Category Archives: defense policy

This Isn’t Espionage?

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Three US companies—Quicksilver Manufacturing Inc, Rapid Cut LLC, and U.S. Prototype Inc—have been caught shipping technical drawings and blueprints for satellite, rocket, and defense prototypes to the People’s Republic of China, ostensibly for their cheaper 3-D printing capabilities. As a result,

Commerce Department on Wednesday suspended the export privileges of [the] three…for 180 days….

Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Enforcement Matthew Axelrod:

Outsourcing 3-D printing of space and defense prototypes to China harms US national security.
By sending their customers’ technical drawings and blueprints to [the People’s Republic of China], these companies may have saved a few bucks, but they did so at the collective expense of protecting US military technology.

Well, NSS.

Nevertheless,

A [Quicksilver] company employee signed a non-disclosure agreement, which included that the work be conducted in compliance with US export control regulations, the [production order from an unnamed US aerospace and global defense technology company] said. Those regulations required licenses that likely would have been denied.
But Quicksilver fulfilled the order that August without seeking a license, and included an invoice that indicated the products had been shipped from China[.]

The companies’ export “privileges” have been suspended for a whole six months.

How is Quicksilver’s behavior in particular not espionage? Why is Quicksilver in particular still in business?

Lost Hope

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That’s the position of the Iranian people regarding President Joe Biden (D). Khosrow (security-protected identity):

The Iranian resistance have lost all hope in the Biden administration. The price of President Biden’s policy on the people of Iran and the region is one being paid with our blood and the destruction of our lives.

They won’t be alone in not too long. Israeli blood and destruction—Israel’s existence—will be in the wind when Biden gets his way on his Iranian nuclear weapons deal, and Iran gets its nuclear weapons along with billions of dollars in cash payments and billions more in lifted economic sanctions.

Nobody Disputes That

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The subheadline lays it all out in the open:

Pyongyang, chairing a United Nations disarmament body this month, says it has a right to defend itself

There’s no disagreement here.

But what Baby Kim needs to understand—what the West (and his allies, the People’s Republic of China and Russia) need to make clear to him—is that northern Korea has absolutely nothing of value, or even of interest, that can’t be gotten far more cheaply through trade than through conquering and taking.

And that even that value is non-existent at present, given the disastrous and murderous mismanagement inflicted by the Kim dynasty over the last nearly 80 years.

That mismanagement, though, lies at the heart of the Kim dynasty’s, and especially Baby Kim’s, constant push for more weapons and weapons development. He needs the distraction of a manufactured threat from without in order to maintain his hold on the population. So long as that need exists, Baby Kim needs no understanding of values.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

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Germany and France have two of them. They were mentioned (although not as such) in a Wall Street Journal piece centered on Russia’s slow grind gains in Ukraine’s Donbas.

The first self-fulfilling prophecy:

Germany and France, which have sent limited heavy weapons so far, are skeptical about whether Ukraine can realistically drive the invading Russian army back to its positions when the war began on February 24.

Which Germany and France are making all the more difficult by their decision to withhold serious amounts of weapons and ammunition from Ukraine.

The second self-fulfilling prophecy:

Berlin and Paris are particularly anxious to avoid an accidental escalation into a direct clash with Russia….

Which surrenders the initiative to Russia and guarantees their continued backing down by telling Putin that such threats work.

We really need a mutual defense alliance with the Three Seas Initiative and a redeployment of American forces out of Germany into Poland and the Baltics.

He Could Have Said This…

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President Joe Biden (D) says he’ll send four—count ’em—four High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems equipped with medium range rockets to Ukraine. It’ll take about three weeks to get into Ukrainian hands for operational use. There’s no word on how many actual rockets will be shipped along with the systems, not even a rough ballpark estimate. Only this:

The Pentagon would not say how many rockets it will provide to Ukraine, only that it is sending four of the truck-mounted HIMARS systems. The trucks each carry a container with six precision-guided rockets, which can travel about 45 miles[.]

Such largesse by the Progressive-Democrat President. Russia’s Smerch system, their own multiple launch rocket system, carries a dozen rockets per load and ranges 56 miles.

Even so, Biden could have said from the start that he was sending this token to Ukraine and without all the prattle about what he was not going to send.

The question remains, too: how many more Ukrainians must die, how many more Ukrainian women raped and children butchered by the barbarian while Biden dithers before any more arms shipments?

And why the concern about Ukraine striking into Russia to hit supply depots, troop gatherings, transportation routes from those into Ukraine, or any other targets the Ukraine government deems useful to its fight for national survival? Why should Russia be a sanctuary, protected against counterattack in this war that Russia started and still is prosecuting?