Tag Archives: defense policy

This is a Secretary of Defense?

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Toward the end of his SecDef nomination hearing in the Senate at the end of last week, Chuck Hagel offered this assurance [emphasis added]:

A number of questions were asked of me today about specific programs: submarine programs, different areas of technology and acquisitions, and our superior technology.  And I’ve said, I don’t know enough about it. I don’t.  There are a lot of things I don’t know about. If confirmed, I intend to know a lot more than I do.  I will have to.

Huh?  On what is he waiting?  Why doesn’t he know more now?  He’s known for months that he’s up for this job.  He’s been a critic of DoD for his political career.

As to his last sentence, well, NSS.

Technology Transfer

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Is this the administration’s new paradigm?  Barnini Chakraborty, writing for Fox News, reports

More than a decade of advanced American technology could be handed over to one of the country’s top economic rivals unless the government intervenes to stop the sale, lawmakers say.

The concerns surround the sale of A123 Systems—a firm backed for years by U.S. taxpayers—to a company run by a Chinese multi-millionaire with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

Chakraborty understates the case, though.  More than mere economic rivals, the People’s Republic of China are our political and military foes, also, as events in the South China Sea demonstrate, as the PRC’s active blocking of meaningful steps to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons and to prevent northern Korea from spreading their nuclear weapon technology demonstrate, as the angry words and covert threats of the PRC leadership against the US whenever we protest their misbehavior demonstrate.

This particular technology transfer

would essentially transfer sensitive battery technology with “key military applications….”

And

…the technology behind [A123 Systems’] ultra-light lithium-ion phosphate batteries being bought will play a major role in modernizing the way electricity is generated and distributed. The new tech could also be used in key military operations and to power satellites and unmanned military drones.

This is one example, and it hasn’t yet played out.  The transfer may still be blocked, at least officially and legally.

There are other examples wherein this administration has acted positively to prevent such transfers to the PRC.  It’s entirely possible that this isn’t a new paradigm (although it’s hard to understand why the question still is an open one and the transfer not already blocked), but merely an example, alongside those others, that shows this administration…has no clue of what it’s doing with American technology.

A PRC Takeover

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Examiner.com has the tale.

Taiwan’s most popular and independent media organization, Next Media, is about to be sold to China-based tycoon Tsai Eng-Meng, in a deal which would give him and his company (Want Want China Times Group) control of 50% of Taiwan’s entire print news industry.

This would be an ordinary monopolist action by a Republic of China citizen, whose outcome would be subject to RoC law.

However.

The $600 million takeover is not so much a business deal as it is a proxy invasion of Taiwan’s independent press by the Chinese Communist Party.  Eng-Meng, who is Taiwanese himself and holds large financial stakes in China, has been a vocal supporter of unification between communist China and democratic Taiwan.  He is also an ally of Beijing’s communist government.

Objections are flowing, and they center on

the fact that Eng-Meng already has a record of using his existing media empire to promote pro-Beijing bias and censorship in [the RoC].

And

The free people of [the RoC] may be about to lose control over their own press to the Chinese Communist Party, without a shot even being fired.

If that sounds apocryphal, consider that the PRC has had a primary goal of conquering the island nation ever since the Communists won their civil war and the losing side escaped to Taiwan.  This is another step in reaching that goal.

Some Thoughts on Negotiating with Terrorists

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Rick Richman, writing in Commentary Magazine, has some.  He outlines some of the outcomes of such…negotiations:

  1. the barbaric terror war against Israeli civilians, commenced after the first Israeli offer of a state;
  2. the Palestinian rejection of the Clinton Parameters, after Israel formally accepted them;
  3. the Palestinian failure to carry out even Phase I of the three-phase Roadmap;
  4. the transformation of Gaza into Hamastan after Israel withdrew every settler and soldier
  5. the election of Hamas in 2006 and the Hamas coup in 2007;
  6. two rocket wars from Judenrein Gaza, and the continuing prospect of more;
  7. the year-long negotiation in the Annapolis Process that produced still another offer of a state, from which Abbas walked away;
  8. Abbas’s announcement in 2009 that he would do nothing without a construction freeze, followed by his doing nothing after he got one;
  9. the continual “reconciliation” attempts by Abbas with the terrorist group he promised to dismantle;…
  10. the violation of their express Oslo commitments[.]

Richman summarizes the futility of negotiating with terrorists at the outset of his piece:

…four years of the “Palestinian Terror War (mistakenly called the second intifada),”…disabused Israelis of the idea that the Palestinian leadership wanted a deal, and the fact that Arabs have become ever more candid about their ultimate goal, with Mahmoud Abbas telling Egyptian TV “he would never, in a thousand years, recognize a Jewish state.”

Negotiating with terrorists just gets more innocents killed.  Yet our SecDef nominee wants to “engage” with them, saying that Palestinian terrorists are misguided victims.  Our SecState nominee has said folks like al-Assad and the mullahs of Iran can be negotiated with.

On the other hand, there’s this:

A mouse is trying to argue with owls.  The mouse thinks their ways are wrong.  They think the mouse is dinner.

 

h/t Power Line

China’s Aggressiveness, America’s Response

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China recently announced guidelines, effective January 1, for its maritime “police” to board and seize foreign vessels in waters around the Paracel Islands, which are also claimed by Vietnam.

And

Chinese fishing boats ha[ve] cut the cables of [Vietnam’s] seismic survey ship last week.

And

Philippines Foreign Minister Albert del Rosario revealed…that China had communicated its intention to station ships permanently at the Scarborough Shoal….

Never mind that the Republic of the Philippines, with the support of international law, claims this area.

Indeed, the PRC claims, with a straight face, fully two-thirds of the South China Sea as its sovereign territory.

And

Beijing also continues to challenge Japan’s control over the Senkaku Islands….  Chinese maritime surveillance and fisheries vessels loiter outside the 12-mile territorial limit, occasionally crossing inside to force the Japanese coast guard to respond.

The PRC also objects to the US’ rotating token units of Marines through a basing facility in Darwin, Australia.  Such a move is an affront to Chinese sovereignty, you see.

Yet President Barack Obama is bent on gutting American defense capability by $500 billion, beginning next month, despite his own Defense Secretary’s warnings of the consequences.  Which gives new meaning to the phrase “leading from behind.”