RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/30/report-china-orders-largest-military-build-up-since-1930s-germany/

According to a report by a national security expert, the People’s Republic of China has ordered the largest military build-up of any nation in the world since Germany in the 1930s, raising concerns about the military threat presented by China.

As Fox News reports, the claims were made in an article in The Federalist written by Chuck DeVore, the chief national initiatives officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. DeVore points out that while the American military has spent over $5.4 trillion on wasted wars such as the “War on Terror” and subsequent attempts at “nation-building,” China has been strengthening its military.

“China is engaging in an unprecedented military build-up that the world frankly hasn’t seen since Adolf Hitler in the 1930s,” said DeVore in an interview following the publication of his article.

“They’re massively building up their nuclear arsenal. We expect it to expand to at least 1,000 warheads by 2030, only five years from now. Probably going to be bigger than that,” DeVore explained. “The Chinese Navy, not by tonnage, but by numbers is now larger than the U.S. Navy. China has something like 250 times the ship building capacity that America does.”

Among other expansions, China has increased the arsenal of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) by 50 new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), bringing the new total to around 400. The Department of Defense (DOD) also reports that 300 more medium-range ballistic missiles and 100 long-range cruise missiles have also been added. China currently has over 600 operational nuclear warheads, and is expected to increase that total to over 1,000 by the year 2030.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/12/our_woke_military.html

Harris/Biden military officials have denied their addiction to DEI, CRT and wokeness in general has had anything to do with the alarming decline in enlistments. Only the Marine Corps has been largely immune to a dearth of enlistees. It seems they’ve done their best to avoid the worst aspects of woke lunacy, or perhaps their historic focus on destroying American’s enemies has helped convince prospective Marines they might have to put up with some woke nonsense, but it won’t keep them from being Marines.

Our service academies, as one would expect of educational institutions, have apparently gone gladly woke, the Air Force Academy in particular:

Graphic: X Screenshot

Judicial Watch announced today that it received 478 pages of records from the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA), a component of the United States Department of Defense, which includes instructional materials and emails that address topics such as Critical Race Theory, “white privilege,” and Black Lives Matter.

The Academy’s descent into woke insanity is fully as bad as one might expect:

The presentation includes a set of tables with the headline “White Americans’ Support for Democratic Candidates for President as a Function of Old-Fashioned Racism.” Another slide depicts tables which purport to show “Correlations between Republican Party Identification and Old-Fashioned Racism among White Americans.”

That theme persists:

A “CRT Talking Points” document prepared at the direction of the Air Force Academy Superintendent includes the question “Does CRT teach cadets to hate our country?” The scripted “academic answer” to the question asserts, “much of what is ‘divisive’ [about CRT] is that it’s hard for people to hear the words ‘white supremacy’ without feeling defensive, even though that is the academically correct way to talk about most of American history.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/jihad-never-sleeps/

The age of modern jihadism began in 1928 with the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, itself a reaction to the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924. Eighty years later Osama bin Laden called that event a “catastrophe” and a “humiliation and disgrace,” for it marked the culmination of the infidel West’s domination of Islam, the religion of some of the greatest warriors in history.

The purpose of the Muslim Brotherhood was to restore Islam to the global power and dominance of Christendom it had wielded for a millennium; and to return Islam to its divine destiny, which founder Hasan al-Bana wrote is “to dominate not to be dominated, to impose its laws [Sharia] on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

Most Westerners didn’t notice or think about the loss of the Caliphate and the epochal shift in the geopolitical order, especially since their secularist culture had relentlessly been diminishing the role of Christianity in our culture and civilization. By the Thirties, Hilaire Belloc could write, “Millions of modern people . . . have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them.”

Despite the gruesome bloody reminders on 9/11 that jihadism and Islam were still a threat, many of our credentialed cognitive elites dismissed criticism of Islam’s doctrines, especially jihad, as Islamophobic slanders and bigotry. Moreover, although the outcome of Hamas’ butchery on Oct. 7 last year seems to be a failure, it is itself an object lesson in the continuing danger of jihadist violence. The collapse of Bashar al Assad’s regime in Syria, mostly at the hands of jihadist forces, should be a warning that jihad never sleeps, and we should not blind ourselves to its nature as documented in Islam’s doctrines and historical practice.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/drones-shut-down-strategic-wright-patterson-air-force-base/

“Unknown drone activity forced one of the U.S.’s most critical military installations to shut down for several hours late Friday evening and Saturday morning,” Newsweek reported on Monday. The incident, confirmed by base officials, “prompted heightened security measures and temporarily halted operations at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.” Home to the 88th Air Base Wing, Wright-Patterson is “one of the largest and most strategically important bases in the U.S., tasked with advanced research, intelligence, and operations.”

The shut-down follows sightings of unidentified “SUV-sized” drones in New Jersey but the Biden White House, Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security claim there’s no threat to national security. Locals and politicians alike want the government to shoot down the drones, but Biden DHS boss Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters that’s not possible.

The drones pose “no threat or nefarious activity,” but they can’t be shot down because “our authorities are limited by the United States Coast Guard in the maritime environment, the United States Secret Service in its protection of our national leaders, US Customs and Border Protection with respect to the border.” And civilians attempting to shoot down a drone “would be dangerous.”

Embattled Americans might compare that response to the massive surveillance balloon China sent across the country in early 2023, which the Biden-Harris administration allowed to enter U.S. air space unannounced. China’s craft was first spotted by photographers while overflying Montana. The Billings Gazette published the photos, quickly picked up by national media. Only then did American officials respond.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21229/countdown-to-chaos-inauguration

While much national attention is on the first 100 days of the Trump 2.0 presidency, there is growing reason to be concerned about the final days of Joe Biden’s term.

Among those with a powerful interest in disrupting the peaceful transfer of power to a new Trump administration are: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), world government globalists, Sharia-supremacists, deep state bureaucrats and assorted homegrown and foreign-enabled terrorists, jihadists, and other revolutionaries.

These hostile forces’ ability to create chaos in the United States – especially collectively – cannot safely be ignored.

While much national attention is on the first 100 days of the Trump 2.0 presidency, there is growing reason to be concerned about the final days of Joe Biden’s term.

Among those with a powerful interest in disrupting the peaceful transfer of power to a new Trump administration are: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), world government globalists, Sharia-supremacists, deep state bureaucrats and assorted homegrown and foreign-enabled terrorists, jihadists, and other revolutionaries.

These hostile forces’ ability to create chaos in the United States – especially collectively – cannot safely be ignored.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/11/clown-commandant/

“President Trump can change this. He could start by relieving Smith of command and promoting an officer with a functioning brain to stand in his stead.We need serious reform in the Department of Defense. That change should start at the top. I, for one, would like to see my former branch become a serious warfighting organization. The Marine Corps is not a circus, and the Commandant should not be a clown.”

In recent comments at the Ronald Reagan Foundation and Institute’s National Defense Forum, General Eric Smith, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, stated that America could defeat China in a war because of our combat experience in the Middle East.

“The advantage lies with us because our last combat was captured on somebody’s iPhone 14… The Chinese’ last combat was captured on oil and canvas, and they should not forget that… I would not undersell the value that our combat experience brings to this fight.”

Smith went on to praise America’s “warrior culture”:

“It is easy to bluster. But it’s another thing when you actually have to go toe-to-toe and go in harm’s way. And we have a lengthy history of going in harm’s way—in Iraq, Afghanistan. We’ve built a culture of warrior excellence, warfighting, and interoperability in the joint force. The PRC has not yet had to deal with that. They haven’t had to deal with that in decades.”

These claims are remarkably stupid. For one, the Chinese’ last combat was not captured on “oil and canvas.”

The United States fought—and lost—a war with China in living memory! That combat was captured not in paintings but in photos and videos. Communist China intervened in the Korean War after UN troops pushed to the Yalu River on the border of North Korea and China in 1950.

Communist troops from the People’s Liberation Army pushed American and United Nations forces south in a series of bloody engagements that fall. The Battle of the Chosin Reservoir in November 1950 is well-known to Marines (save for General Smith) for the brutality of the cold conditions. Chinese forces pushed the Marines back to the 38th parallel, but we inflicted heavy losses in the process.

American troops displayed great bravery, but it should be noted that the conflict was a disaster for the Americans.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/01/the-new-cold-war-is-at-sea/

Since the end of Operation Desert Storm and the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. Department of Defense has failed to maintain one of the principal dictates of great power competition—the necessity of having a well-balanced military force. This deficiency has been most evident in the maritime domain. Tellingly, the size of the U.S. Navy has shrunk from about 600 warships in 1986 to just over 290 ships today. This decline in the size, and capabilities, of the U.S. Navy occurred in large part because the nation’s leader was obsessed with what has been termed as “endless wars”—those fought in the land domains of the Middle East (ME), Southwest Asia (SWA), and now Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, this myopic focus on ground war has occurred just as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has conducted the largest naval build-up and modernization of any nation since the end of World War II.

The reality of these two diametrically opposed trendlines was brought to a head this past week by a series of announcements from both the PRC and U.S., which signals what can be declared as the end of “endless ground wars” and what should be a return to a balanced national defense strategy—namely one that includes the foundational importance of maritime power—something that has been sorely neglected over the past three decades.

The first announcement was made by the PRC’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi who made the unusual statement that “China is ready to work with other countries to use the three global initiatives as an opportunity to elevate global maritime governance and improve the well-being of all people.” Since coming to power in late 2012, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping has implemented three global governance initiatives: the Global Development Initiative in September 2021, the Global Security Initiative in April 2022, and the Global Civilization Initiative in March 2023.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/01/isis-plots-its-return/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

The West can’t afford passivity

We are living through a momentous phase in the twilight struggle against the Islamic State. In the past year or so, the jihadist outfit has been an increasingly assertive presence in Syria’s hinterland, deploying a band of “holy warriors” to resurrect its dream of ruling a caliphate. Once more, an armed rebellion has blossomed there against the U.S.-led coalition, and, unless put down in short order, it promises to bring about an Islamic State resurgence.

The gathering of jihadist forces and the corresponding explosion of violence could prove potent enough to engulf Syria and consolidate another state with no law but God’s — a supposed kingdom of heaven on earth. This year, the pace of Islamic State attacks in Syria and Iraq has doubled. The primary targets have been U.S. garrisons in Syria and units of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Kurdish-led troops who worked with the U.S. to defeat ISIS five years ago. The jihadists’ immediate objective has been to curtail counterterrorism patrols and free thousands of their confederates who have languished in jail since the SDF and the U.S.-led coalition swept away the final remnant of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate at Baghuz in March 2019.

Since shattering the Islamic State, the U.S. has maintained a small military footprint in Syria and Iraq to keep the peace. U.S. warplanes carry out air strikes and provide live aerial surveillance to SDF ground forces that conduct raids on suspected Islamic State cells. Occasionally, American commandos conduct missions of their own to kill or capture senior Islamic State leaders. This year, the SDF has reportedly captured 233 Islamic State fighters in 28 operations, while American aircraft have conducted three strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria and one in Iraq. This level of activity mirrors that of 2023, when the U.S. carried out four strikes against the Islamic State.

Bolstering the tepid military campaign in Syria and Iraq is a necessary precondition to staving off the ISIS resurgence.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21133/the-next-war-attacks-on-us-digital-infrastructure

It’s an old saying repeated by military strategists who consistently warn, “Don’t prepare to fight the last war…”

Their inference is that, while there are lessons to be learned from studying the last conflict, the next one may well be profoundly different than what you previously endured, catching a nation totally unprepared.

For America, the “next one” may already be upon us. It is not the scenario we anticipated, namely enemy aircraft coming over the pole to attack with nuclear weapons, or a catastrophic exchange of ICBMs. Even the lessons gained from the current Russian war on Ukraine may not be fully applicable to America’s defense of the homeland.

Consider the current assault as revealed in media reports. Chinese hackers sought to target the mobile phones of then-presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and intercepted data meant for our law enforcement agencies.

A sworn enemy, Iran, is also looking to wage their war against “The Great Satan” by seeking to hit our nation’s most vulnerable targets: our digital infrastructure.

Meanwhile, today’s Pentagon is wrestling with multibillion dollar projects that are not going well. The Army has been stymied in developing a new attack helicopter, at a cost to the taxpayer that is staggering.

The Air Force is still profoundly unhappy with its next generation tanker aircraft built by Boeing, and rightfully so.

The Navy lost an aircraft carrier to an accidental fire.