RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-defense-budget-fiscal-2024-pentagon-army-navy-air-force-china-russia-573e4bea?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

China’s Xi Jinping traveled to Moscow this week to commune with Vladimir Putin, cementing the new axis against the U.S. Compare that scene to President Biden’s proposed fiscal 2024 defense budget, which isn’t serious about matching American military power to growing threats.

To the extent the press is covering Mr. Biden’s $842 billion Pentagon budget, it is to note the number is large. Yet defense spending at 3% of the economy is low by historical standards. The Pentagon says the proposal is a 0.8% real increase over fiscal 2023, but that is based on an inflation fantasy. This is a defense cut, and not from an epiphany of fiscal restraint. Mr. Biden is choosing to put welfare entitlements over national security. The risks of his choice are worth examining:

• A Navy in shoal waters. The U.S. Navy is the beat cop for deterring bad behavior in the Pacific, but the U.S. fleet would shrink to 291 ships by 2028 from 297 now. The Biden Pentagon wants to retire ships prematurely, such as the cruiser USS Vicksburg, which taxpayers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade for longer service.

The Navy is also telling the U.S. Marines to find another ride to work, declining to buy any San Antonio-class amphibious warships. This will wreak havoc on the production line and make it harder to grow the Navy to 355 ships, as Congress says it wants.

The Navy failed to submit a shipbuilding plan, and an institution that can’t articulate its strategy or reason for existing won’t command public support to grow. The Navy is already struggling to buy and maintain enough of the best platforms for deterring China, such as the Virginia-class attack submarine.

• An under-powered Air Force. The Air Force deserves points for buying 72 fighters, which is the minimum needed to keep inventory stable. Meanwhile, the service asks to retire 310 aircraft, and some of this is inevitable. The F-15C/Ds leaving Okinawa with no permanent replacement are structurally exhausted; the A-10 is 40 years old and too rudimentary to operate against adversaries like China.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/u-s-military-recruiting-numbers-dip-to-record-lows/

It will come as no surprise to patriots, but it may surprise the Leftists who are sure that they can keep using Americans who love this country as their drones and cannon fodder on an indefinite basis: hardly anyone wants to join Old Joe Biden’s woke military. That’s perfectly understandable. Why go through all the trouble of going through training and risk getting sent to some unnecessary war when you can learn about Critical Race Theory and get vaccinated right at home? Recruitment levels are lower than they’ve been in decades, and instead of doing something about it, Biden’s handlers are working to drive the morale of military personnel even lower.

According to a Sunday report from WTOV in Steubenville, Ohio, “in 2022, the U.S. Army fell 15,000 recruits short of its goal.” Francis Nwiah, captain and commander, U.S. Army Bridgeport Recruiting, said, “It’s a national security concern. We are struggling to get folks into the Army right now.” Nwiah blamed the Shanghai Sniffles: “We got hit by COVID, that affected our modus operandi and how we operate as recruiters.” He didn’t say anything about relentless Leftist indoctrination and the politicization of the military, however, and that’s more likely to be the problem.

To try to get the recruitment numbers back up, the Army is spending $117 million to dust off its 1980s slogan, “Be All You Can Be,” and that’s terrific, because the slogan has so much more resonance now than it did in the Reagan era. Now a male recruit may decide that he wants to be all that he can be by becoming a female recruit, and the Army (using your money, of course) will pay for surgery to reinforce his delusion.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/gen-milley-wont-stop-russia-from-retrieving-u-s-drone-wreckage/

The profiles in courage just keep coming.

Three U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence said the highest levels of the Kremlin approved the aggressive actions of Russian military fighter jets against a U.S. military drone over the Black Sea on Tuesday.

The Russian jets dropped jet fuel on the MQ-9 Reaper, an unprecedented action, and two of the officials said the intelligence suggests the intent seemed to be to throw the drone off course or disable its surveillance capabilities.

It was “Russian leadership’s intention to be aggressive in the intercept,” said one of the officials.

Russia then followed that up by announcing it was going to retrieve the wreckage to count coup and gain whatever intel they liked.

Russia will attempt to retrieve and study the wreckage of the American MQ-9 drone that crashed into the Black Sea after being harassed by Russian fighter jets.

Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council, told Rossiya-1 TV on Wednesday that he was not certain the drone could be extricated from the water.

Gen. Milley is on the case though.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-budget-defense-pentagon-china-russia-ukraine-ae4f9adf?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The White House is touting President Biden’s U.S. military budget for fiscal 2024 as a record, and Mr. Biden is betting busy Americans won’t look past the headlines. The truth is that he’s asking for a real defense cut, even as the U.S. is waking up late to a world of new threats.

The Pentagon’s budget request may seem large at $842 billion. But the figure is only a 3.2% increase over last year, and with inflation at 6% it means a decline in buying power. Compare the 3.2% growth with the double-digit increases for domestic accounts: 19% for the Environmental Protection Agency; 13.6% for both the Education and Energy Departments; 11.5% for Health and Human Services.

For all the talk about a bloated Pentagon, defense in 2022 was only about 13% of the federal budget. It’s about 3% of GDP, down from 5% to 6% during the Cold War, even though America’s challenges today are arguably more numerous and acute.

China is building a world-class military to drive America out of the Pacific. Russia is committed to grinding down Ukraine and then moving its military to the Polish border; Iran may soon have a nuclear bomb; North Korea is lobbing missiles toward Japan. Hypersonics and missiles threaten the U.S. homeland.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/who-pandemic-treaty-the-back-door-to-ccp-control-over-america/

America’s enemies never stop scheming about the ways in which they can bring the United States down. China, our greatest external strategic enemy, already has a plan to gain control of America through the next pandemic and United Nations agency channels. The first stage of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) accomplishing this was gaining controlling influence over the U.N.’s World Health Organization (WHO), which was achieved when the Chinese groomed Tedros Adhanom Ghbreyesus as a candidate and then got him elected as Director-General of the WHO in 2017.

The WHO’s misguided recommendations and harmful policy responses to the Covid-19 China virus included lockdowns and disruptions of holidays; school, church, synagogue, and business closures; social distancing and masking that retarded children’s’ social development—all of which led to economic contraction, bankruptcies, supply chain disruptions and inflation. That record doesn’t enhance the WHO’s trust factor, and its ability to deal with future health emergencies and pandemics. In fact, the CCP views the WHO’s COVID-19 policy results in terms of power politics rather than health care results. The COVID-19 responses are part of a test run analysis for the greater medical tyranny they may impose with the next health emergency or pandemic.

The second stage of the CCP’s gaining control of American health care policy is to forge an agreement between the WHO and its member states (including the U.S.) in which they all  enter into a “legally binding” accord that would give the United Nations health agency the authority to dictate policies during a pandemic.

Admittedly, Biden may be compelled to turn over the sovereignty of U.S. health care policy to the China-controlled World Health Organization (WHO) because of the CCP’s preponderant controlling influence of the Biden administration. We know from the sworn testimony of Tony Bobulinksi, the former business partner of Hunter Biden,  that the Biden family has been “compromised” by Chinese money.  We know from the Hunter Biden laptop records that the monetary value of that compromise involving multiple Chinese deals was at least $31 million, which is significant bribe money.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-spy-balloon-biden-administration-trump-administration-pentagon-glen-vanherck-11675724569?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The U.S. Navy is fishing fragments of a Chinese spy balloon out of the Atlantic Ocean, and each fresh detail about this episode raises new and troubling questions. A striking example is the news from the Biden Administration that previous Chinese balloon incursions into the U.S. appear to have gone undetected. This suggests there’s a major hole in U.S. defenses that needs closing.

A senior defense official told reporters on Feb. 2 that a balloon incursion “has happened a handful of other times over the past few years, to include before this Administration. It is appearing to hang out for a long period of time this time around, more persistent than in previous instances.”

The Biden Team was leaking over the weekend that balloons had snuck into U.S. airspace during the Trump Administration, and the obvious implication was to absolve President Biden of political blame. More than one media outfit took the bait. But then Trump officials started denying on the record that they’d ever heard of such an event—from former national security adviser John Bolton to Defense Secretary Mark Esper to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The Administration’s attempt to muddy responsibility is bad enough, but the revelation that at least three past balloon flights evaded U.S. notice is alarming. “I will tell you that we did not detect those threats,” Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck of U.S. Northern Command told reporters on Monday. In Pentagon argot for the ages, he called it “a domain awareness gap.” The U.S. government ostensibly pieced the puzzle together later with the help of the intelligence community.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-balloon-surveillance-montana-beijing-biden-administration-xi-jinping-antony-blinken-11675461302?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday postponed his visit to Beijing scheduled for next week after a suspicious Chinese balloon was spotted over Montana. Good decision. But the public deserves to know more about this episode, and one uncomfortable lesson is that the U.S. homeland is increasingly vulnerable.

The Pentagon said Thursday night it had “detected and is tracking a high-altitude surveillance balloon” over the U.S. F-22 fighter jets and other assets were sent to examine the balloon, and one question is why the U.S. didn’t shoot it out of the sky. The Pentagon admits it’s been lurking in sovereign U.S. air space for “a couple of days,” notably near bases for U.S. nuclear missiles.

The military brass advised against shooting down the balloon, though the stated reason—risk of debris—seems manageable. No one doubts China would have shot down an American asset wandering over its bases. The Pentagon won’t say whether it may take out the balloon once it’s over water.

Beijing’s official explanation is that this is merely a hapless “civilian airship” that made a wrong turn and . . . ended up near U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile bases. “China regrets that the airship strayed into the United States,” the foreign ministry said.

So the balloon heads over the Aleutians, strays over Canada, but China acknowledges the balloon only after the U.S. announces it has been discovered over Montana? This isn’t believable, and the patent dishonesty will add to the U.S. public’s growing mistrust of China.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/paula-bolyard/2023/02/02/breaking-pentagon-admits-theres-a-chinese-spy-balloon-hovering-over-the-united-states-n1667467

The Pentagon admitted on Thursday that the U.S. military has been monitoring what’s being described as a Chinese “surveillance balloon” hovering in the skies over the United States for days.

“The United States government has detected and is tracking a high-altitude surveillance balloon that is over the continental United States right now,” Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told NBC News. “We continue to track and monitor it closely.” Officials have confirmed that the balloon belongs to China.

“Once the balloon was detected, the U.S. government acted immediately to protect against the collection of sensitive information,” Ryder said.

“The official said there was a window while the balloon was over Montana Wednesday when they could have taken it down. NORAD sent aircraft — including F-22 Raptors from Nellis Air Force Base and airborne early warning aircraft known as AWACs — but the official would not say whether one of the options was to shoot the balloon out of the sky with a U.S. aircraft,” NBC reported. “The U.S. military flights prompted a ground stop at the airport in Billings, with air traffic controllers citing a ‘special military mission.’”

According to the Montana Free Press, “The Air Force at Malmstrom [Air Force Base] maintains 150 intercontinental ballistic missile silos across its 13,800-square-mile complex in central Montana.”

Biden refused to answer questions shouted at him by reporters Thursday afternoon.

Officials say the balloon flew over the Aleutian Islands and through Canada before settling over the Billings, Mont., area. The balloon is still hovering somewhere over the United States, according to a senior defense official who declined to say where it is now.