Tag Archives: defense policy

Bring It

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With President Donald Trump’s formal notice to Russia that the US will pull out of the Treaty on Intermediate-range Nuclear Force, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened an arms race.

Our American partners apparently believe that the situation has changed to such an extent that the US should have such weapons.
What answer will they have from our side? It’s simple: we’ll do it too.

In addition to that,

The head of the Russian armed forces warned that if the deal collapses, the targets of subsequent military exchanges would be US missile sites hosted by allies within striking distance of Russia rather than American soil.

Well, of course they will.  That’s what they’ve been threatening for some time with their deployment of tactical nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad, their redeployment of their tactical nuclear forces toward their western border—and their development and testing of the treaty-prohibited IRBMs.

If Putin wants an arms race, let him bring it. The last one these guys had with us didn’t end well for them, and Russia’s economy is in worse shape than was the Soviet Union’s.

What’s So Hard?

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Great Britain is agonizing over how to deal with the People’s Republic of China’s Huawei Technologies Co and the latter’s desire to supply the nation’s 5G mobile network.  On the matter of Huawei’s having supplied the predecessor 4G network, Great Britain thinks it had arrived at “an understanding” with Huawei concerning the latter’s behavior vis-à-vis the installed 4G—which, astonishingly, allowed Huawei to monitor “aspects” of 4G tech.  Britain’s MI6 head, Alex Younger, seems to be the chief agonizer.

5G will by and large be based on Chinese technology, chiefly with Huawei. We need to decide whether we are comfortable with the ownership of these platforms in the case where our allies take quite a definite position…This is not straightforward[.]

Why must Huawei be the supplier of Britain’s 5G network?

And: Huawei is an arm of the People’s Republic of China government—how is this not a straightforward decision?  Why is it so hard to decide whether the nation wants to let the PRC government spy on every aspect of the British government, its defense, its economy, its citizens?

Veterans Administration Fails Again

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Recall the VA’s failure regarding paying our veterans all of the funds they’re due under the GI Bill; those student veterans are being shorted the money they’re owed.  That shortchanging will continue next year due to a “software glitch” that the VA isn’t fixing any time soon.

Now we get the VA’s Undersecretary of Benefits, Paul Lawrence, saying that the agency has no plans to retroactively pay shortchanged GI Bill recipients or to make next year’s VA victims whole.  He didn’t even have the integrity to admit this to the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs subcommittee before which he was testifying—under oath, mind you, as is typical for witnesses before Congressional hearings—until he’d been pressed on the matter by several Congressmen.

After that admission, VA Secretary Robert Wilkie said otherwise:

To clear up any confusion, I want to make clear that each and every post-9/11 GI Bill beneficiary will be made 100 percent whole—retroactively if need be—for their housing benefits for this academic year based on Forever GI Bill rates, not on post-9/11 GI Bill rates[.]

Whom to believe?  Based on what evidence?  It’s true enough that of the two, only one was under oath, and it wasn’t Wilkie, but that doesn’t count for much here.

And this: that software glitch is being blamed on an outmoded computer system that hadn’t/couldn’t be upgraded due to lack of funds.  Molly Jenkins, a spokeswoman for that House VA committee had a different view, though:

It’s laughable that VA is blaming Congress for its IT issues, especially given the fact that Congress just passed the largest VA budget in history[.]

She also emphasized that the VA was allotted $30 million to improve its system.

She then pointed out a few other things: one is that the VA’s problems are “inexcusable, decades-long and well-documented.”

And that that the agency already is six months late with a required progress update.

And

[VA] sounded no alarms in their May 2018 report that there would be any delays at all[.]

It’s hard to tell whether VA management is not trying, is breathtakingly incompetent, or is actively defying Congress—and our veterans, whom the VA was created to support.

In any event, the VA needs to be eliminated and its once and future budgets committed to vouchers for our veterans.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Ukraine and Russia, Again

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The Wall Street Journal had an editorial on this earlier, but they’re selling the Ukraine situation short along with several others.

The [Russian] attack violated a 2003 treaty that designated the Azov Sea as shared territory between Russia and Ukraine.

Sadly, this accepts as fait accompli the existing invasion, partition, and occupation of Ukraine by Russia.

The attack, and that invasion, partition, and occupation, also violated, and violate, the Budapest Memorandum, which the Western signers (the US and UK) appear too timid to enforce—even though we’d be confronting a country whose economy is roughly akin to that of the Black P-Stone Nation, and whose morals are those of MS-13.

Another Betrayal

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Recall Russia’s latest provocation (which amounts to an act of war), consisting of ships of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet ramming a Ukrainian tugboat and firing on and seizing the Ukrainian three-ship flotilla of which that tug was a part along with the “detention” of the crews of the three ships.

Germany—Chancellor Angela Merkel—has magnanimously offered to mediate the matter.

The German chancellor phoned [Russian President] Vladimir Putin on Monday evening to emphasize the “necessity for de-escalation and dialog,” government spokesman Steffen Seibert said in a statement. For his part, the Russian president condemned Ukraine’s “provocative behavior” and said he hoped Berlin could “influence” Ukraine into refraining from such actions in the future.
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The tentative solution hashed out by Merkel and Putin, Seibert reported, was “an analysis of the incident with the participation of Russian and Ukrainian border-security experts.”

The “provocative behavior” was the flotilla’s sailing past Ukraine’s Russian-partitioned and -occupied Crimea oblast on its way from Odesa to Mariupol—or its intent to do so at the time it was attacked and captured.  Russia claims that the flotilla violated Russian territorial waters during the sailing and that the “provocation” was compounded by the presence of Ukrainian intelligence officers aboard the flotilla.

Merkel has meekly cynically accepted that premise, even though she knows it to be false.  It isn’t possible for Ukrainian shipping—military or civilian—to violate Ukraine’s territorial waters.  The only Russian waters in the Black Sea are well east of the Kerch Strait, roughly between Anapa and Sochi; that would be a ludicrous route for this flotilla to have taken.

This amounts to another German betrayal of Ukraine, following as it does Germany’s walk-away from the Budapest Memorandum (which Germany, a non-nuclear nation, avoided signing in the first place), wherein Russia (among others) guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity and national independence if it gave up its nuclear arsenal (which it did), in favor of the Minsk II “accord,” wherein France and Germany (remember this EU axis?) urged Russia and Ukraine to play nice, accepting the fact of Russian occupation, along with pro-Russia rebels, of two of Ukraine’s eastern oblasts and that Russian seizure of Crimea.

Some friend.

Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko has got to be having second thoughts about the benefits of joining the European Union or NATO.  He plainly can’t count on either later with the EU axis (and key NATO members) selling his country out now.  Ukraine would be better off in free-trade zone consisting of eastern European nations, the UK, and the US, and membership in a similarly constituted mutual defense arrangement.  It’s never too late to negotiate such arrangements.