RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-admin-allows-chine-to-fly-spy-balloon-over-montana/

China knows what it’s doing. It pushes harder and harder because it knows that western nations are weak and will back down.

And we never disappoint.

The U.S. tracked what officials described as a Chinese reconnaissance balloon over the continental states this week, in what would be an aggressive act of intelligence gathering over sensitive American national security sites.

The balloon sighting came days before Secretary of State Antony Blinken was to make a planned trip to Beijing, according to U.S. officials, throwing into question efforts to repair relations between the two powers who are at odds over a host of global and regional issues.

There’s nothing accidental about the timing.

Two Air Force F-22 fighters scrambled from Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada to Montana, where the balloon was observed, before the administration decided not to shoot it down.

Shooting it down would be aggressive. It would mean committing and taking a stand. So that’s a no-go.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/catherinesalgado/2023/01/31/biden-dhs-released-564-criminal-illegals-into-u-s-in-january-2023-n1666724

While falsely boasting that the number of illegal alien crossings dropped significantly in January, the Biden administration was distracting from another aspect of the southern border crisis — the fact that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released 564 criminal illegals from detention and into America just in the first 30 days of 2023. Because the Biden administration doesn’t care a bit about Americans’ safety.

Breitbart explained the new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data that highlights the ugly realities of the Biden border crisis. Between Jan. 1 and Jan. 30, 2023, the DHS released 564 illegal aliens “with criminal convictions and those with pending criminal charges against them” into the U.S. interior. From December 2022 through January 30, 2023, nearly 1,000 illegal alien convicts were released into America, as well as over 1,200 illegals with pending criminal charges, making about 2,200 convicted or charged criminals. Remember that the next time Democrats claim they want gun confiscation — I mean, gun control — because they care about keeping the American people safe.

Most illegal alien criminals released this January were through an “order of recognizance,” Breitbart reports. The DHS released 5,590 illegals altogether into the United States in the first 30 days of 2023, most of them likely to return to the same American communities where they were first arrested by ICE agents. Which makes the arrests seem pretty pointless.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/18/watchdog-pentagon-cant-account-for-220-billion-in-equipment/

On Tuesday, a watchdog report claimed that the Department of Defense (DOD) has still been unable to account for at least $220 billion worth of equipment that had been given to government contractors.

According to the Daily Caller, the report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) noted that auditors first noticed the Pentagon’s failure to keep track of such contractor-loaned equipment back in 2001. The report says that the DOD has not made any improvements to its accountability processes since then, which heightens the possibility of overlooking similar errors in the future.

“This long-standing issue affects the accounting and reporting of GFP and is one of the reasons DOD is unable to produce auditable financial statements,” the GAO report read in part.

The GAO went on to say that when it comes to attempting to identify the causes of such financial deficiencies, the DOD should create an entirely separate plan to address this issue, since “department-wide efforts have not been comprehensive and sufficiently detailed.”

“Without such a strategy, DOD is at an increased risk that its efforts to remediate the [government furnished property] material weakness will continue to be insufficient and that it will continue to miss or push back target remediation dates,” the report continued.

Even more alarming is the likelihood that the given total of $220 billion in unaccounted property may be lower than the actual amount. The GAO noted in its report that there had been past instances of the military admitting that it could not provide an estimate; in 2016, the Army told the GAO that it had an “unknown” number of assets, and that “quantities may be greatly different than the Army’s documented property records reflect.”

Since the DOD had its first audit in 2018, it failed its fifth consecutive audit in November of last year. Of the Pentagon’s roughly $3.5 trillion in assets, contractors were unable to provide expenditures for about 61 percent of the money spent.

“I would not say that we flunked,” said Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord in response to the abysmal report. “The process is important for us to do, and it is making us get better. It is not making us get better as fast as we want.”