Tag Archives: foreign policy

A Nadir and a One-Two Punch

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SecDef Pete Hegseth spoke to his troops the other day, and the WSJ‘s editors remarked on it at some length. Among their remarks was this, toward the end of their piece.

The US military is weathering a one-two punch: a major evolution in battlefield technology coinciding with a nadir in conventional forces as Reagan-era equipment retires. Meanwhile, the US must deter two nuclear peer adversaries (China and Russia) as well as deal with their lesser partners in Iran and North Korea.

One-two punches often precede a knockout blow and the end of a fight, or a nation (for an example of the latter, see Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Poland). The one the US faces, though, can work out extremely favorably for us.

Were our military flush while the technology rollover proceeds apace, political inertia, along with legally committed spending and longer term contracts would strongly militate [sic] against changing course and switching over to greater emphasis on those emerging technologies of immediate and longer-term use on the battlefield, in any upcoming war, and in diplomatic and military efforts to shape the battlefield and the post-battle diplomatic arena.

However, with our military at its current nadir and defense spending similarly reduced, a golden opportunity to shift our military equipage, manpower training, and our fighting (and diplomatic) tactics, strategy, and doctrine to better meet the developing current and future conflict environments has presented itself. With limited funding, there’s less inertia to continue business as usual in acquisition and training for our military components. The ability to shift to those more productive efforts is made commensurately easier.

The one-two punch that confronts us today truly is a crisis. The People’s Republic of China—one of those nuclear peer adversaries—understands the nature of crises: its word for the term is a two-ideogram construct consisting of the ideograms for Danger and Opportunity. The present one-two punch is one of those crises for us.

Talk about Conspiracy Theories

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Canada’s Liberal Party Prime Minister Mark Carney is no piker when pushing them.

…he suggested he has prepared for a possible military invasion by American forces. “I think you have a responsibility in these roles to look at extreme tail risk,” Carney said recently. “That’s just risk management. That’s not a base case, but it would be irresponsible not to” prepare.

Given that level of irrationality, how would it be possible to reach any sort of trade deal with Canada?

Later

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President Donal Trump (R) has correctly rejected Iran’s offer of a 7-day cease fire, during which the IRGC, the true power in the Iranian government, would pretend to negotiate a permanent end to the conflict, to do chit-chat regarding the IRGC’s nuclear weapons program, and to codify the fiction that the Hormuz Strait is an Iranian waterway. Even without the nonsense regarding the Strait, the offer was entirely disingenuous, since the IRGC uses all such cease fires and talks solely as periods within which to rest, refit, rearm, and resume fighting.

Trump’s responding plan, though, maintaining the current state of the conflict, is a serious error. He says he won’t resume bombing, if he does at all (he says he hasn’t decided), until after the November mid-terms. His abhorrence of the killing and destruction that war, or any shooting conflict, causes is laudable; however, he’s letting his abhorrence go too far; it’s seriously clouding his judgment in the present conflict. He’s fallen into a never do today what can be put off to tomorrow counterproductive loop.

As the conflict wears on, the destruction and deaths the IRGC inflicts on our Middle East allies and friends steadily increases. The privation the IRGC inflicts on the Iranian people steadily worsens as the IRGC diverts ever mote resources from the people toward its attacks on shipping and the infrastructure of the other nations of the Middle East. The costs to our military and its ability to respond to crises elsewhere in the world—viz., Russia’s growing threat to eastern Europe and the People’s Republic of China’s increasing threat to the Republic of China and the Philippines—greatly increase and is increasingly eroded, respectively. The costs to our military increases in the near term, especially. The repeated delays in serious bombing, the fits and starts, only requires far too many targets to be struck a second time, a third time, a fourth time,…. That just wastes our ammunition.

Domestically, as the conflict wears on, inflation will remain elevated, even if it is vastly reduced by Trump and Republican action so far from the Biden years, and in particular, the cost of gasoline to individual Americans remains high, the cost of diesel to shippers and farmers remains high and is increasing, and from those, the cost of food and cooling homes (and soon of heating them) remains high and is increasing.

Beyond that, Trump’s constant threats to Iran, ranging from harsh consequences to annihilation, are rapidly losing impact and costing credibility from his constant decisions to not act on those threats.

For all of those reasons, delay is strongly counterproductive.

Trump must resume heavy bombing and add heavy cyber attacks on Iran, and do them now, not tomorrow. The IRGC will never negotiate in any serious fashion. The only way to end the conflict and ease the Iranian people’s suffering with any hope of durability is to destroy the IRGC’s ability to fight at all and to eliminate the IRGC’s members altogether.

Coming Around?

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Many of the Arab nations that as recently as this summer had been pushing for negotiations with Iran to end the fighting between Iran and the US are now trying to persuade President Donald Trump (R) not to negotiate. This comes on the heels of Iranian attacks on Saudi oil tanker shipping in the Arabian Gulf and Iran’s Houthi satrap seizing islands in the Red Sea to cut off Arab shipping there, and attacks by the Houthis and by Iran’s Iraqi supporters on the Saudi oil pipeline to the Red Sea coast and on the Saudi port there.

They’re waffling on that, though. Don’t start shooting again, they’re also pushing. Just maintain the blockade and the economic pressure.

Other Gulf states, mainly Oman and Qatar, argue the region already has suffered significantly and say proposals for a phased reopening of Hormuz and a halt to attacks on Gulf states are the only viable way to end the conflict.

They need to recognize the suffering they’ll continue to experience with Iran still a military and terrorist threat, unless they kowtow to the murderous regime. There’s no need for a “phased reopening” of the Hormuz Strait. There’s only a need for the IRGC to stop shooting at Strait shipping and to acknowledge in writing and in public speaking that the Strait is international waters and Iran has no authority to change that fact.

That change in the IRGC is unlikely. The IRGC, which is the real power in the Iranian government, isn’t interested in ending the fight except on its terms: the Hormuz Strait is Iranian water, and shipping must pay an Iranian toll to pass through it; Iran must be able to resume its nuclear weapons development without interference; and the US must pay reparations to Iran in addition to lifting all sanctions.

The Arab nations may be starting to figure out the real world around their Iran fantasy, but they’ve a ways to go, yet. That path begins with those nations getting their collective heads out of the sand while finding enough backbone to get their hands dirty: taking back those Red Sea islands; getting serious about running the Houthis out of Yemen; joining with actual military force instead of stern words in renewed and expanded attacks on Iran until that nation is completely disarmed and has no means of rebuilding its military, including its missile, rocket, and drone inventory; it has no means of even beginning, much less resuming, its nuclear weapons program; and the IRGC has seized to exist.

“Growing Risks”

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That’s the concern about AI and its use in hacking that was written about in a recent WSJ article.

Two weeks after a swarm of AI agents broke out of containment at OpenAI to hack the company Hugging Face, the ChatGPT maker learned about another AI-powered intrusion—and this time it was the target.
Independent security researchers had used Anthropic‘s Claude software to gain access to an OpenAI employee’s ChatGPT account, giving them a way to read and suggest changes to the company’s private cache of software.

And this:

The team, who participated in an OpenAI bug-hunting program that offers a safe harbor for researchers to attempt to break into corporate systems, quickly reported their findings to the company. …
The new hack joins a long list of recent disclosures by leading technology companies and researchers alike of cyber intrusions aided by fast-evolving artificial-intelligence tools. Despite months of warnings about the capabilities of AI systems, the new intrusion shows how the complexity of today’s computer systems makes them difficult to defend.

Umm, no.

That breakout and hack of Hugging Face wasn’t an example of the risks of AI; it was an example of the risks from human failure to properly airgap the sandbox in which they were building and testing that swarm of agents.

The “difficulty to defend” today’s increasingly complex computer systems isn’t a matter of AI tools’ or swarms of AI tools’ ability to hack into complex (or simple) computer systems. The difficulty is the failure to use frequently, broadly, and deeply those AI tools to do the White Hat hacking those independent security researchers had done to expose some OpenAI bugs and gaps.

That White Hat hacking needs to be done by lots of security researchers all across our economy and our governments at all jurisdictional levels, so enterprises and governments can find their own software and system failures and repair them before outside entities with nefarious intent—whether government, criminal, or just folks poking around because they can—find them, penetrate them, and inflict their damage or steal critical information or demand ransom or…. And then the White Hat hacking needs to be repeated at frequent, irregular intervals so as to keep systems buttoned up and ahead of Black Hat and other adversarial hacking efforts.

The risk, and it is growing, is that that White Hat hacking isn’t being done as widely or frequently as it should be to identify those system gaps and bugs so they can be quickly sealed off. And make those difficult to defend systems more easily defended.

Instead, people who should know better insist on locking up AI with excessive regulation.