Tag Archives: defense policy

Operating in a Hostile Drone Environment

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The US Army tried that in an exercise in Germany in which Ukrainian drone operators were the OPFOR. The OPFOR won that engagement very easily, and in a real world shooting fight, it would have been a disaster for the US forces.

Because of that—all of us learn more from our failures than our successes—the exercise, Combined Resolve, was a treasure trove of learning opportunities regarding ground forces operating in a hostile drone environment.

Exercises like Combined Resolve are run precisely so that forces can experience realistic combat conditions. Army leaders in Europe over recent years have taken advantage of having Ukrainian forces on hand to participate and impart their hard-won skills to US and allied troops in practice, on simulated battlefields. The expectation is that failures are educational. British and Swedish exercises have also resulted in easy Ukrainian triumphs.

The problem with this, though, is identified by Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich, Commander, United States European Command, and Supreme Allied Commander Europe:

You can’t get training like this in the United States.

Grynkewich added that after NATO forces exercise against Ukrainian forces, “The change is remarkable.”

Why can’t we get that sort of training stateside? The USAF has stateside exercises where the OPFOR fly the actual aircraft of enemy nations where we have examples of them, and uses USAF aircraft flown by pilots steeped in enemy tactics and doctrine where enemy aircraft aren’t available. The Navy’s air forces do the same.

America pioneered using long-range drones in war. The Pentagon has recently spent billions acquiring new drone and counterdrone technology and formed special units to operate it.
Still, in the Middle East this year, the US has struggled to defend against Iran’s long-range drones, which have killed and injured soldiers and destroyed aircraft.

Why don’t we have drone exercises—especially with the short-range drones optimized for attacking close-in OPFOR or OPFOR in contact with our formations—to train for dealing with, operating in, and defeating enemy forces operating under or behind their drones?

One answer to my question, I freely speculate, is that there are too many bureaucrats, both uniformed and civilian, in the Pentagon. These folks are clogging up mission development, weapons design and development, and weapons acquisition, and therewith are badly slowing down field training for this environment by denying our field personnel the requisite equipment.

Another answer, which dovetails with that Pentagon bloat (again, I freely speculate), is that there is too many politics involved in the development and acquisition of these systems. Congressmen and Senators fight for the associated spending to be done in their districts and States, too often balkanizing the whole process, slowing it down, making it less efficient, and driving up costs entirely artificially.

Clear those two, and the situation, both in the training and on the battlefield, will greatly improve.

This is a Mistake

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The lede lays it out.

President Trump over the weekend signaled the US will now rely more on economic pressures than military strikes on Iran to force an end to their war.

The only way to deal with the terrorists who run Iran is to destroy their ability to shoot anything and to kill the terrorists. They simply don’t feel any pressure, least of all economic, because they don’t care what their position and their actions cost their own people.

Trump needs to keep firmly in mind the words of an earlier Iranian President, Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, agreed to since by all of the people in the several administrations reigning over Iran.

If one day…the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons]—on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.

This is not a gang with which we can treat, nor is it a gang that feels any pressure other than its own urgency to get the destruction going.

Accesses to Classified

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SecDef Pete Hegseth has revoked the security clearance of Frank Kendall, ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) Secretary of the Air Force. Kendall had been quoted in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal as saying that the Air Force One jet gifted to President Trump by the Qatari government lacks the defensive capabilities of the traditional jets that fly the president.

Kendall is all wide-eyed innocence.

“I’m mystified,” Kendall said in a text message when asked for comment. “I’ve been extremely careful to not say anything that could be classified, and as far as I know I have not said anything classified.” He added, “So far no one has told me what I’m supposed to have revealed.”

Revealing the defensive capabilities of the aircraft flying as Air Force One is perfectly jake?

This is Kendall pretending to not understand the requirements of OPSEC. Or he’s cynically standing on the legalist distinction between classified material vs OPSEC material. That’s assuming, generously, that he didn’t reveal actual classified information—and I would be amazed if information regarding the military capabilities of our President’s transport aircraft were unclassified.

It’s good that Kendall has lost his accesses. More retired or resigned officials should lose their accesses.

The problem could be mitigated greatly if all employees, government or private, automatically lost their clearances as well as any other accesses when they leave the job in which they had those credentials. This needn’t be stigmatic; it should be routine: those people no longer have any need for a security clearance, and so it’s automatically revoked.

Limited Incursions

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The US intelligence community is beginning to wake up to the possibility of Vladimir Putin having Russia engage in a limited incursion into NATO territory in an attempt to relieve Western pressure on him regarding his invasion of Ukraine. (That invasion, keep in mind, he was explicitly permitted to carry out by ex-President Joe Biden, so long as Putin kept it to a small one.)

The likelihood of the most extreme scenario—a limited land incursion—is low, but gets higher as time goes on, according to the reports.

It’s a threat that needs to be taken seriously and to be prepared for.

Putin’s military doesn’t need to be up to snuff to embark on a limited invasion of NATO territory. His military just has to be better than the forces he’d face, and depleted as his military is, they are, strongly so. Likely he couldn’t run all the way to Dunkirk, but he could run all the way to the Baltic Sea. Nobody in Europe, individually or in the aggregate as an alliance presently has the wherewithal to defeat a Russian invasion.

The authors suggested a grey area type of invasion/incursion, and doing so, they missed the larger picture.

The possible threats range from a cyberattack on a NATO country….

Do the authors mean like the cyberattacks Putin has been running all along against the Baltic States for some years?

They posed this bit of ignorance as if it were a serious deterrent:

Such a move [armed invasion] has always been considered extremely unlikely because it would trigger NATO’s Article 5, which commits members to collective defense.

This is a chimera, at best. There’s nothing in Article 5 that requires an armed response by NATO members. The nations’ Foreign Ministers shaking their fingers very firmly at Putin, or Prime Ministers and Presidents issuing strongly worded statements objecting to the invasion, would satisfy the Article.

Hold Who Accountable, Again?

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Over the last month, or so, there has been a spate of cyber attacks against our nation’s infrastructure, culminating in a series of attacks a variety of water distribution networks causing shutdowns of several cities’ water supply, primarily in Minnesota, but spread also across seven States.

It’s not like these attacks came out of the blue, though. Ever since Colonial Pipeline, the executive management teams of utilities—of all private enterprises, come to that—have been on clear notice that well that cyber attacks were a thing; they would occur; and by the success of that attack, they were encouraged by Colonial’s—at then-President Joe Biden’s (D) pressure in his own abject meekness in front of Russia—weak-kneed payment of the demanded ransomware, matched by Biden’s surrender to Russia regarding Nord Stream 2.

And yet, these latest attacks occurred and successfully shut down those physical networks.

The failure of these management teams is reprehensible, given their apparent cavalier attitude—criminally negligent attitude, in my opinion—toward cyber security and securing their networks against cyber intrusion, cyber vandalism, cyber-instigated shutdown. This lack of effort by those managers should result in stern sanction, including jail, against them.

Their decision to not bother with any serious security measures is a failure of their fiduciary duty toward their shareholders. More than that, their failure, especially in the water distribution cases, puts their customers who depend on them for water at serious risk. Above even that, their negligence represents a threat to our nation’s security. The one is criminal, if proven, and the others are unpatriotic and especially unacceptable.

And yet, to date, no one is being looked at for sanction or even civil liability.