Tag Archives: defense policy

The VA Fails Again

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Now we learn that the Veterans Administration owes our disabled veterans a ton of money for something other than their health: some 53,000 of them have been charged home loan fees that they didn’t have to pay, to the tune of $189 million in aggregate. Those 53,000 are over half of our veterans who were allowed the fee waiver.  VA auditors have discovered that, for 2012 through 2017

[V]eterans were charged the fees under the VA’s Home Loan Guaranty Program and now may be entitled to refunds ranging from $5,000 to $20,000….

That’s bad enough, but mistakes—even egregious ones like this—happen.  What makes this mistake unacceptable is this [emphasis added]:

The watchdog report also said the Veterans Benefits Administration knew since 2014 that tens of thousands of veterans may have been wrongfully charged the funding fee.
“OIG finds it troubling that senior (Veterans Benefits Administration) management was aware that thousands of veterans were potentially owed more than $150 million yet did not take adequate actions to ensure refunds were issued,” the IG report says.

Troubling.  NSS.

And this:

The VBA [Veterans Benefit Administration] noted that the financial impact to the veterans was minimal over the life of the loan, the inspector general report says.

Oh, well, that makes it all right.

No, it doesn’t.  The only thing that makes it all right is the disbandment of the VA altogether and use its budget and putative future budgets as vouchers our veterans

 

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Russia Gets Nervous?

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That’s the thesis of James Marson and Thomas Grove in their recent Wall Street Journal article.  It seems the US and allies have been running a number of training exercises in the Baltic Sea and in eastern Europe, and we’ve agreed to plus up (trivially) the number of soldiers we station in Poland—at Poland’s request.  This is making Russia nervous.

Mikhail Barabanov, of the Moscow-based Center for the Analysis of Systems and Technologies:

Russia sees the exercise as a preparation to deploy large NATO forces across the Baltic region[.]

Given Russian acquisitive aggressions in Georgia and Ukraine, its cyber attacks against each of the Baltic States, and its movement of tactical nuclear weapons close to its western border and into Kaliningrad, among other threatening moves, such a defensive redeployment seems only reasonable.

Now Moscow is complaining that such defensive moves and such training for defense is “destabilizing the region.”

This is nonsense.  It’s also dishonest.  It’s Russia projecting, assuming that because it has nefarious intentions, those preparing against those intentions must have their own.

Of course, if Russia has no aggressive intensions toward other nations, including those on its border, Russia has nothing about which to worry from those other nations—including those on its border.

It’s a Start

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Germany has shown, with its welching on its commitment to spend 2% of its GDP on bolstering NATO, that it has no interest in Europe’s mutual defense.  That, though, does not alter the threat to European security represented by Russia other than to increase it.

I’m reminded of a remark President Abraham Lincoln made about General George McClellan and the army the latter commanded: If McClellan does not want to use the army, I should like to borrow it a while.  Since Germany isn’t interested in Europe’s defense, isn’t even interested in getting up a serious defense establishment of any sort (McClellan was strongly interested in this much), our forces are better placed elsewhere.

Enter Poland, which sits on the front line of the threat and has only just gotten out from under the Russian jackboot.

President Trump signed an agreement to send 1,000 additional US troops to Poland while treating his visiting Polish counterpart to a military flyover at the White House as thanks for a commitment to buy F-35 jet fighters.

Trump also suggested that those soldiers could come from the contingent—52,000 of them—currently based in Germany.  After all, Germany isn’t using them.

This should only be a start, though.  We need to be working toward a NATO-like mutual defense treaty that involves the eastern European nations, Great Britain, and us to work in parallel with, and perhaps eventually to supplant, NATO.

Another Reason

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…to not have these things in our homes.

According to internal documents seen Wednesday by local media, German interior ministers are considering a proposal that would allow data from speech assistants to be legally permissible as evidence for the prosecution of crimes.

“Speech assistants”—is that what the kids are calling these things?  The speech assistants to which those German interior ministers refer are “smart” home devices like Alexa, Siri, smart TVs, presumably Cortana, and on and on—any device we allow in our naivete into our homes—that listen to our every word, every sound we sigh, and records the most current of them.

Those interior ministers say those “digital data saved on devices” are there to be “collected and evaluated by authorities.”  Those data, those interior ministers piously claim, are “‘increasingly important’ for investigating capital crimes and preventing terrorist threats.”

All very high-minded and pure of intent.  There’s no need of any natural limiting principle to constrain this surveillance.  Because no government would ever grow…curious…of the doings inside a private home.  No government would ever get so protective of its own prerequisites that it would look preemptively for untoward, or rude, criticisms.  No government’s bureaucrat would ever eavesdrop on the sounds of pleasure flowing through a home for his own jollies.

No.

This is the People’s Republic of China’s overt, face-by-face surveillance of citizens in the public square brought into the privacy of a home. And, like the PRC’s surveillance, this one would be done solely with speculative intent.

So far, this effort is overt only in Germany, but we need to be vigilant against its spread and to ensure our own government doesn’t try to embrace such an invasion of our castles, our homes—our privacy.

Venezuela is not Grenada

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That, there, is a true fact. The University of Georgia’s Emeritus Professor (of Agricultural and Applied Economics) Glenn Ames used that as an argument for why the US ought not invade Venezuela in his Letter to the Editor of The Wall Street Journal.  After all, he wrote,

Venezuela is a large, complex country politically, not a tiny island in the Caribbean.

Also a true fact.  But then he went astray, here and on a couple of other points.  For one, our military is not the disjointed, uncoordinated collection of disparate forces that went into Grenada; it’s much better integrated, and it has demonstrated that improvement many times since.

The Venezuelan military is indebted to President Nicolás Maduro for their perks and subsidies. They are not going to give them up easily.

This badly overstates the case. The Venezuelan military leadership is indebted to Maduro.  The field-grade officers and especially the junior officers and soldiers have no such “loyalty;” they are not going to fight seriously in support of that “leadership”—which steals from their paychecks as much as they do from the civilian citizens of Venezuela.

Cubans and others are embedded in Venezuela’s security apparatus.

As Cubans were in Grenada, and they folded rapidly in the face even of that confused operation.

That Venezuela is not Grenada also is an irrelevant fact.