Tag Archives: defense policy

“It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath.”*

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From Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars:

In France during the 1920s, teachers’ unions had all but banned patriotic references to French victories (which were regarded as “bellicose” and “a danger for the organization of peace”) and removed books that considered battles such as Verdun as anything other than a tragedy that affected both sides equally.

Sound familiar?

How about this:

Of the Anschluss, Germany’s forced annexation of Austria, Chancellor Franz von Papen later concluded, “not only had there been no armed conflict, but no foreign power had seen fit to intervene.  They adopted the same passive attitude as they had shown toward the reintroduction of conscription in Germany and the reoccupation of the Rhineland.  The result was that Hitler became impervious to the advice of all those who wished him to exercise moderation in his foreign policy.”

 

*Extra points for naming the speaker of the quote.  No search engines, no Wikipedia; although consulting your print libraries is allowed.  Graduates of the Hillsdale collection of schools should know this from memory.

Readiness Capability

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There’s a dismaying graph in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that illustrates the combat readiness of several of NATO nations’ forces.

In essence,

If Europe came into conflict with Russia, only several thousand of the more than one million troops in its armies would be ready for rapid deployment, military planners fear.

Plans to correct this (using the term loosely) don’t come close to the capability regularly exercised during the Cold War, when the US planned for moving 10 divisions into Europe within 10 days.  Current planning goal is to feed dribs and drabs into the furnace.

A US proposal would have the alliance commit to having 30 battalions, 30 fighter squadrons and 30 naval ships ready to deploy. That would translate to roughly 30,000 troops and more than 360 fighter planes.

Sadly, given Europe’s long history of free-loading off US nuclear and soldier commitments, and the EU’s current reluctance even to meet the nations’ 2% of GDP on defense commitment, that’s probably all we can expect out of that continent.

Feeding the furnace: 30 days was all that was necessary in WWII to overrun Poland once the Germans crossed the frontier, and it was all that was needed to knock France out of the war and push the remnants of British forces off the continent once Hitler moved west.  Only 60 days after Barbarossa went in, the Germans were approaching Leningrad, were over halfway to Moscow, and had overrun half of today’s Ukraine.  And that was against an allied contingent that, in retrospect, was better equipped and numerically superior, at least in the West.  The lack of political will then and now is the same, and Putin has shown the willingness to aggress as did Hitler, even if Putin is quite a bit more subtle about it.

And: the 30 days is from the decision to put the forces “on alert.”  Given the amount of warning available today, with the speed of modern communications, transportation, and so on—the ability to deliver tactical surprise—what is the time relationship between going on alert and having actually to launch the forces?  Thirty hours seems more like reality than does 30 days.

The graph, too, is misleading to an extent.  Italy currently can produce 5 combat-ready battalions in 10 days, while three other European nations can produce all of 3 combat-ready battalions apiece—in 30 days.  The rest, none at all in the time frame.  But what does that mean?  What is the actual combat capability of these nations’ units?  Until the term is normalized, the comparisons in the graph have only the coarsest of meanings.

Yemen and Spain

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Is Yemen becoming like 1930s Spain?  Is the civil war in Yemen being used, like Nazi Germany did the Spanish civil war, by Iran as a test bed for doctrine and weapons development?

Iran certainly is trying out techniques for running terrorist clients there, just as it is in Syria and Iraq.  Iran has an active ballistic missile development program, too, and Iranian ballistic missiles have been tried out against Saudi Arabia, including a mini-barrage of seven tested over the weekend.

Which, just incidentally, also is giving the Iranians valuable data on the Saudis’ (read: our) missile defense capabilities and techniques.

The PRC and Intellectual Property Theft

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In the absence of any serious legal protections against intellectual property theft in the People’s Republic of China, businesses operating there are engaging more and more in sweeping conference rooms there for bugs and equipping personnel with sanitary burner phones for use while in the PRC.

That’s a start for those willing to put their proprietary information at risk through a business venture inside the PRC or with a PRC-based business anywhere, but it’s inadequate by itself, as illustrated by this bit of naivete by the linked-to piece’s author:

Mr Trump wants China to unwind policies that require auto makers, cloud service providers and others to share technology with Chinese partners for the right to operate here. …for example, operate in 50-50 joint ventures with Chinese partners.
Those technology transfers, however, are distinct from the outright theft some companies say they face.

The distinction is little different from the distinction between extortion and robbery.  President Donald Trump needs to take concrete action to encourage the PRC to eliminate those policies.

Where national security information would be at risk, CFIUS needs to get more active.

Congress needs to take complementary action: perhaps barring companies from sharing their proprietary information, perhaps requiring companies wanting to do business with PRC-based companies or within the PRC to retain a controlling share of any partnership, perhaps other steps, also.

Probing the Attempted Murder of an Ex-Spy

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Recall that an ex-spy and his daughter were attacked in a British park with a view to killing at least the ex-spy.  The weapon used was a nerve gas that’s only made in Russia.  The investigation itself is pointing strongly at Moscow as the instigator of the murder attempt; although the investigation is not complete.  Now Russia is refusing to cooperate in the investigation unless certain conditions are met.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Moscow would only cooperate with the UK’s investigation into the nerve-agent poisoning of a former spy if London supplied the substance in question and opened up the probe to Russian officials.

Supplying a sample of the nerve agent—which use just incidentally also poisoned roughly 20 other folks associated with the discovery of the two victims, their transport to a hospital, and their treatment, thereby illustrating the indiscriminate nature of the attack—would be entirely reasonable.

That last, though, opening the investigation to the Russians should be unacceptable to the Brits for a couple of reasons.  One is that the Russians are unlikely to cooperate with, much less support, the investigation in any serious way regardless of any sharing by British investigators.

The larger reason, though, is that the opening would only provide Putin with another avenue for spying on Great Britain.