Tag Archives: defense policy

Of What are they Afraid?

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The People’s Republic of China has been vociferously objecting to the US deploying a missile defense system—THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense)—in the Republic of Korea, with the RoK’s blessing and at their behest.  The PRC has begun taking economic retaliatory actions against the RoK and threatening the Koreans and us with further, more serious action if we don’t desist.

So my question.

Ankit Panda, writing for The Diplomat, offered some thoughts last week, one of which centers on the PRC’s concern that the THAAD deployment, relying as it does on a particular radar system—two of which already are deployed in Japan—would let the US degrade a PRC second nuclear strike against the US.  To be clear: a second strike is an ability of one nation to respond to another nation’s (first) nuclear strike with a nuclear strike of its own, the second strike of an exchange.

Since it doesn’t matter that THAAD is incapable of intercepting the PRC’s ICBMs en route to the US, and the US has no offensive interest in the PRC (and not to put too fine a point on it, neither do the RoK or Japan, and neither of them have a nuclear capability even were they offensive minded), I have to wonder why the PRC objects so harshly to a nation having the capability to defend itself against a rogue nation, gang-run, that’s bent on developing nuclear missiles of intermediate and intercontinental range.  Especially when that same rogue nation constantly threatens Armageddon against the RoK.

Especially when that rogue nation is a client of the PRC.

As Panda put it,

To avoid the need for a massive nuclear build-up and to feel comfortable with its several hundred or so nuclear warheads for targeting, China needs to feel comfortable enough its intercontinental ballistic missiles can reliably penetrate US antiballistic missile countermeasures.

Just what are the Warring State PRC’s plans vis-à-vis the US?

What are the Warring State’s plans, via its madchild-run client, vis-à-vis the RoK?

Europe Going Nuclear?

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That’s what The New York Times says the European Union is talking about.

…a European Union nuclear weapons program.

Under such a plan, France’s arsenal would be repurposed to protect the rest of Europe and would be put under a common European command, funding plan, defense doctrine, or some combination of the three. It would be enacted only if the Continent could no longer count on American protection.

Leaving aside the cynically manufactured hysteria underlying this idea, there are a couple of flaws in it.  One is that it assumes that France remains a part of the EU.  A Marine Le Pen victory in this spring’s French presidential election cycle would toss the whole idea into the circular file.  Another is that the French, extremely individualistic when it comes to military action and their military, would agree to such a thing.  Another is that bit about American protection.  The idea that we’d withdraw it is someone’s straw man; we’ve only argued that it’s time for our treaty partners to pay the shares they committed to paying when they signed up to NATO.

And: would Germany trust France—could Germany trust France—to risk French existence defending an attacked Germany, or would Germany begin to acquire its own nuclear arsenal?  After all, this scheme depends on German financing for the French—to show solidarity, of course—and the money might be thought better spent on acquiring a German nuclear arsenal they could more directly and completely control.  On the other hand, could the Germans, with their guilt complex, trust themselves with nuclear weapons?

Of course, there’s an upside, too.  The notoriously unreliable French military participation in NATO would be ameliorated by getting those nuclear weapons more reliably included in the NATO (not EU) arsenal, fulfilling some of the requirement that NATO signatories actually live up to the they obligations incurred with their signatures.

Defense

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The People’s Republic of China objects to the US’ planned deployment of a missile defense system in the Republic of Korea to defend the RoK and Japan against northern Korean attack.  The PRC has already engaged in low-grade economic warfare, barring certain trade arrangements from going forward.  Now, however, the PRC is making threats against us and the RoK if we go through with the deployment.  Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang:

China firmly opposes the deployment of THAAD.  We will definitely be taking necessary measures to safeguard our own security interest.  All consequences entailed from that will be borne by the US and (South Korea).

Lou Yuan, a retired PLA general, was more explicit.  The PLA, he said,

could conduct a surgical hard-kill operation that would destroy the target, paralyzing it, and making it unable to hit back[.]

When one nation objects to another nation having an ability to defend itself, it’s necessary to ask after the motivations of the one—what does that nation have planned for the to-be-defenseless one, either directly or through a client?

Don’t Offend Russia?

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Heaven forfend.  Or at least that was Michael O’Hanlon’s (Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution) concern when he proposed An Alternative to NATO Expansion That Won’t Antagonize Russia.  Never mind that what’s in American national interest is what matters, not that subset of it that won’t upset an enemy of ours.

[T]hese two countries [Ukraine and NATO], as well as other Eastern European neutral states, get no protection from NATO.

I’ll leave aside the value of NATO protection as that organization is currently constituted, funded, and armed; that’s a separate discussion.  No, the nub of O’Hanlon’s misunderstanding is this:

They are also too close to Russia for NATO to protect them, absent the deployment of a large and permanent forward defense.

He wrote that as though he thought forward deployment would be a bad thing.  In some respects it would be, but not for the reason he thinks.  Forward deployment of lots of heavy units would be foolish; such units would simply be targets in the event of a Russian decision to invade (aside from the fact that, with modern weapons and Russia’s forward deployment of nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad and its deployment of nuclear cruise missiles in western Russia, such units would be targets anywhere they’re stationed).  On the other hand, forward deployment of smaller, but still combat capable, units would send a very clear message that any Russian invasion would be an invasion of much more than just the nominally target nation.

On top of that, they most assuredly are not “too close to Russia.”  They merely abut Russia.  Russia is too close to eastern European nations by O’Hanlon’s logic.  Then he suggested this in all seriousness:

It is time that Western nations seek to negotiate a new security architecture for neutral countries in Eastern Europe today. The core concept would be permanent neutrality, at least in terms of formal membership in treaty-based mutual-defense organizations. The countries in question collectively make a broken-up arc from Europe’s far north to its south—Finland and Sweden; Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus; Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan; Cyprus plus Serbia, and possibly other Balkan states. …

The new security architecture would require that Russia, like NATO, commit to uphold the security of Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and other states in the region. Russia would have to withdraw its troops from those countries in a verifiable manner

It is, indeed, time for a new security architecture, but O’Hanlon’s idea is little different from unspoken surrender born of false premises.  Permanent neutrality?  Russia won’t allow it; it never has.  Russia commit to uphold another nation’s security?  It’s already partitioned Georgia and occupied parts of it, and it’s dividing up Moldava, working as it is to carve off Transnistria.  It’s partitioned and occupied parts of Ukraine, explicitly crapping on the Budapest Memorandum in the process.

O’Hanlon can’t be that ignorant.

This isn’t naïveté.  This is idiocy.  I repeat: what’s in American national interest is what matters, not that subset of it that won’t upset an enemy of ours.  The same holds for Europe, as well, most especially those nations of eastern Europe, under the Russian gun as they so plainly are.

Part of the Problem with Claims of NATO Obsolescence

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…is the Left’s and Europe’s lack of understanding of the meaning and the import of obsolescence.  This is illustrated by a piece in World Politics Review.

The failure to understand is illustrated with this claim:

[A]lthough Russia’s resurgence as a revanchist and norms-breaking power has conveniently thrust NATO back into the thick of European and American security concerns, Europe actually faces no threats for which the alliance is the most effective instrument. In fact, Europe faces no military territorial threats at all.

Never mind that Russia militarily partitioned and is occupying significant fractions of Georgia and Ukraine, has moved nuclear weapons into its enclave in Kaliningrad, as mounted cyber attacks on each of the Baltic States and its subsequent redeployments of military units closer to the borders with Poland and those same Baltics.

The failure is further illustrated with this:

…Russia’s resurgence, and Moscow’s clear willingness to use military force to further its political objectives, do not represent an existential threat to Europe….

How illogical is that?  How head-in-the-sand?  If Moscow is willing to use military force to further its political objectives, on what planet is that not an existential threat to the nations of Europe?

Then there’s this:

[L]ike his attacks against China for currency manipulation, Trump’s criticisms of the disproportionate cost borne by the US for European defense are slightly outdated. Although the trend has been reversed since the Ukraine crisis, the past decade actually saw a steady drawdown of American forces stationed in Europe under the George W Bush and Obama administrations, which left the US military presence on the continent at historic lows.

This is just disingenuous.  We still bear a disproportionate cost for the defense of Europe: we still spend more than the 2% of our GDP on defense that the NATO treaty requires every treaty member to commit to defense.  Most of the NATO nations—notably including rich and prosperous Germany—still commit less than the 2% they promised to commit when they joined NATO.

Even this bit is disingenuous:

The metric Trump uses to measure proportionate contributions to the NATO—total defense expenditures, which puts the U.S. at roughly 75 percent of alliance spending—is also misleading, since the vast majority of America’s defense budget is not devoted to European defense. If you look at contributions to the alliance’s permanent budget, for instance, the U.S. pays 22 percent, compared to 14 percent for Germany and 12 percent for France. But Germany’s GDP is roughly one-fifth of America’s, and its population is one-fourth; France’s GDP is roughly one-seventh of America’s, and its population is one-fifth.

The US has permanent global commitments, and NATO does not.  NATO has traveled all the way to the Balkans and made trips as far as Afghanistan, but these are temporary sojourns, and so the relative costs for Europe are quite trivial and irrelevant to the question of proportionate contributions to European defense.

Beyond that, there’s very little in the piece that addresses the question of NATO obsolescence.  Beyond this bit of vapidity, that is:

NATO is no longer as necessary as it once was. But there are many reasons why both sides of the Atlantic should want to maintain it.

NATO is obsolete because it’s designed to resist a Soviet-style massive ground and air invasion backed by the threat of nuclear weapons employment.  It’s not at all prepared to resist, much less defeat, today’s threat: terrorist attack, whether isolated incidents or well-coordinate, broad spectrum attacks; military attacks in small bites, like today’s Russia inflicted on Georgia and Ukraine while Europe watched with its collective thumb in its collective mouth; the new combined arms attack represented by military assault accompanied by cyber assault and infiltration by little green men, Russia’s hybrid war; economic threats like withholding Russian sales of oil and natural gas to western Europe.

This isn’t a time to bleat about Europe is too spending comparably with the US or to pretend confusion over President Donald Trump’s remarks vs those of his Vice President and his Cabinet Secretaries; this is a time for NATO’s European nations to get serious about their commitment, and it’s a time to revamp NATO—with those increased monies—to deal with today’s and tomorrow’s threats, not simply to rest on yesterday’s laurels.