Tag Archives: defense policy

The Veterans Administration Revisited

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To repeat: the VA needs to be disbanded, its employees returned to the private sector, and its budget distributed to our veterans as vouchers with which they can get the care they need from the doctors and facilities they choose.

The latest example of the VA’s fatal dysfunctionality is a hospital in Aurora, CO—rather, a hospital shell, since the VA has been mismanaging this project to the tune of claiming to “need” $1 billion (yes, that’s with a “b”) to finish—finish, mind you—building this building.

Those billion dollars are three times the original construction cost estimate in 2005, just nine short years ago. Accounting for inflation, that original estimate of $328 million would be a bit over $400 million today. Assuming it really would have needed all nine years to build the thing. Apparently, though, including VA incompetence, 18 years will be needed; the “hospital” is only half done. And just to saucer and blow it: the VA “is in arrears” with the payments it owes its current contractor.

Hoover Dam was built in five years (yes, yes, the dam wasn’t hindered by other government claptrap that also is in the VA’s way, but still…).

VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson has conceded VA fault, and he’s actually apologized (to his credit, it wasn’t one of those 21st century pap statements being masqueraded as an apology).

I apologize to veterans here in Colorado. I apologize to the taxpayers. We have let you down[.]

Sorry, though. It’s a fine apology (I’ll assume sincerity), but words don’t get the hospital built. Words don’t recover those hundreds of millions of lost dollars. Coming as they do in the midst of ongoing VA failure, words of apology are entirely worthless.

Get rid of the VA.

Hostility

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In an article more centered on relations between Ukraine and Russia and Ukraine’s ending of its “nonaligned” status, Nick Shchetko and Alan Cullison had this remark in noting that Ukraine’s move

drawing a quick rebuke from Moscow, which has accused the West of bringing hostile forces to its borders.

No. Moscow is…not describing accurately…the situation. The only hostile forces on Russia’s borders are Russia’s own, looking out, and Russia’s own on the outside of Russian borders, looking further out.

If Russia doesn’t want hostile forces on its borders, all it has to do is stop behaving hostilely. Full stop.

The PRC’s Misunderstanding

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After too much hemming and hawing, the US finally got around to approving the sale of four, used, Oliver Hazard Perry class guided-missile frigates to the Republic of China. Even used, these combat ships represent a considerable boost to Chinese national security.

Naturally, the People’s Republic of China is…up in arms. The PRC’s Foreign Affairs Minister of objected, asserting that helping arm RoC

blatantly interferes in China’s domestic affairs and undermines China’s sovereignty and security interests[.]

Of course, the sale does no such thing. In fact, it enhances RoC Chinese sovereignty and security interests. It plainly doesn’t represent a threat, or any impediment, to the PRC’s national security, except in the fevered imaginations of PRC President Xi Jinping his Foreign Affairs Minister.

Unless the PRC has designs on the RoC.

Trust and the PRC

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Having finally, and successfully, crushed a pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China has declared null and void its treaty with Great Britain, the Joint Declaration that turned Hong Kong over to PRC control.

China’s deputy ambassador to Britain, Ni Jian, told the committee’s chairman, Richard Ottaway, that the Joint Declaration “is now void and only covered the period from the signing in 1984 until the handover in 1997.”

Never mind that the treaty the PRC signed was agreed by the PRC to run for 50 years from 1997, the year of the turnover.

This follows the PRC’s naked aggression in the South and East China Seas, as it looks to occupy those seas under falsified legal pretenses.

This government cannot be trusted. We—and the Brits—must govern our interaction with it accordingly; we can never know when the PRC will decide that another of its agreements with one of us has become inconvenient to it and so will welch on it.

US Defense, Foreign Policies

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Russia, China, Iran, and Islamists are waging unconventional warfare around the world, and the United States currently lacks a clear strategy to counter the threat, according to a recent report by the Army Special Operations Command.

“This challenge is hybrid warfare combining conventional, irregular, and asymmetric means, to include the persistent manipulation of political and ideological conflict,” states the Army white paper, Counter-Unconventional Warfare.

Foreshadowed by Iranian actions throughout the Middle East, and by Chinese “unrestricted warfare” strategists in the 1990s, hybrid warfare has now reached its most brazen form in Russia’s support for separatist insurgents in Ukraine.

[“Non-kinetic”] tools…include covert and clandestine special operations commando activities combined with political, intelligence, diplomatic, and financial warfare methods to counter the activities of states like Russia, China and Iran, and insurgent activities by terrorist groups such as the Islamic State.

And

US government “lacks a cohesive [information warfare] strategy to counter adversary [unconventional warfare] campaigns conducted by state and non-state actors….”

Russian examples include

using special operations forces, intelligence agents, political provocateurs, and news media reporters, as well as transnational criminal elements in eastern and southern Ukraine.

“Funded by the Kremlin and operating with differing degrees of deniability or even acknowledgement, the Russian government uses ‘little green men’ for classic [unconventional warfare] objectives,” [according to the white paper].

Examples of the People’s Republic of China’s…techniques…include

unconventional warfare [based on the book,] Unrestricted Warfare…calls for using all means to defeat enemies, including cyber attacks, ecological warfare, financial warfare, and terrorism.

“China will use a host of methods, many of which lie out of the realm of conventional warfare,” [according to the white paper]. “These methods include trade warfare, financial warfare, ecological warfare, psychological warfare, smuggling warfare, media warfare, drug warfare, network warfare, technological warfare, fabrication warfare, resources warfare, economic aid warfare, cultural warfare, and international law warfare.”

Examples include China’s threat several years ago to sell off large US debt holdings to protest US arms sales to Taiwan, and cutting off sales of rare earth minerals to Japan in a dispute over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea.

Chinese news outlets also are used in media warfare….

Iran’s techniques are more limited in scope, but no less deadly:

“…Iran provides ‘material support to terrorist or militant groups such as HAMAS, Lebanese Hezbollah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Taliban, and Iraqi Shia groups,’ [according to the white paper]. “Hezbollah is the primary terrorists’ proxy for Iran working together with a campaign of terror against Israel, the United States, and other western nations.”

It’s entirely possible that an administration more interested in American global interests would have missed this, also. It’s virtually certain, though, that this administration, bent as it is on American withdrawal from the world, wouldn’t have cared even had it recognized any of this.

The Free Beacon‘s article is well worth reading in its entirety, and so is the USA SpecOps’ white paper on the matter.