Tag Archives: defense policy

Proportional Responses

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Last week, Iran-backed terrorist organizations in Iraq fired rockets into an Iraqi military base that housed, among others, American and British soldiers, killing two American soldiers and one British soldier, a medic.

In response, we struck some of those terrorists’ operating locations.

The US strikes targeted five separate weapons storage facilities in Iraq associated with Kataib Hezbollah, a Shiite militia group operating in Iraq that US officials said has frequently targeted bases where American service members are based.
The strikes aimed to degrade the group’s ability to conduct future attacks against US and coalition forces….

And this:

The strikes were “defensive and proportional,” the Pentagon said….

On this, “the Pentagon” is dead wrong.

Tit-for-tat is not proportional; it just facilitates action-reaction cycles with mounting damage, casualties, collateral casualties, and collateral damage. This is demonstrated by a subsequent terrorist rocket attack on the same base Saturday, this one wounding three of our soldiers and two Iraqi soldiers.

A proportional response isn’t a tit-for-tat one, it doesn’t aim to degrade anything. It is an overwhelming one that destroys our enemy’s ability to act further in hostility. That is what stops the action-reaction cycle and holds down the totality of damage and casualties.

Proportionality must be considered against the overall, long-term situation, not against any single event.

Some Coronavirus Perspective

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To put some perspective on national coronavirus infection levels, I’ve picked out some nations that have been in the news lately.  Coronavirus cases are drawn from Johns Hopkins University as of 14 March, and the population data are from Wikipedia. The per capita normalization is from third grade arithmetic.

I’ve emphasized one nation of particular interest.

Population Coronavirus Cases Per Capita Cases (per 10,000) Deaths Per Cent Deaths per Case
People’s Republic of China 1,427,647,786 80,976 0.56720 3,189 3.93820%
Germany 83,149,300 3,758 0.45196 8 0.21288%
US  328,239,523 2,175 0.06626 47 2.16092%
Japan 126,150,000 725 0.05747 21 2.89655%
Republic of Korea 51,709,098 8,086 1.56375 72 0.89043%
Italy 60,317,546 17,660 2.92784 1,266 7.16874%
Republic of China 23,780,452 53 0.02229 1 1.88679%
Iran 83,183,741 12,729 1.53023 611 4.80006%

Close

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…but no cigar.  Senator Mike Lee (R, UT) has some thoughts on fixing the  Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and its secret FISA Court.  He’s on the right track, but his ideas fall short.

Lee wants to fix the FISA Court and tighten the parameters under which it operates. This Star Chamber cannot be fixed; it must be disbanded and the sections creating and empowering it must be rescinded from the FISA altogether.

There remains a need to guard against and to respond to espionage and interference efforts, and there remains a need for that response to involve investigations of American citizens who might be involved in those foreign assaults.  There remains a need to keep many of our responses and investigations secret—for a time—so as not to tip off the targets of our investigations, whether they’re foreign or American.

Counterbalancing that is the even more crucial need to protect Americans’ individual liberties, including those being investigated.  Especially the latter need protection; they’ve not been shown to have done anything wrong, but public suspicions would ruin the reputations of those actually innocent.

Our present Article III courts already are well-versed in handling secret warrants where necessary for domestic criminal investigations and for sealing records until it’s useful to release them or after sufficient time has passed that their release will not harm an ongoing investigation.  FISA warrants can be handled here.

Many of Lee’s other ideas, with some adjustments, will work just fine in a sealed Article III court.

He wants to expand the role of an amicus in FISA warrant applications beyond warrants involving a novel or significant interpretation of law.

amicus should advocate for the privacy and civil liberties of the person targeted.

The role needs to be expanded further. This new amicus should overtly act as Devil’s advocate and seek to expose weaknesses in the warrant application with a view to getting the application denied. The target legitimately cannot be present, yet in most domestic criminal cases, the target has opportunities to contest the warrant, even if only after the fact.  Such a contest needs to be present with FISA warrants, as well.

Lee wants relevant agencies to be required to provide all information in their possession as part of the application, including any exculpatory evidence. The FBI Director and the Attorney General should be required to certify that this has been done, and there needs to be heavy sanctions applied to the agents, the Director and the AG if this requirement has been found, after the warrant’s submittal, to have gone unsatisfied. It’s almost never enough merely to punish the workers directly responsible; too often they acted improperly because they were actively allowed to or because they were permitted to by too lax supervision.

It’s critical that we take these kinds of measures in response to the failures of and abuses from the present FISA setup so that this sort of violation of United States citizens never happen again.

Maybe It’s Time

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The just-concluded Munich Security Conference has illustrated the growing disconnect between the US and central and western Europe regarding European security.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier opened the conference—one of the largest annual gatherings of political leaders, military chiefs and top diplomats from around the world—by accusing the Trump administration of “rejecting the idea of the international community.”
“Every country should fend for itself and put its own interests over all others … ‘Great again’—even at the expense of neighbors and partners,” Steinmeier said….

That’s a cynical distortion of our position, coming as it does on the strenuous efforts the Trump administration has made to get these nations to increase their commitment to NATO, and coming as it does on the heels of Germany’s naked duplicity in promising—on its own initiative, mind you—to increase its spending on NATO to 2% of its GDP, and then welching on that commitment.

And this:

French President Emmanuel Macron, speaking at the forum for the first time, echoed Steinmeier the next day, noting that “what Europe wants is not quite the same as the US.”

That’s certainly true, with France—and Germany—toadying up to Russia as enthusiastically as they are. But Macron, at bottom, is as duplicitous as Steinmeier. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, all NATO members, and Ukraine, are much more closely aligned with the US on matters of their (and our) national security. Macron, for all his ego, does not speak for “what Europe wants,” only for what Germany and France want. To claim they are Europe is not hubris, it’s just dishonest.

Maybe it’s time to move decisively toward a mutual defense treaty among the US, the eastern European nations fronting Russia, and the UK, and let central and western Europe do what they’re so evidently desperate to do: to go their own way.

After all, at least the former, in evident contrast with the latter, care about their security.

Telecommunications and Backdoors

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It turns out that Huawei has been able to use legislatively mandated backdoors into telecommunications software—backdoors ostensibly for the sole benefit of law enforcement, and then only usable within judicially allowed limits, search warrants duly sworn, in the US, for instance—for years.

But we would never do that, says Huawei in its wide-eyed innocence.

“The use of the lawful interception interface is strictly regulated and can only be accessed by certified personnel of the network operators. No Huawei employee is allowed to access the network without an explicit approval from the network operator,” the [senior Huawei] official said.

The existence of the interface is the access pathway. The bar to its use is wholly a matter of the integrity of the humans involved. This is not a hard concept to understand; Huawei’s management is being disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

Further, PRC law requires PRC companies to cooperate with the government on the government’s demand.

Huawei “has never and will never do anything that would compromise or endanger the security of networks and data of its clients,” the company said.

Huawei’s CEO Ren has also made that preposterous claim. He and his management team insult our intelligence, assuming as they do that we would believe that Huawei would actually defy the PRC government.