iran were friends and allies until the US led a coup to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953.

Yeah. We were such tight friends and close allies that we felt constrained to assist in tossing that government. The illogic here is awesome.

Then Kaine cited a list of Iranian-inspired if not -led attacks on our facilities and murders of our people throughout the Middle East. Our support for Iraq in the Iraq-Iran war, though, is sufficient justification for us to ignore the mullahs’ terrorist attacks on us and on our friends and allies. Diplomacy is so effective with terrorists, you see.

Then he quoted—carefully cherry-picking—from the JCPOA, which his Party claimed to end Iran’s nuclear weapons aspirations:

Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.

That’s in the first paragraph of the Preface to the document. Throughout the body of the document, where the actual force of the agreement lies, are repeated agreements that sanctions would be lifted at 8, 15, or 25 years, depending on the sanctions involved (those at 25 years are trivial). Following the end of those sanctions, Iran would have been free to resume nuclear weapons development without consequence. Kaine so carefully withheld these tidbits from his op-ed.

And his “constitutional” pseudo-argument: he opened with this,

without the congressional debate and vote that the Constitution requires

and bookended that with this at the close of his piece:

How long will the Article I branch of America’s government remain silent against this wholesale repudiation of our basic constitutional order?

This is the carefully generalized, carefully unspecific claim of “it’s unconstitutional!” while just as carefully declining to cite the clause(s) of our Constitution that mandates all of this. What Article I—Section 8 for those of you following along more closely than Kaine is doing—says is that the power to declare war is reserved to the Congress. That’s all that our Constitution says about our involvement in the beginning of wars, and it’s a far cry from the Article II executive authority to fight for our safety.

Even the War Powers Act, grants the President—whoever he is—60 days of fighting before he must seek Congressional approval to continue. Congresses led by both parties have explored altering the Act, and each of them have explicitly declined to do so. At that, the Act is iffy itself; generations of Presidents since the Act’s passage in 1973 have called the Act an unconstitutional infringement of our Constitution’s separation of powers structure of government.

This kind of deliberately misleading foolishness by Kaine is why his Party can never be trusted with the reins (Party: reigns) of government.

At Whose Cost?

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The Federal courts, in the person of Judge Robert Conrad in his capacity as Director of the Administrative Office of the US Courts, wants that office to take control of and responsibility for the physical Federal courthouses around the nation.

This request is a long-standing Judicial Conference position, originally adopted in 1989, and reaffirmed again in 2006. This position is being sought now because the condition of many buildings housing the Judiciary has reached a crisis point after decades of inadequate management and oversight.
This has led to over $8 billion worth of delinquent infrastructure repairs that have created risks to safety, security, and court operations. The recent unilateral actions and reorganization of GSA have only exacerbated these conditions[.]

Whether that last is accurate is a separate question. It’s nevertheless a valid beef, but my questions here are these: who will produce those $8 billion, the AOUSC through some sort of fee structure (levied on whom), some sort of GSA-/Congressional-mandated fee structure (levied on whom)? A line item in one of Congress’ appropriation bills? Something else?

Next, is this a one-time fund, or is it ongoing? At what sustainment level?

Then, who will administer the fund, whether it’s one-time or ongoing? Will this be an AOUSC function, or will it be GSA, Congressional, …?

Finally, who will let, agree, and administer the upgrade/maintenance contracts? Again, would this fall to the AOUSC, to GSA, to someone else?