Tag Archives: defense policy

Little Satan and Great Satan

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PLO Secretary General and head of the PLO’s Negotiations Affairs Department, Saeb Erekat is infected with the Wuhan Virus. He had been handling his treatment from his West Bank home, but his condition worsened, so he was transferred to a hospital Sunday.

In Tel Aviv.

Erekat also has one of the several comorbidities associated with particularly severe and potentially lethal Wuhan Virus infections. He had a lung transplant three years ago, and he has a depressed immune system from the drugs necessary to minimize organ rejection.

The lung transplant was performed in the United States.

In the words of Walter Cronkite, “What’s going on here?” How is a PLO mucky-muck running around in two versions of Hell?

What’s up with the PLO hypocrisy?

Defense of the Republic of China

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Paul Wolfowitz had a thought on that last Tuesday. His opening paragraph laid out his thesis.

Beijing has been making a show of hostility toward Taiwan. Last week China released footage of “real combat” it conducted last month in Taiwanese airspace. A Chinese invasion would present the greatest threat to global peace in a generation. The US would confront an agonizing dilemma: risk an armed clash between two nuclear superpowers or abandon a free people to communist tyranny. But there’s an alternative—deter the threat by committing to oppose it, by force if necessary.

I’d be a bit more blunt.

It would be good to remind the PRC of who has vastly more nuclear warheads than the other, who has the better cyberwar capability, and how little the US depends on river dams—or a single dam—for its food supply.

It also would be good to stage our own demonstrations, real rather than virtual, throughout the East and South China Seas and in the Taiwan strait and to increase and accelerate arms sales to the Republic of China.

Joe Biden, however, is the epitome of an Asian nation being of little strategic value, of a commitment to use military force in [RoC] would be ill-advised and impracticable, and whose prevailing mood… [is] not to interfere—after all, the PRC, Biden insists, is not a serious competitor; the nation isn’t a “patch on our jeans.”

Progress

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…on the foreign policy and national security front.

The White House is moving forward with three sales of advanced weaponry to Taiwan, sending in recent days a notification of the deals to Congress for approval, five sources said on Monday, while China threatened retaliation.

The three weapons systems—of seven in the works—have been approved by the State Department and are these:

  • High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS)
  • SLAM-ER, a long-range air-to-ground missile system
  • external sensor pods for F-16 jets that allow the real-time transmission of imagery and data from the aircraft back to ground stations.

These aren’t just feel-good devices, either; they’ll give the Republic of China an ability to strike back hard and meaningfully against People’s Republic of China invasion forces along with recon data concerning approaching/maneuvering PRC forces.

Other weapons systems in the works include these, and their approvals and deliveries need to be moved along apace.

  • large, sophisticated aerial drones
  • land-based Harpoon anti-ship missiles
  • underwater mines to meet amphibious landings and, depending on where deployed, to meet PLA Navy combatants

Still, these sales and deliveries, sound progress that they represent, need to be coupled with more frequent Naval sailings throughout the South and East China Seas and in the immediate vicinity of the RoC, including the Taiwan Strait, and port calls at RoC ports in order to maximize the sales’ potential and concrete effect.

Because, Of Course

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Russian President-for-life-soon-to-be Vladimir Putin says Alexei Navalny secretly works (or works secretly, you pick ’em) with the CIA.

Putin’s Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov:

I can even be specific: these days, specialists from the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America are working with him.

You bet. I understand Putin has a summer dacha outside Bykovskiy he’s interested in selling, too. Nice ocean front property.

Arms Control

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In the current arms control negotiations, the Trump administration proposed

that a future treaty cover all Russia, Chinese, and US warheads and include more-intrusive verification

Russia, through its Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergei Ryabkov, rejected the proposal out of hand.

Since Russia has shown itself not serious about arms control, perhaps we should engage in a new bout of arms control via rapid arms development and buildup. That won’t produce prompt results, but it will result in a new and stricter arms control régime just as surely as the Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative build up did with the Soviet Union.

A modification of a Reagan doctrine: we can afford it; they can’t.