Tag Archives: foreign policy

More PRC Sea Grab

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The People’s Republic of China is extending its sea grab nearly to the shores of Malaysia, some 1200 miles south of Shenzhen on the PRC’s southern coast.  Last week, the PLA Navy sent three of its heavily armed ships, together with its largest amphibious landing ship, to tool around James Shoal, which is roughly 75 miles from the Malaysian coast, well within the latter’s economic zone; although Brunei has an overlapping claim in the area.

The Chinese task force, which included a guided missile destroyer and two guided missile frigates, was fully capable of attacking and destroying any aircraft or submarines that it might have encountered.

This intrusion occurred on the same day other PRC naval vessels fired on Vietnamese fishing boats in Vietnamese waters elsewhere in the South China Sea, and it came on the heels of a January incident in which another PRC naval ship threatened a Japanese destroyer and helicopter that were patrolling Japanese waters in the East China Sea.  In that incident, the Chinese vessel locked onto the Japanese ship and helo with its targeting and guidance radar, preparatory to launching missiles at them.

The PRC previously had only “claimed” two-thirds of the South China Sea as its sovereign territory; however, with this intrusion, they’re plainly intending to seize all of it for themselves.

Malaysia, Brunei, and Vietnam, among others, are members of ASEAN.  Where was—and is—the United States, supposedly a friend of ASEAN and a friend of several of the individual ASEAN nations?  Not there.  Not anywhere to be found.

Is the PRC’s continued aggressive expansion a result of their read of the United States as a paper tiger?  Or are we just leading from behind again?  Or is President Barack Obama channeling Sallah?

  • Chinese.  Very dangerous.  You go first.

More “Muddled” Foreign Policy

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Courtesy of The Wall Street Journal‘s transcript of President Barack Obama’s joint presser with the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmud Abbas, an affair which Obama carefully conducted beneath a banner of the terrorist Yasser Arafat,

we have these…remarks…from our President in answer to the questions “After you meet leaders from both sides, is there any chance to resume peace talks as soon as possible?   And do you think that the two-state solution is still valid in this policy of expanding settlements is continuing going on?”:

I think it’s important for us to work through this process, even if there are irritants on both sides.  The Israelis have concerns about rockets flying into their cities last night.  And it would be easy for them to say, you see, this is why we can’t have peace because we can’t afford to have our kids in beds sleeping and suddenly a rocket comes through the roof.  But my argument is even though both sides may have areas of strong disagreement, may be engaging in activities that the other side considers to be a breach of good faith, we have to push through those things to try to get to an agreement….

Let me get this straight.  Our President says that murderous acts of terrorism, blatant acts of war, are just “strong disagreements?”  Mere “breaches of good faith?”

And then he said this:

And those two states I think will be able to deal with each other the same way all states do.  I mean, the United States and Canada has arguments once in a while, but they’re not the nature of arguments that can’t be solved diplomatically.

So our good friend Canada is no better than the PA?  Just a bunch of thuggish, ungovernable terrorist wannabes?

Does it get any more incompetent than this?

Incoherent Foreign Policy

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President Barack Obama has it.

Here’s an illustration of that incoherence, vis-à-vis Israel and Iran.

Vice President Joe Biden, on 4 March:

Let me make clear what that commitment is: it is to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.  Period.  End of discussion.  Prevent—not contain—prevent….  Big nations can’t bluff….  And President Barack Obama is not bluffing.

Here’s Secretary of State John Kerry, on 5 March:

[Red] lines have been drawn before and they’ve been passed.  …  [President Obama] would like to see the P1+5 process and negotiation process be able to work and avoid any consideration of any kind of military action.  …we are prepared through P5+1 and negotiating process to engage in a serious proposal that they would make to prove their program is in fact a peaceful program.

Commander US CENTCOM, General James Mattis before the Senate Armed Services Committee, on 5 March, in answer to the question, “In your professional opinion, are the current diplomatic and economic efforts to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons capability—are they working?”

No, sir.

Then he testified that he was working on “other options” at Obama’s direction.

Obama knows he’s better than any of his expert advisers, but does he, or by extension do any of his advisors, have any idea of what he’s doing in this arena?

A Cyber First Strike

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John Wohlstetter in The Wall Street Journal defines cyberspace as the software that controls the operation of networks linking computers in the governmental and private sphere.  This is incomplete, though.  Cyberspace includes that, but it also includes the software running on individual computers, whether they are linked into a (the) network or are operating in isolation.  Even those isolated computers, after all, are susceptible to cyber attacks, with many of them (unless they are physically disconnected from any network at all) susceptible to being hijacked into cyber attacks against other computers/networks through such means as social engineering, a process whereby hackers, or hostile governments, or terrorists, or… convince, usually through subterfuge, the human operator of those computers to load malware onto them.

Wohlstetter then identifies the People’s Republic of China’s “military’s massive continuing cyberspying” as an example of one type of cyber attacks that may be simple spying, or that may be preparation for further adventuring.  People’s Liberation Army spies, he notes, have stolen “volumes of documentation on the ultra-advanced F-35 Lightning, the only fifth-generation fighter still being produced by the US,” and they’ve penetrated “every major national-security database that they can within the Pentagon and US defense companies.”  But this could be just ordinary pre-battle preparation.  Every general is going to investigate his enemy so as to understand as clearly as possible that enemy’s force disposition and the strengths and vulnerabilities of that enemy’s systems so as to efficiently neutralize those systems at the battle’s start.

To support these efforts, the PLA “Third Department” (among others),

which handles telecommunications, can call on 12 operation bureaus to carry out cyberattacks, and three research institutes for technical support with some 13,000 staff upon request.

The PRC isn’t alone in this sort of effort.  Russia and Iran are two others who maintain major efforts in offensive cyberspace.

A necessary, but not sole, prelude to defending against a first strike is understanding the nature and depth of what’s happening in a particular incident.  Siobhan Gorman and Siobhan Hughes address this in part, citing Army General Keith Alexander, Commander, US Cyber Command

When does a nuisance become a real problem and when are you prepared to step in for that?  That’s the work that I think the administration is going through right now and highlighting that.

But this is the question concerning a physical problem, too—when does any incursion stop being an error, or stop being minor, and start being an act of war?  And what do we do about it, and when?  Do we simply defend against the incident?  To we take offensive measures to encourage the attacker to not do that anymore, do we take more extensive measures to defeat outright the attacker and compel his acquiescence?  When?  In accordance with what criteria?

And that’s part of where a first strike starts to come into play.  A cyber attack as a first strike in all likelihood won’t occur.  A first strike, though, will include a decisive cyber attack.  We’ve seen rehearsals of the cyber component:

  • the “PLO virus,” a logic bomb designed to infect and destroy files on computers [a very early virus, its “rehearsal” aspect is in the lessons learned in managing and delivering such malware]
  • 2010’s stuxnet, which damaged or destroyed hardware—high-speed centrifuges, in one case, by causing them to run too fast and burn themselves out
  • 2012’s cyberassaults on the websites of many US banks
  • 2012’s more destructive attack on a Saudi oil company that destroyed 30,000 computers
  • the implantation of malware on computing equipment prior to sale and delivery to the target nation.  For instance, I bought a laptop from an otherwise reputable major computer company; it was delivered to me directly from the factory in Shanghai—with a Trojan carefully installed.

Given the penetration of American systems by the Chinese, it’s not beyond the pale that either a) this kind of malware has infected the computing systems managing any target nation’s infrastructure—water, electricity, communications, et al.—and the target nation’s defense systems, including, but not necessarily limited to, sensor suites and communications, or b) this kind of malware is ready to be emplaced in the weeks prior to the intended first strike.

How would a first strike work, then?  With the malware in place, sufficient of it could be triggered to shut down a nation’s electrical grid, its water handling and delivery systems, and its financial infrastructure.  With responders deployed to deal with this—and so widely dispersed—communications then could be crippled, isolating those responders, and isolating that nation’s population from each other and from their government.  Far fetched?

Russia tested a limited cyber attack against Estonia in 2007.  Moreover, as Gorman and Hughes note the temptation offered by our own continued vulnerability:

US intelligence officials told a Senate hearing that the nation is vulnerable to cyberespionage, cybercrime, and outright destruction of computer networks, both from sophisticated, government-sponsored assault as well as criminal hacker groups and cyberterrorists.

“It’s hard to overemphasize its significance,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said, addressing members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “These capabilities put all sectors of our country at risk—from government and private networks to critical infrastructures.”

Then, with cyber’s civil battlefield preparation in place and domestic upset rising, additional malware could be triggered to attack defense sensory and communications systems (among others), greatly disrupting, if not crippling them.  This phase of the cyber preparation could functionally blind physical military units and cut off their communications with adjacent units and higher command echelons.  In this environment, many of those units might not even know they’re next coming under physical attack until they start being destroyed.

This isn’t even a new strategy; it just uses modern facilities.  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote about this a century and a half ago, as noted by Sigmund Neumann and Mark von Hagen in Makers of Modern Strategy:

They were fully aware that military campaigns could be lost before the first shot, that they would in fact be decided beforehand on the preliminary battlefronts of economic and psychological warfare….  To [Marx and Engels] war was fought with different means in different fields.

Modern economies expand the opportunities to be gained from a first strike.  Most modern economies don’t have an industrial capacity.  Modern industry either assembles components that have been manufactured in other countries or it consists of component manufacture which are then shipped to those assembling economies.

A Cyber first strike would be no worse than a Pearl Harbor?  On the contrary, a properly executed first strike, as a classical combined arms assault that would include cyber warfare, could prevent us utterly from responding in any way at all, whether in cyberspace or in meat space.  There may not be any opportunity to work our way through our response decision criteria.

In a modern war (now exacerbated by those modern national economies), there will be no time to recover, to build up our forces, to bring our industrial capacity to a wartime footing and production rate.  We’ll fight this war with the army we have and with nothing at all, including replacement equipment and soldiers, else.

We could be left prostrate, begging for mercy.  If we could get our radios and telephones to work well enough to beg.

None of this is to suggest that a first strike is imminent.  But responding after the fact will be no response at all.  If we’re not better prepared, though, after the fact is what will be left to us.

Update:  Here’s a realtime example of a cyber attack rehearsal.

Computer networks at major South Korean banks and top TV broadcasters crashed simultaneously Wednesday, paralyzing bank machines across the country and prompting speculation of a cyberattack by North Korea.

Screens went blank at 2 p.m., the state-run Korea Information Security Agency said, and more than six hours later some systems were still down.

Something about Missile Defense

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I won’t go into the older history of the Progressives’ vilification of President Ronald Reagan over his push for a missile defense, and I won’t mention then-Senator John Kerry’s (D, MA) denunciation of such a system as

a dream based on illusion, but one which could have real and terrible consequences[.]

But we do need to think about Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s 2008 promise to gut missile defense development programs and—in one of the few spending cuts to which Progressives have agreed in recent history—to cut spending on such things.

We do need to think about President Barack Obama’s betrayal of Poland and the Czech Republic when he cancelled agreements to deploy missile defense systems there on the basis of Russian demurral.

We do need to think about spending $2 billion to add a whole 14 interceptors to our existing de minimis system in this time of world-ending sequester.

We do need to think about Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s analysts justifying all of this:

Although American and South Korean intelligence officials doubt the North is close to being able to follow through on a nuclear strike, or that it would even try, given its almost certain destruction, analysts say the country’s aggressive behavior is an important and worrying sign of changing calculations in the North.

After all, this “analysis” comes in light of the Russians and the Iranians having or being allowed to achieve this capability, yet we withdraw missile defenses from European locations that could defend Israel and Europe.

We do need to think about DoD delaying deployment at additional sites, including the East Coast, in order to do an environmental study, first.

We do need to think about whether this administration has any sort of clue at all about a coherent national defense policy.

Congressman Mike Rogers (R, AL), Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee, is saying

Four years ago, the Obama administration began to unilaterally disarm our defenses and deterrent in the hope our enemies would follow suit.  President Obama is finally realizing what President Reagan taught us 30 years ago—the best way to keep the peace is through strength.

But is he?  Or is all of this just the loud posturing of a paper tiger?  After all, Pentagon officials are dismissing Rogers’ criticism, insisting that northern Korean technology was considerably less developed four years ago.  Yet surely they know that Russia’s wasn’t, when Reagan’s missile defense efforts were so loudly pooh-poohed, and surely they know that Russian technology was 30 years improved when Obama acceded to Russian demands to cancel our missile defense plans in eastern Europe.

Hmm….