Tag Archives: freedom

Deterring the PRC

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Deterring the PRC

The editors at The Wall Street Journal are correct in one respect regarding convincing the People’s Republic of China that it cannot successfully fight us at sea, but the editors fall woefully short of what’s truly necessary. And so does the Trump administration, although it is taking more serious steps regarding our national defense and our national security than has any administration since Reagan.

Today’s 296-ship Navy isn’t large or capable enough to prevent a war in the Pacific while deterring bad actors elsewhere. China is amassing military power with one adversary in mind: the US. This threat demands a diverse mix of firepower, including more stealthy submarines, longer-range aircraft, a deep cache of long-range missiles spread across more ships, and an unmanned fleet to deter an invasion across the Taiwan Strait.

Our Navy badly needs that, but it needs much more than that. It needs more combat ships, building rapidly to at least a 500 combat ship fleet, it needs more cargo ships capable of replenishing at sea those combat ships of everything from ammunition of all types, fuel, and such consumables as potable water and food. It needs better ship- and fleet-wide defenses capable of much earlier detection of incoming fires and countering those fires, including the PRC’s ship-, air-, and ground-launched hypersonic missiles. It needs hardening against EMP attacks and cyber attacks against shipborne software. It needs improved capability against PRC ECM measures. It needs its own ECM capability to isolate PRC shipping—surface and subsurface—from its command centers and from each other. It needs countermeasures capable of blinding PRC aircraft and missiles. It needs longer range and better detection systems against the PRC’s growing and increasingly capable submarine fleet.

Our Navy needs also to be backstopped by other services and measures, especially in cyber warfare and in space. When the PRC attacks our fleet, we need to be able to counter those attacks, at least in part, from space, kinetically and electronically. We need to fragment with cyber measures the PRC’s onshore energy distribution infrastructure. We need, with cyber measures, to isolate the PRC government from the PLA, and we need fragment the PRC government, preventing the several branches from talking to each other electronically.

And one more major improvement.

New battleships for the US Navy will “help maintain American military supremacy, revive the American shipbuilding industry, and inspire fear in America’s enemies all over the world,” Mr Trump said Monday. “We’re going to start with two” ships and “quickly morph into 10,” he said, with lasers, guns, missiles, and more.

We need all those things, but we need them now, not in 10 or 15 years. We need to get rid of the development and acquisition bureaucracy that infests DoD and replace it with personnel and procedures that streamline the process and get systems from the drawing board into production much faster than that. In conjunction, design and mission creep must be put to an end, with both frozen early rather than being allowed to continue past laying down keels.

2027 is two years off, and that’s when PRC President Xi Jinping intends to begin his war of conquest against the Republic of China, and in support of that, that’s when he will have the PLA attack our Navy. Nor will his attack be limited to that. His announced goal is to dominate us, and the PLA’s doctrine is total war across the entire spectrum. This has been clear for more than 20 years, since publication of Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui’s Unrestricted Warfare, China’s Master Plan to Destroy America in 2002.

Time’s a-wasting, and our freedom, every bit as much as the RoC’s, is in the wind since what we have in being is not much deterrence.

An Empty Promise?

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Supposedly, the US has offered a security guarantee to Ukraine in the form of support[ing] European security guarantees and seek[ing] Senate backing for Washington’s promised role as a means of breaking the current peace talks impasse.

This supposed guarantee

would include monitoring, verification, and deconfliction, the officials said, and would lay out the role the US would play if Russia breached a peace deal and came back to attack Ukraine. They would also include the provision of weapons to deter a Russian force.

Yeah, sure. “Monitoring:” we see you, Russia, resuming your invasion, we’re watching the hell out of you. “Verification:” Yup, Russia really is resuming its invasion. “Deconfliction:” What does this mean? European forces entering Ukraine to fight the barbarian alongside Ukrainian forces? Traffic control to deconflict traffic jams on Ukrainian roads for Ukrainian forces and civilians moving in the other direction? Something else?

“Provision of weapons for deterrence:” This is risible. Europe already is refusing to provide the weapons the UA needs, in the numbers it needs them, or on the schedule it says it needs them. Excuses range from fear of provoking the barbarian to insisting the UA doesn’t really need them like that to claims they don’t have the weapons to provide the UA, having drawn down their armories already with transfers. That last, given Europe’s disdain for any thing military, at least has a measure of plausibility.

The supposed guarantee also purports to include

legally-binding commitments to come to Ukraine’s aid in the event of a Russian attack.

What is the timeline for implementation of a related peace agreement? Would the agreement go into effect before or after “Senate support” had been secured? If after, what support for Ukraine’s continued fight for its survival would be in the offing pending that Senate agreement? If before, how would Ukraine recover or be aided in recovering, from the barbarian’s virtually guaranteed violation of the terms? What would be the Or Else should the barbarian violate the agreement—more monitoring, verification, and…”deconfliction?” All the nations’ governments—including, shamefully, our own—have already been slinking away, their tails covering their crown jewels, from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nattering on about nuclear weapons.

However sincerely offered, this seems like an empty promise. There’s no guarantee that the Senate, with its two-thirds majority treaty ratification requirement, would support such a thing. A simple Senate majority-voted resolution of support would be meaningless, legally, politically, and morally. Nor is there any guarantee that an alternate path to securing support—bills passed in both the House and Senate, which would require only majority votes (after a 60-vote cloture success in the Senate)—would succeed.

There’s this bit, too, that overhangs any security “guarantee” that might be offered Ukraine. Three of the participants in the Budapest Memorandum—the US, the UK, and France via its separate individual assurance—already have betrayed Ukraine by dishonoring the security and territorial integrity guarantees contained in that document. The Memorandum also was a legally binding commitment.

On Whose Side Are They?

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Via Deputy SecState Christopher Landau:The data are for the Biden administration years of 2022-2024. As Landau pointed out, the money sent to Russia is in blue; the money sent to Ukraine is in orange. This is how much the nations of Europe really care about Ukraine and their own security. The money transfers to the barbarian invader pales the paltry financial and equipment support those nations have been offering Ukraine. Only the UK was sending more aid to Ukraine than to Russia; that has been colored by the UK’s access to North Sea oil and natural gas.

This, despite the hooraw over the US’ apparently fading support for Ukraine.

As usual, right click on the image and select Open Link in New Tab to enlarge the image.

H/t @ralflongwalker

Cards on the Table?

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That’s the breakthrough being touted by Just the News regarding “peace” talks between Ukraine and Russia.

This week for the first time, Kiev and Moscow articulated specific visions for a peace deal. And while they remain apart on big issues like land borders and NATO membership, the two sides have a meaningful framework that eluded past negotiations and presidents.

This is inaccurate. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been clear on Ukraine’s vision for peace, and equally specific the requirements for achieving one from the outset following the barbarian’s renewed invasion of his nation four years ago. He has demanded Russia’s departure from Ukraine and specific, material mechanisms for guaranteeing his nation’s sovereignty against renewed barbarian invasion.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has been equally clear on his requirements for peace. He has demanded recognition of his occupation of Crimea as a Russian oblast, the ceding of all of the Donbas to Russia as additional Russian oblasts, disarmament of Ukraine, and guarantees that NATO will never accept Ukraine.

It’s hard to get any more specific than these; the two sides’ cards have been on the table all along.

There’s this bit of foolishness, also, from Congressman Andy Biggs (R, AZ):

If you’ve ever negotiated anything, and virtually everybody has, if you don’t understand what you want and what the other side wants, you can never get to yes.

This operates from the false premise that “yes” by Ukraine is in any way useful or would be at all reliable given to whom and to what Ukraine would be saying “yes.” It’s not possible to say “yes” to a barbarian that routinely welches on each of its commitments, including, during its present invasion, its universal violation of every cease fire to which it has pretended to agree. That’s local. More universal is the barbarian’s routine violation of international law, particularly including the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of civilians in occupied territories and the targeting of civilians in the course of a campaign. Russia’s atrocities—rape and butchery of women and children in occupied Ukrainian cities and its targeting hospitals, churches, residential neighborhoods, and children’s schools during repeated attacks are well documented.

The real breakthrough, the only breakthrough with any security or moral validity, is to transfer to Ukraine the weapons, ammunition, and logistics it says it needs; in the numbers it says it needs them; and on the schedule it says it needs them. The UA has shown its superiority these last four years over the barbarian hordes, despite the barbarian’s superiority in numbers. The only advantage the barbarian has is that it’s far better supported by its allies, Iran and the People’s Republic of China. Ukraine could win the barbarian’s war decisively were the West, led badly by the US, to find some spine and set about supplying Ukraine at least as effectively as are the barbarians’ benefactors supplying the barbarian.

Doubting NATO’s Utility

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Trump I questioned the utility of NATO and wondered aloud whether the US should continue supporting it/staying a member. In immediate response, some (not enough) European member nations started honoring their promises of some years prior to contribute more to NATO—all of 2% of national GDP at the time. Over the ensuing years, most (though still only 2/3) of the member nations increased their contributions to very nearly meet (a large bump by these) or to meet or exceed those 2%. Trump’s overt disdain and blunt threats resulted in a material strengthening of the alliance.

Recently, the member nations met and agreed to push that contribution commitment to 5% of national GDP, and some nations are meeting that commitment (notably, the eastern and far northern European nations fronting on Russia). Also notably, though, Canada and western European members continue to freeload, and in order to get the agreement at all, the alliance was required to give Spain explicit permission to continue to freeload, despite its strongly growing economy.

Unfortunately, now the alliance is facing this. The headline and subheadline is the short and bitter of it:

NATO Member’s Top Court Considers Whether Saying Men And Women Are Different Is A War Crime
Finland’s Supreme Court heard arguments Thursday about whether quoting the Bible is illegal “hate speech” under its war crimes laws.

Yes, this is one of those far northern members, recently acceded to the alliance. Even so, this is a case of censorship by the nation’s chief prosecutor, unrestrained by either Finland’s President or Prime Minister, despite lower courts having repeatedly cleared the alleged miscreants of any wrong doing.

[Member of Parliament Paivi] Rasanen was first investigated for tweeting a Bible verse in 2019 to criticize Finland’s state church sponsoring a queer sex parade. Three criminal charges against her arose from the investigation, which also resulted in one criminal charge against [Lutheran Bishop Juhana] Pohjola for publishing a booklet Rasanen wrote about the Bible’s teaching on the sexes.

And

Two lower courts cleared Rasanen and Pohjola of all charges, but the prosecutor kept appealing, now to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization member’s highest court.

 

This is government censorship, government sexist bigotry, and government demand for political correctness all rolled into one.

If this case results in any form of conviction, then given the spread of censorship and sexist bigotry into the rest of NATO members—most notably, Germany, Netherlands, and UK—then it will be time to consider anew our withdrawal from an alliance too enamored of its political shower appearance to be able to resist the barbarian farther east.

It will be time to stand up a different, more serious mutual defense arrangement involving the Three Seas Initiative nations and the US.