RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/23/why-are-we-allowing-dangerous-chinese-tech-companies-to-operate-on-us-soil/

It’s not just TikTok and ByteDance. Chinese tech companies like Alibaba and Baidu are a major threat to U.S. national security.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is synonymous with espionage. The country’s tech companies, we’re told, give the CCP a vital edge. Companies include the likes of Baidu and Alibaba. Why, then, are both operating on U.S. soil?

Alibaba is China’s answer to Amazon. The Chinese multinational technology company specializes in e-commerce, retail, internet, and technology, to name just a few areas. The problematic company has a business presence in dozens of countries, including the United Kingdom, South Korea, Singapore, Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. The fact that Alibaba, very much an ally of the CCP, is operating in the U.S., China’s fiercest rival, is worrisome, to say the least.

It certainly worries Charles Dunst, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Dunst recently wrote an eye-opening article that revolved around a rather sobering shopping experience. Earlier this year, the researcher was shopping at a CVS near his apartment in Virginia. At the self-checkout counter, he scanned for payment options; besides cash and credit/debit cards, other options included Apple Pay, PayPal, and Alipay, Alibaba’s online payment platform. This made Dunst stop and think.

In truth, American retailers have been offering the Alipay option of payment for years, all in an effort to attract more Chinese tourists. The app has at least 4 million users in the United States. Initially, as Dunst noted, the Alipay payment option was confined to luxury shops, “to capture the spending of well-off Chinese tourists.” However, the platform quickly expanded into your average, everyday American stores, like Walgreens, 7/11, and the aforementioned CVS.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-tactical-nuclear-stand-down-china-russia-missile-nuclear-posture-review-11667573622?cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_4&cx_artPos=6&mod=WTRN#cxrecs_s

The Biden Administration has released an unclassified review of American nuclear forces, and buried in the bureaucratic prose is a contradiction. China and Russia are amassing large, diverse nuclear arsenals, but the U.S. is nixing a tactical nuclear missile that could help deter Vladimir Putin and other rogues.

The 2022 Nuclear Posture Review says the Biden Team will cancel the nuclear sea-launched cruise missile, known as SLCM-N, which is a planned smaller “tactical” nuke that could be launched from U.S. Navy ships or submarines. The cancellation isn’t a surprise. The Administration zeroed out the missile in its budget proposal this year.

But the decision is notable for failing to adapt to growing dangers. To quote from the review, China has “embarked on an ambitious expansion, modernization, and diversification of its nuclear forces and established a nascent nuclear triad.” Beijing hopes to have at least 1,000 deliverable warheads by the end of the decade, offering new options to “leverage nuclear weapons for coercive purposes.”

Russia may have an overrated conventional force, but Mr. Putin has an “active stockpile” of up to 2,000 tactical nukes. By the 2030s, the posture review notes, “the United States will, for the first time in its history, face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries.” Ponder that grim reality.

The U.S. will have to improve its weapons stockpiles, missile defenses and conventional military power, and a sea-launched cruise missile is only one small part of the arsenal. But the SLCM-N would give the U.S. an effective military response that can limit destruction if an adversary uses a tactical nuke. No President should have to choose between doing nothing or nuking Moscow. If the U.S. can respond in discriminating fashion to the use of a tactical nuke, an adversary is less likely to go nuclear in the first place.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/former-dod-contract-translator-arrested-for-alleged-ties-to-isis/

A former Department of Defense (DOD) contract interpreter, Mohammad Rafi Mohammadi has been arrested for allegedly having lied about his connection to ISIS in his application for a security clearance in conjunction with his employment by the DOD.

The arrest of this defendant is of great significance however, while information about this case has been published in several news reports but, incredibly, has not been reported by the Justice Department or any other federal agency.

Mohammadi is being prosecuted by the federal government and is alleged to have worked to assist ISIS, the group behind the bombing in Afghanistan that killed 13 American soldiers and grievously wounded many others.

Additionally, the news reports neglected to provide important insight into just how the alleged actions of the defendant may have done significant harm to U.S. national security or ask what should be obvious questions about the way that Mohammadi is being charged.

I will address these issues shortly, but first, let’s begin by reviewing information about this case that Rolling Stone’s article about the arrest provided in its October 18, 2022 report under the title:

CAUGHT

Feds Charge Pentagon Contractor With Lying About Ties to ISIS

Mohammad Rafi Mohammadi worked for the U.S. in Afghanistan. He was also allegedly helping the terrorist group behind a bombing that killed 13 American troops.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-big-one-is-coming-china-russia-charles-richard-u-s-military-11667597291?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed the fading power of America’s military deterrent, a fact that too few of our leaders seem willing to admit in public. So it is encouraging to hear a senior flag officer acknowledge the danger in a way that we hope is the start of a campaign to educate the American public.

“This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup,” Navy Admiral Charles Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, said this week at a conference. “The big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested” for “a long time.”

How bad is it? Well, the admiral said, “As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking. It is sinking slowly, but it is sinking, as fundamentally they are putting capability in the field faster than we are.” Sinking slowly is hardly a consolation. As “those curves keep going,” it won’t matter “how good our commanders are, or how good our horses are—we’re not going to have enough of them. And that is a very near-term problem.”

Note that modifier “near-term.” This is a more urgent vulnerability than most of the political class cares to recognize.

Adm. Richard noted that America retains an advantage in submarines—“maybe the only true asymmetric advantage we still have”—but even that may erode unless America picks up the pace “getting our maintenance problems fixed, getting new construction going.” Building three Virginia-class fast-attack submarines a year would be a good place to start.

The news last year that China tested a hypersonic missile that flew around the world and landed at home should have raised more alarms than it did. It means China can put any U.S. city or facility at risk and perhaps without being detected. The fact that the test took the U.S. by surprise and that it surpassed America’s hypersonic capabilities makes it worse. How we lost the hypersonic race to China and Russia deserves hearings in Congress.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/02/our-disunity-is-a-national-security-threat/

In the lawsuit challenging Harvard’s affirmative action practices, a group of senior retired military officers filed an amicus brief, which argued that maintaining affirmative action was a “national security imperative.” Those signing off include four former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, six former superintendents of the service academies, and 17 retired four-star generals, including Wesley Clark and William McRaven. 

Recruiting an adequate number of troops and increasing their quality also seems pretty important. But we know that recent efforts at recruiting have been a disaster, amplified by the mass expulsion of troops who refused the COVID vaccine. 

While things carried on for a while out of habit, eventually the patriotic, mostly white, rural Americans who formed the backbone of the military started doing an about face. Polls show that fewer veterans now want their kids to follow in their footsteps. Conservative Republicans, once the most stalwart supporters of the military, have lately become more critical and less trusting. 

Woke Military Has Difficulty Recruiting

The reason for these trends is obvious: the military leadership has lost its way and its moral compass. 

As the ruling class ethos has shifted leftward, military leaders have become imitators and flatterers of the powerful. That is, top military leaders have decided to move away from the military’s traditional nonpartisanship and color-blindness and instead identify with the managerial class leftism and identity politics of Washington, D.C. This is why they have gay pride events and talk about “white rage.” They confused this ideology with the values of the country as a whole.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/democrats_are_systematically_destroying_our_military.html

A little over a week ago, the Heritage Foundation issued a report that did not get the attention it deserves. The report is entitled “2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength,” and it details how significantly the U.S. military has declined under the not-so-tender care of the leftists in charge of the White House and the Pentagon. Indeed, if one considers China to be our greatest geopolitical foe, it’s questionable whether our military has the ability to fight, let alone win.

The 2023 Index has an executive summary that pretty much says it all:

As currently postured, the U.S. military is at growing risk of not being able to meet the demands of defending America’s vital national interests. It is rated as weak relative to the force needed to defend national interests on a global stage against actual challenges in the world as it is rather than as we wish it were. This is the logical consequence of years of sustained use, underfunding, poorly defined priorities, wildly shifting security policies, exceedingly poor discipline in program execution, and a profound lack of seriousness across the national security establishment even as threats to U.S. interests have surged.

The summary explains that “The condition of America’s military power is measured in terms of its capability or modernity, capacity for operations, and readiness to handle assigned missions.” These metrics are measured against specific military objectives: defending American soil, successfully concluding a major war that poses a serious threat to America, and preserving “freedom of movement within the global commons (the sea, air, outer space, and cyberspace domains) through which the world conducts its business.” Except for the Marines, which have managed to resist the Pentagon’s “woke” obsessions, every one of America’s forces is in increasingly dire straits.

The threats are those you would expect: Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and other bad actors. What’s depressing is the grades assigned to the various branches of the military.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/military-spending-ukraine-defense-budget-putin-deterrent-taiwan-china-north-korea-entente-supply-chain-11667242695?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Vladimir Putin has reminded us of a forgotten lesson of the Cold War: Deterrence isn’t merely about preventing nuclear war.

The U.S. and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization failed to deter Mr. Putin from launching a conventional war in February, and the costs of that failure—in blood and tears, in the military and economic support needed to keep Ukraine in the fight, in the economic shocks reverberating across Europe, in the food and fuel inflation threatening to destabilize governments across the Global South—continue to mount.

If conventional deterrence also fails against China, and Beijing attacks Taiwan, the costs will be even higher. Ukrainians at least were able to flee from the war zone. Trapped on their island, the people of Taiwan would have no place to go as war engulfed their homes. The shock to the world economy would be almost immeasurably greater. The importance of the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea to world commerce eclipses that of the Black Sea. It isn’t only computer chips whose global supply chain would be crippled by war over Taiwan. Everything made in China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan would become scarce. Global financial markets would tank. Japan and Korea would face critical shortages of fuel and food. Africa and Latin America would face massive economic damage.

Meanwhile, the failure to deter Russia is leading to increased American spending in Europe. We have sent around $20 billion to Ukraine since the invasion began and have dispatched an additional 20,000 troops to Eastern Europe. All this makes sense, but the contrast with our Asian commitments is sobering. Senators are currently working to send Taiwan $10 billion in U.S. aid over the next 10 years, half of what Ukraine has received in eight months of war. The U.S. announced plans to send six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to Australia Monday morning, but the impact was offset by news that up to half the American combat aircraft stationed in Japan will be withdrawn, with no agreed Pentagon plan for permanent replacements.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/28/america-world-war-iii-and-space-based-missile-defense/

The United States is staring down the barrel of another world war. Like previous world wars, the coming conflict will be fought using weapons and tactics with which we are currently unfamiliar—and it will require strategic thinking unlike the kind that dominated the previous century’s conflicts. 

Nuclear weapons, used with great effect in World War II to end that terrible conflict, will likely be used to initiate the next. The likeliest use of these terrible weapons will be by Russia in their unjust war against Ukraine. But, even if Ukraine is not where the atomic devastation occurs, China is very near the point of initiating an invasion against democratic Taiwan. And the mad mullahs of Iran appear on the brink of nuclear weapons breakout—as does the North Korean tinpot dictator, Kim Jong-un. 

It is a question of “when” rather than “if” the nuclear genie is loosed from its bottle.

Nuclear weapons have been with us for decades. We have perfected the murderous science behind these ghastly weapons to the point that great powers, like the United States, Russia, and China, all possess the ability to visit nuclear Armageddon upon each other (and the world). Despite having lived through the harrowing days of the Cold War, the United States never seriously invested in a reliable defense against nuclear weapons. In fact, most American leaders scorned the very concept of building reliable defenses against nuclear weapons as “destabilizing.”

After squandering precious time to develop a viable defense against nuclear weapons, Washington should immediately redirect as many resources as possible to the creation and deployment of space-based defenses as well as other ballistic missile defense systems. 

During the Cold War, the bureaucracy resisted Ronald Reagan’s calls for space-based missile defense on the grounds that the technology to create such a revolutionary system was not yet available (none other than legendary Hungarian-American Dr. Edward Teller, father of the neutron bomb, disagreed with the skeptics). Plus, the naysayers complained, deploying a defensive system into orbit to render nuclear arms obsolete would precipitate the very sort of nuclear attack the defensive system was designed to protect against. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/americas-woke-military-has-never-been-this-weak/

For the first time the Heritage Foundation’s index of American military strength has ranked us as ‘weak’. The index warns that the Army “remains ‘weak’ in capacity with only 62 percent of the force it should have”. And even the Army has admitted that it has missed its recruiting target by 10,000 personnel which is expected to climb to over 20,000 by the end of the next fiscal year.

As Heritage and the Wall Street Journal note, “From 2005 to 2020, the U.S. fleet grew to 296 warships from 291, while China’s navy grew to 360 from 216.” The Navy however is focused on inclusion and diversity. The situation at the Air Force is much worse with the Heritage report warning that “the munitions stockpile” would probably “not support a peer-level fight that lasted more than a few weeks”. But the Air Force is also focused on diversity and inclusion.

The Navy is rated as very weak in capacity and weak in readiness. The Air Force ranks as very weak due to “problems with pilot production and retention, an extraordinarily small amount of time in the cockpit for pilots, and a fleet of aircraft that continues to age”. The Heritage index warns that “there is little doubt that it would struggle in war with a peer competitor”.

The Space Force is described as weak because “there is little evidence that the USSF has improved its readiness to provide nearly real-time support to operational and tactical levels of force operations or that it is ready in any way to execute defensive and offensive counterspace operations.”

Only the Marine Corps is rated as strong. Even our nuclear capabilities are slipping with “Russia and China are aggressively expanding the types and quantities of nuclear weapons in their inventories. Nearly all components of the nuclear enterprise are at a tipping point with respect to replacement or modernization and have no margin left for delays in schedule.”