Tag Archives: defense policy

A Test

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Recall the false alarm about an inbound ICBM that a functionary of the Hawaii State government apparatus triggered last weekend.  I’m not interested, here, in how the false alarm got triggered in the first place, or why it took so long—38 minutes—to send out a false alarm notice, or why the State apparently chose to not even consider sending out an All Clear notice and figure out the false alarm aspects later.  There’s another question that seems to be getting ignored.

The mistaken alarm presented the citizens of the State and all of the State and local jurisdictions with a live, real-world, 38-minute test of the citizens’ and all of the State and local jurisdictions’ training to date and real-world responses to the situation of an inbound missile.  There was little more than citizen panic for those 38 minutes and little visible response by any jurisdiction within the State to help its citizens get to shelters or even to prepare or open any extant shelters.

At every level of responsibility within Hawaii, the State failed miserably its Operational Readiness Inspection.  What will Hawaii do about that?

Nuclear Weapons Proliferation

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President Donald Trump has moved to fix or withdraw from ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) Executive Agreement with Iran, cosigned by the leaders of a number of European nations, covering Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Folks can argue that this step has taken too long (and the terms of Obama’s EA have not been fixed, yet, nor have we canceled it; the deadline for that is next May), and I’m among the impatient.  However, the delay isn’t all bad (so far), since discussions of the Agreement, both public and behind the scenes (I assume), over the course of this delay have made the problems with it plainly evident, and the other parties to the deal no longer have excuses—they’ve have plenty of time to make their positions plain.

And the European parties are doing so.

European leaders have pushed back against major revisions. That, they fear, could give Tehran an excuse to walk away from the deal entirely, accelerating Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon.

This is naïve.  Accelerated or only moderately accelerated, Iran will get nuclear weapons in the current circumstance.  That would be the true disaster, since Iran has sworn to destroy Israel, and Iran will happily sell (or give) nuclear weapons to its client terrorist network entities for the latter’s use in Europe, the US, and elsewhere around the world.

We Can Help

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And we should.

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen has pledged to step up defense spending to defend the self-ruled island’s sovereignty in the face of China’s growing military assertiveness in the region.

A good start would be to sell missile defense systems to the Republic of China along with modern aircraft—both air defense, like updated F-16s and F-15s, and ground attack, like F-16s and A-10s.

We also should resume sea and air patrols of the Taiwan Strait, something we’ve not done for far too long.

A Caliphate Has Collapsed?

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That’s what Renée Rigdon, Tristan Wyatt, and Karen Leigh would have us believe in their recent Wall Street Journal piece.

It’s true enough that the Daesh—that JV team of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) estimation—ran through the Iraqi “army” a few years ago, exploded through Syrian territory, and wound up controlling a significant fraction of Iraqi and Syrian land.  Their physical expansion was stopped in the immediacy of the situation only by Iraqi Kurds and the confused and fractious condition of Syria.  It’s also true that under President Donald Trump, a US-refurbished Iraqi army allied with those Kurds and local militias, with the support of an unleashed US-led coalition of air forces, recaptured nearly all of Iraqi territory in very short order while that same coalition of air forces supported a US-led coalition of rebels (albeit of at best dubious provenance) have disinfected most of Daesh-held Syria.

However, it’s naïve to suggest that the Daesh’s “caliphate” has crumbled, as the article’s title claims.  The Daesh, like its forerunner al Qaeda, is a polity that is first and foremost a network entity.  It has physical nodes existing parasitically in a broad swath of nation-states, ranging from western People’s Republic of China through northern Africa.  It has cells throughout Europe and in the United States.  These nodes and cells are connected via the Internet and the world’s cell phone network.

All that’s happened with the physical rollup of the Daesh in Iraq and Syria is that this terrorist polity has been freed from the shackles of geography.  Now our battle must shift to the virtual world; it’s far too soon to cry Victory.

Heads up.  Be very heads up.

That’s the Point

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Six months after it went into force, China’s tough new cybersecurity law is still troubling US technology executives who fear that it will put the intellectual property of their companies and the data they collect in jeopardy.

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…while the law went into effect June 1, the Chinese government is still drafting specific implementation rules.

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Company and trade-group representatives are also concerned that the network-equipment security reviews could expose proprietary source code, jeopardizing their trade secrets[.]

The People’s Republic of China wants other nations’ intellectual and technology property, and it’s willing to steal it in any way it can.  Especially targeted are businesses the PRC considers “critical information infrastructure:” computer-network operations in telecommunications, energy, transportation, information services, and finance.

Notice that.  These technologies also are critical to the other nations’ security. But that’s why the PRC demands the accesses and is so…hazy…about its rules facilitating getting those accesses.

One more reason to restrict the amount and nature of any business dealings with the mainland.