RUTHFULLY YOURS

U.S. Air Force

Nuclear weapons are in the news multiple times each day, with unsettling events in North Korea, China, Iran, and Russia escalating the concern that the United States is entering an era of growing instability and uncertainty.

While there are serious and gathering nuclear threats facing the United States and our allies, there is no need to panic, nor believe that doomsday is just around the corner. However, we do need to get on with the task of modernizing our nuclear deterrent, enhancing our ballistic missile defenses and working effectively to stop the proliferation of such weapons.

This essay addresses the question of how best to maintain nuclear deterrence. Critics of the current US modernization plan urge the US to exercise restraint by curtailing the modernization of significant portions of our nuclear deterrent under the assumption that if the United States unilaterally stops “arms racing,” our adversaries such as Russia and China will as well.

My conclusion is three-fold: (1) recent history shows restraint does not work; (2) nuclear modernization is absolutely required; and (3) a renewed “peace through strength” policy will both reduce nuclear dangers and restore some stability in international affairs.

First, let’s review the facts of the nuclear landscape.

The United States has deployed in its strategic nuclear forces under 1600 nuclear warheads, at least 1000 warheads less than the Russians. [The Russians have to reduce these numbers to the New Start level by February 2018].

Second, the United States has a few hundred tactical or theater nuclear weapons, less than the 2000-5000such weapons held by Russia.

Third, the Russians are on pace to modernize at least 90% of their nuclear deterrent force by the turn of the decade, no later than 2021 it appears. By contrast, the U.S. modernization begins with the deployment of a new bomber, submarine, and land-based missiles no earlier than from mid-2027 through 2031, so U.S. modernization restraint is hardly called for.

Fourth, and just to be clear, current forces are capable but in need of significant investment. Most of the U.S. forces were fielded 30 or more years ago and are at the end of their service lives. They are thus actually way past due for modernization, and that is the only way they can remain credible and capable as the foundation of our deterrent. Four senior Air Force and Navy nuclear commanders underscored this point in House Armed Services Committee testimony on March 8, 2017.

In that context, how should we treat calls for major U.S. restraint in rebuilding our nuclear arms? Perhaps it would be instructive to review the impact of U.S. nuclear unilateral restraint just before and following the 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union.

Now to be clear, the U.S. and the Soviet Union and then Russia jointly agreed to the INF (1987), START I (July 1991) and START II (January 1993) nuclear weapons treaties. However, we significantly invested in a simultaneous modernization of our entire nuclear deterrent during the Reagan administration while also seeking arms control. Peace through strength worked as we secured major reductions in Soviet-era nuclear weapons and the end of the Soviet Union.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has withdrawn retired senior diplomat Anne W. Patterson as his choice for undersecretary for policy after the White House indicated unwillingness to fight what it said would be a battle for Senate confirmation.

U.S. officials said that two members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), were strongly opposed to Patterson’s nomination because she served as U.S. ambassador to Egypt from 2011 to 2013, a time when the Obama administration supported an elected government with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood that was ultimately overthrown by the Egyptian military.

The withdrawal leaves Mattis with a bench still empty of Trump-appointed senior officials, a situation that stretches across the administration as Cabinet secretaries have not chosen or the White House has not approved nominees. Although Obama administration holdovers remain in a few jobs, after eight weeks in office, President Trump has not nominated a single high official under Cabinet rank in the Defense or State departments.

In the service branches, former Republican congresswoman Heather Wilson has been named, but not confirmed, as Air Force secretary, while picks for Army and Navy secretaries have withdrawn from consideration.

The White House plans this week — perhaps as early as Tuesday — to announce a handful of approved nominees proposed by Mattis for senior Defense Department positions, but Patterson will not be among them, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity about internal decision-making.

Mattis’s acquiescence to Patterson’s withdrawal came after he fought and won a major battle with the White House to remove Iraq from the list of majority-Muslim countries whose citizens are barred from U.S. entry under Trump’s executive order on immigration.

The world isn’t going to wait.

Tomorrow, German Chancellor Angela Merkel will meet face-to-face with President Trump for the first time, each to take the other’s measure. Mr. Trump has previously criticized Mrs. Merkel for her open-door immigration policy and, by implication in his criticism of NATO, for Germany’s paltry defense spending.

Mrs. Merkel, the European press says, is on the defensive against Mr. Trump’s nationalist-populist positions, including his criticisms of the European Union. A few weeks ago, she floated the idea of more defense spending, but it turns out that her 2018 budget raises defense spending to the lofty level of 1.23 percent of Germany’s Gross Domestic Product, well below the 2 percent that all NATO members committed to a decade ago. Free riders like Germany deserve a repeated dose of “Dutch uncle” counseling by Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has a lot on his plate. General Joe Votel, commander of Special Operations Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that the Taliban has fought us to a standstill in Afghanistan. It remains a permanent war, a quagmire, resulting from Mr. Bush’s nation-building approach.

Mr. Trump sent about 200 Marines and their artillery to the fight to take Raqqa, Syria, from ISIS. As good as they are, they are far too small a force — even combined with our air forces and special operations guys in Syria — to determine the outcome of the war. And what comes after? Mr. Trump hasn’t said what our plan is for the future of Syria, assuming that ISIS can be defeated there. If ISIS is defeated in Syria, what does he propose to do about ISIS in Libya and elsewhere? How long and large a war is he in for?

On the other side of the globe, the threat from North Korea grows by the day. The North’s ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs are, by almost universal judgment, going to be capable of attacking the continental U.S. with nuclear weapons in less than five years. Secretary of State Tillerson is visiting Beijing, Tokyo, and Seoul this week. What will he be telling those nations, and what will he be asking of them?

Those are only the most visible parts of the international status quo. Mr. Trump would do well to remember that President Reagan said that “status quo” was Latin for “the mess we’re in.”

Mr. Trump has no experience or expertise in defense or foreign affairs, so he is left to make decisions based only on the advice of others. Sitting atop the advisers’ pyramid is the National Security Advisor, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who is entirely ill-suited for that position.

As I’ve written earlier, McMaster is a politically correct product of the Bush and Obama eras who insists that there is no connection between Islam and terrorism despite the fact that the connection is thoroughly documented and compelled in Islamic scripture. McMaster, having refused to retire to join the Trump administration, is a careerist, trying to ensure he gets his fourth star after his term in the White House.

Speaking to governors at the White House on Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a ‎sharp increase in the military budget. According to some assessments, the allocation in question could ‎reach wartime levels.‎

If so, rightly so.‎

Americans may not feel it on a day-to-day basis, but their country is the target of global jihadists, some ‎of whom have been committing small-scale killing sprees on U.S. soil, while others are training in the ‎Middle East and honing their skills to execute operations on a grander, more 9/11-type scale.‎

Still, although Trump, like many other leaders and lay people, seems to consider the group Islamic State ‎to be the world’s bogey man, as al-Qaida used to be viewed, the greater danger is posed by the ‎regime in Tehran and its proxies. ‎

For one thing, unlike the Sunni rogues who like to decapitate people on YouTube, Shiite Iran is an ‎actual country with all that this entails, including a place at the proverbial and literal table. What should ‎have been its lowly station in the overall hierarchy of things was lifted to great prominence when the ‎Obama administration and five other governments — those of Britain, France, Russia, China and ‎Germany — groveled before its leaders, begging them to agree to a deal to retard their race to a ‎nuclear weapon.‎

The disastrous end result of this mass genuflection was the acceleration of Iran’s nuclear program ‎through the infusion of billions of dollars into its coffers. Even more unfathomable was what the ‎ultimate agreement — called, oddly, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — included: a clause ‎handing over the responsibility for monitoring activity at Iran’s nuclear facilities to members of its ‎parliament. It would be funny if it weren’t so horrifying. Indeed, the Iranian regime was chuckling, ‎while Israel and others in the West who opposed the JCPOA winced and braced for fallout.‎

When Trump won the U.S. presidential election in November, however, the ayatollahs suddenly ‎stopped laughing. Touted by all Democrats and many Republicans as crazy, unpredictable and a loose ‎cannon, the real estate mogul and reality TV star who took to Twitter and other platforms to bash his ‎detractors made Tehran extremely nervous. The shift from a White House and State Department ‎characterized by appeasement to America’s enemies — refusing even to name them as Islamists — to ‎an administration headed by someone who declared that it would be necessary to perform extreme ‎vetting of Muslims entering the United States could not have been sharper.‎

We all know about the Obama administration’s lies and treachery regarding Benghazi. But how many of you know about the Obama administration’s lies and treachery against the American families of the Americans ambushed and murdered on the orders of Raul Castro?

Thought so … Well, please read on:

You see, amigos: This week 21 years ago three U.S. citizens and one legal U.S. resident who belonged to a humanitarian volunteer organization known as “Brothers to the Rescue” were busy at their volunteer humanitarian jobs when Raul Castro (then head of Cuba’s military) gave orders for his air force to ambush and murder them. Raul Castro himself boasted about these orders.

These American volunteer workers were tangibly saving more innocent lives (countless men, women and children) than most Peace Corp workers or “community-organizers” could ever show for their work, despite all the media hype.

You see, amigos: Twenty times as many people (men, women, children) have died trying to escape Castro’s Cuba as died trying to escape East Germany. So during the mid-1990s a volunteer outfit known as Brothers to the Rescue based in south Florida flew unarmed Cessnas over the Florida Straits alerting the U.S. Coast Guard to the location of these desperate escapees from Stalinism and keeping many from joining the terrible tally of death by drowning, dehydration or getting ripped apart and eaten alive by sharks. By 1996 these American humanitarian volunteers had flown 1,800 missions and helped rescue 4,200 men, women and children.

Considering how prior to Castroism Cuba was swamped with more immigrants per-capita (mostly from Europe) than was the U.S.–considering how people once clamored to enter Cuba–the exodus from Castroite Cuba and the rescue flights were viewed by Castro (and his innumerable U.S. agents-of influence) as very bad publicity for the Stalinist regime.

So in preparation to murder Brothers to the Rescue (the historic Castroite remedy for this type of thing) Castro infiltrated a KGB-trained spy named Gerardo Hernandez into south Florida and into the humanitarian group. On Feb, 24, 1996, Hernandez passed to Castro the flight plan for one of the Brothers’ humanitarian flights over the straits.

With this info in hand, Castro’s MIGS ambushed and blasted apart (in international air space) the lumbering and utterly defenseless Cessnas, murdering the four humanitarian volunteers. Three of these murdered men were U.S. citizens, one was a Marine who volunteered for two tours in Vietnam.

The murdered Armando Alejandre Jr. came to the U.S. at age ten in 1960. His first order of business when he reached the age of 18 was fulfilling his dream of becoming a U.S. citizen. His next was joining the United States Marine corps and volunteering for service in Vietnam. He returned with several decorations. As a member of Brothers to the Rescue he often dropped flowers over the sea, in memory of the thousands they’d been unable to rescue in time.

A man with a weapon or with both hands free to fight has always palsied the Castros with fright. The notion of Raul Castro facing a United States Marine in combat mode is simply laughable, in a pathetic sort of way. So Castro waited for Alejandro and his brothers to be carrying flowers–and made his move, ambushing and murdering them in cold blood. Migs against Cessnas, cannon and rockets against flowers.