Tag Archives: defense policy

John Kerry, Secret Agent?

Posted on by
Reply

Perhaps for the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps?

If what Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif said, in what he thought was a secret interview intended for posterity’s sake and to be held by an Iranian Presidency think tank, is true, maybe.

Buried in a leak of three hours’ worth of a seven hour interview was this bit:

Former Secretary of State John Kerry informed him that Israel had attacked Iranian interests in Syria at least 200 times, to his astonishment, Mr Zarif said.

I sure hope Zarif is dissembling again. But he’s talking, he thinks, in secret, and none of what he said in the leak is particularly self-aggrandizing, so his motive for lying is unclear at best.

Of course, it also could be the case that Kerry isn’t a foreign agent. It’s at least as likely that it was Kerry’s self-absorbed superiority complex that led him to betray Israel and our nation. Zarif’s astonishment would certainly be a nearly addictive ego stroke for a man like Kerry.

“In two-war scenario, could US forces prevail against powerful enemies?”

Posted on by
1

That’s a question Just the News‘ Susan Katz Keating asked in her recent article.

One of the “Pentagon war-planners” she interviewed had this to say about our military’s considerations of that sort of question.

We hold modeling scenarios about this on a regular basis. We work out the likelihood of what would happen in a multi-front war. In the scenarios, we do well.

Frankly, I’d have to see the scenarios before I could think this believable.

I wonder if any of their scenarios include cyber attacks on our national energy and water infrastructure and our financial centers, coupled with EMP strikes against our fleet afloat and against our land force command units and bases, coupled with attacks against our orbiting GPS and com assets, coupled with “kinetic” attacks on those sea and land—and air—forces and against our homeland.

I’d then like to see them run a scenario where we’re attacked in that broad spectrum way by two geographically separated enemies at least roughly simultaneously.

I note with dismay the emphasis (elsewhere in the article) on “major conflict” with little apparent consideration of “total war.” The war gamers also seem to limit their perception of our enemies’ goals to their desiring victory in limited war—a badly outmoded concept. Are they considering that our enemies don’t think like we do, have different value sets than we do?

The gamers simply seem oblivious to the likelihood that our enemies have different views of what constitutes victory than we do, that their war goals aren’t merely to force us to give them something, but rather to conquer us and occupy us. Or to destroy us altogether as a society, much less a polity; not considering that we have anything of value to give them but our deaths.

Regarding Russia and the People’s Republic of China in particular, another of Keating’s interviewees had this:

The two prospective opponents “conveniently pose very different military problems, allowing the United States to allocate some of its assets to one, and the rest to the other,” Farley wrote in an essay exploring whether the US could survive concurrent wars.

A conveniently posed scenario, with convenient assumptions built in.

All of that comes against the backdrop of our last several administrations eroding—deliberately or through disinterest or plain incompetence—our military capability:

The US previously approached multi-war scenarios with a doctrine to “defeat; defeat; deny” up to three enemies. Under that approach, US forces would defeat two opponents and block a third. Now, according to the Pentagon war-planner source, the aim is to “defeat; deny.”

What was that about one is none, two is one, three is backup? Now we’re down to one and a hope.

A Long-Standing Error

Posted on by
Reply

President Joe Biden (D) seems to have identified a long-standing error regarding our nation’s response to espionage.

President Biden’s decision…to punish Russia for the SolarWinds hack broke with years of US foreign policy that has tolerated cyber espionage as an acceptable form of 21st century spycraft[.]

Espionage is espionage, spycraft is spycraft; the tools used are irrelevant to these simple facts.

Congressman Jim Langevin (D, RI) is continuing the misapprehension, though.

The SolarWinds incident that the administration today attributed to the SVR has had all the trappings of traditional espionage that, while unfortunate, has not historically been outside the bounds of responsible state behavior…. Mr Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken should “explain the contours of their new policy,” Mr Langevin said.

Not so much. While the SVR’s activity was, perhaps, not outside the bounds, neither was Biden’s response on this occasion a “new policy” so much as it may be the beginning of a correction of an erroneous policy. Most nations jail domestic spies and expel foreign spies (often jailing them domestically before expelling them at the ends of their sentences).

Biden is on track to getting this one right, for all that he needs to do more.

A Couple Errors about to be Reversed?

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s one, maybe.

President [Joe, D] Biden on Tuesday announced that all adults will be eligible to get a COVID-19 vaccination by April 19, which is even earlier than the May 1st date that he announced last month.

That pretty tightly coincides with the predicted achievement date the prior administration made months ago and that until very recently Biden and his Progressive-Democrats had derisively pooh-poohed.

Here’s another.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told department employees he may restart border wall construction to plug what he called “gaps” in the current barrier.

OK, that’s only a partial correction that may be in the offing, but still….

Hmm….

The PRC, American Business, and Decoupling

Posted on by
1

Matt Pottinger, former President Donald Trump’s Deputy White House National Security Adviser, had a number of thoughts concerning the People’s Republic of China, and its targeting of American businesses, with unusual bluntness.

Beijing’s message is unmistakable: you must choose. If you want to do business in China, it must be at the expense of American values. You will meticulously ignore the genocide of ethnic and religious minorities inside China’s borders; you must disregard that Beijing has reneged on its major promises—including the international treaty guaranteeing a “high degree of autonomy” for Hong Kong; and you must stop engaging with security-minded officials in your own capital unless it’s to lobby them on Beijing’s behalf.
Another notable element of Beijing’s approach is its explicit goal of making the world permanently dependent on China, and exploiting that dependency for political ends.

RTWT.

What also drew my eye is this, near the end of his op-ed, in response to a PRC strawman that the US was working on decoupling our economy from the PRC’s.

No one in Washington is seriously threatening a wholesale decoupling of the two economies.

That’s sadly true, regardless of the fact that Pottinger, with that sentence, was setting aside the PRC’s nonsensical claim. Pottinger did suggest that we are decoupling in key technologies, but I think that’s inadequate.

Washington—and private enterprise—should be moving apace to decouple from the People’s Republic of China. Not just in “key technologies,” too, but all across our economy, from strategic minerals, through those key technologies, to ordinary consumer products, components, and raw materials.

It’s a wide world, and we have no need to trade with our enemies, much less one who’s clearly stated goal is to conquer us and that wide world.