Category Archives: politics

Expanding our Defense Budget

Posted on by
Reply

President Donald Trump (R) says he’ll propose a $1.5 trillion defense budget for 2027, a 50% increase over this year’s proposed (because it’s only passed the House, with no guarantee that an obstructionist Progressive-Democratic Party will allow it to be passed in the Senate) $1 trillion budget. Of course, there’s no guarantee that the larger budget proposal will ever be passed, either, which adds to the premium on Republicans and Conservatives winning the 2026 mid-terms for the reasons below.

The subheadline set the framework.

A $1.5 trillion military will cost much less than a war with China.

This is a war that, presently, we would lose and lose in the most humiliating fashion.

But, but—

[H]asn’t the US military shown, in Iran and Venezuela, that it is unmatched? Yes, and brilliantly so, against small powers when we can dominate space and the skies, and use our experience in combined arms operations. Going up against China, or a multiple front conflict, is far less certain.

Actually, in a fight with the PRC or a multi-front war, the outcome is pretty certain, just not favorably so. The Ukrainian military’s last attempted offensive against our near-peer Russia was an abject failure. That offensive was conducted in accordance with NATO—which is to say American—combined arms doctrine (which worked so brilliantly in Venezuela), but without a Critical Item component of that doctrine: air power and support. Absent that, even with the technologically superior ground weapons Ukraine employed against the Russian forces, Ukraine’s offensive was stopped in its tracks with very heavy loss of those superior armored vehicles.

When the People’s Republic of China invades the Republic of China, American air power will be stripped away from any putative support we might have in mind for the RoC as our Pacific aircraft carriers are sunk and our surviving naval forces are driven all the way back to Hawaii.

Nor would the PRC would have no incentive to stop there, because

new technologies are proliferating in ways that threaten the US homeland. These include hypersonic missiles, space and cyber weapons, drones, and as ever nuclear weapons. All of this is before AI is weaponized in multiple ways.

Unlike 1940s Japan, the PRC has both the stated goal of dominating us in every important way and the wherewithal to follow up its naval victory in the Western Pacific.

The US remains helpless against cyber attacks as demonstrated by the repeated hacks against a variety of data storage sites and infrastructure distribution nodes. The PRC has a first strike capability with its hypersonic, nuclear-capable missiles, which have intercontinental reach. As part of its invasion of the RoC, the PRC has strong incentive to isolate us from the island and wage its cyberwar against us and then to exercise its first strike capability. With the latter, there will be no possibility of a nuclear threat, much less response, from the United States.

We would be left with the PRC dominating our foreign policy and, especially with its control of the Pacific sea lanes of communication and of commerce, dominating our domestic economy. With those controls, the PRC will control us.

That budget must be passed without delay, and DoD’s reform of contract-letting, of weapons development, and of procurement and production must proceed ruthlessly and with similar pace.

Options in Iran

Posted on by
Reply

[A]nalysts, lawmakers, and former administration officials all are busily insisting that President Donald Trump’s (R) options for helping the Iranian people are limited. What’s limited, though, is their thinking on the matter.

A limited strike against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s main security force, is unlikely to decide the outcome of the popular uprising….

And

There are nonmilitary options to put pressure on the theocratic leadership, including cyberattacks on military and civilian institutions….

And

A raid like the one that targeted Maduro in his Caracas residence would be far-fetched in Iran, a much larger country with defenses built to protect Khamenei, including a Revolutionary Guard unit known as Vali-ye Amr, which counts several thousand forces.

These are being posited to occur in isolation from each other, though, and that would be unproductive. All of these and more (see below) would need to be done together and in coordination with each other. Nor is there any need to “raid” Tehran to capture Khamenei and his immediate deputies. American and Israeli intelligence are fully capable of tracking these folks’ whereabouts, and there’s no need to attempt capture. Having located them, it would be necessary only to direct the appropriate ordnance onto them in those locations. This is, after all, what both the Israelis and Americans have done with other terrorist leaders, whether Hamas, Hezbollah, Daesh, or Iranian.

There’s also the matter of sanctions, though these would need to be addressed only after the fact.

The US could also offer to remove sanctions that have crushed the Iranian economy, if moderate military and political leaders remove Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his circle of clerics from the government and promise elections for a secular state.

Sanction removal already is on the table as part of their imposition, on the condition that the Iranian government materially and sustainably alter its behavior. That alteration would require the actual removal of Khamenei, et al. Iranian government promises, in any event, are worthless, and actual, provably fair elections would need to be held before sanctions relief could be contemplated.

Peyman Jafari, a supposed expert on Iranian social movements at William & Mary University cautioned that an attack could rally millions in defense of the Islamic Republic.

The foolishness this sort of thing has been empirically demonstrated within the last few months by the Israeli and American attacks on Iran, which resulted in…no one rallying to the government’s defense.

This is one area where John Bolton is on the right track:

Trump would need to hit the Revolutionary Guard’s bases, its volunteer militia known as the Basij, its nuclear and ballistic weapons programs, and its navy, “and that is just to get started.”

Trump has naval and air forces getting positioned in and around the Arabian Gulf, from which broad, simultaneous, and sustainable actions can be taken—not in constant successive waves, ideally, but on a shoot-look-shoot basis, where the shoot is each wave of attacks. It’s necessary only to act.

What’s the Deal with Little Liam?

Posted on by
Reply

Recall that little Liam Ramos was seized and held by ICE agents a few days ago. Or at least that’s the narrative an intrinsically dishonest “news” media has been peddling. Some facts, though, are coming to light despite the best efforts of the core of that guild, courtesy of some few news writers who have different ideas regarding reporting news.

The Department of Homeland Security said ICE was conducting an operation to arrest Liam’s father, who the department said was in the country illegally, when the father fled and left Liam alone in a vehicle.

This is a little boy’s father abandoning his son in his own attempt to escape to continue violating US laws.

And

Agency spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said an officer stayed with Liam while others apprehended his father.

Making sure the little boy wasn’t just left to wander.

Then,

Officers made several attempts to get his mother, who was inside the house, to take custody of him, saying she wouldn’t be detained if she did so, McLaughlin said.

Several attempts. Because the little boy’s mother was more worried about her own neck than she was about her son. Today, both the little boy and the man who may be his biological father but who has in no way acted in that role are being held in a Texas facility that’s set up to handle both adults and children. The boy is there because, ultimately, his biological mother refused to take him, despite those repeated ICE attempts.

Keep in mind that ICE is the agency that took care of a little boy who’d just been deserted by his parents and which a leading Minnesota candidate for the US Senate, along with incumbent Congressional Progressive-Democrats, want to completely defund and abolish.

This is how little Progressive-Democrats and their Leftist supporters—all of whom have become mainstream left, no longer being an extremist fringe—care about facts. This is how little those folks care about a little boy, all of five years old, mind you, who was deserted by his parents.

Wrong Answer

Posted on by
Reply

House and auto insurers’ profits and the rate increases they charge policy holders are coming under political scrutiny, but politicians’ proposed solutions are badly counterproductive.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) this month became the latest state lawmaker to advocate profits caps on insurers, to tackle escalating home- and “crushingly expensive” auto-insurance rates.
Her plan would require home insurers with “outsized profit margins” to lower or justify their rates, and review the profits threshold at which auto-insurers are required to refund customers.
Also this month, lawmakers in states including Oklahoma proposed profit caps targeting insurance.

No.

Government definitions of “outsized profit margins” have nothing to do with business imperatives or what happens in a free market. Those definitions serve only the personal political ambitions of the politicians doing the defining, and they’ll vary across politicians and their political parties.

Beyond that, all price caps do is limit the availability of the product being capped—whether oil and natural gas and gasoline, rental housing availability and quality…or insurance policies. The limit on supply, too, hurts those on the lower economic rungs of our economy first and hardest.

Requiring insurers to justify their rates and the profit levels at which policy holder refunds are paid is a good idea, but government is the wrong crowd that must be satisfied.

Better simply to require insurers to disclose their profit margins and the basis on which they arrive at their definitions of profit. Their policy rates already are publicly available; making both sides of that process public would let the public more effectively shop for policies that suit their individual needs.

Doing that within an increasingly deregulated (not unregulated) insurance market environment would move the industry closer to a truly competitive market within which insurers would reap fair profits and insurees would pay fair premium amounts for the policies they want. And the Critical Item: “fair” would be defined within that competitive market by those market participants, not by any government.

Trump’s Board of Peace

Posted on by
Reply

President Donald Trump (R) is looking to stand up a Board of Peace that would seek to broker peace deals between belligerents and between soon-to-be belligerents. In many respects, this BoP would supplant the UN, which is famous for its failure to create peace and infamous for its failure to maintain any peace in which its peacekeeping forces are involved.

Some nations, like putative allies France and UK are reluctant to join it. Enemy nations like Russia and the People’s Republic of China also are reluctant to join.

UK and France…worried about joining an organization subject to Trump’s whims that could give equal status to authoritarians such as Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A Board of Peace, whether or not led by Trump, may or may not be a good idea, but the plaint that the BoP would give folks like Putin an equal status is just silly. He, and the PRC’s President Xi Jinping, already have equal status in the UN via their positions as permanent members of the Security Council and their veto authority in that body.