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HOMELAND SECURITY

Our Disunity Is a National Security Threat The military now reflects the selfishness and fragmentation of our culture. Welcome to the looting-the-treasury phase of imperial decline. By Christopher Roach

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.

Democrats are systematically destroying our military By Andrea Widburg

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.

The High Cost of Low American Military Spending Ukraine’s lesson: Deterrence isn’t about preventing only nuclear war. Walter Russell Mead

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.

America, World War III, and Space-Based Missile Defense America needs an immediate, robust program for space-based missile and hypersonic weapons defense before our enemies exploit our weakness. By Brandon J. Weichert

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. 

America’s Woke Military Has Never Been This Weak But Biden’s National Security Strategy says diversity is our strength. by Daniel Greenfield

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.”

It’s Official: Joe Biden Is the Absolute Worst Protector of the Border in U.S. History By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/10/23/its-official-joe-biden-is-the-absolute-worst-protector-of-the-border-in-u-s-history-n1639289

The U.S. fiscal year ends on September 30, which means the final numbers on illegal aliens attempting to cross our border are in. There were 227,000 attempted border crossers in September — the highest September numbers in history. The total attempted border crossers for FY 2022 were 2.3 million — also the highest ever recorded.

Buried in the Border Patrol release was the fact that 20 known or suspected terrorists were caught at the border in September, bringing the total number of terrorists captured at the border in 2022 to 98.

“While failing regimes in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua continued to drive a new wave of migration across the western Hemisphere, the number of Venezuelans arriving at the southern border decreased sharply nearly every day since we launched additional joint actions with Mexico to reduce irregular migration and create a more fair, orderly and safe process for people fleeing the humanitarian and economic crisis in their country,” CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus said in a press release.

Would you describe this process of getting rid of Venezuelans “fair, orderly and safe”?

El Paso Times:

Border Patrol is moving around migrants it intends to expel to Mexico in what it calls “lateral transfers” to reduce overcrowding in its holding facilities in El Paso and to keep from further overwhelming Juárez, where hundreds of Venezuelans have been left on the street to fend for themselves and with orders to leave Mexico “by their own means.”

“We’re doing it an effort to decompress the Central Processing Center” in El Paso, said Border Patrol El Paso Sector spokeswoman Valeria Morales. The holding facility in Northeast El Paso has been overcrowded for weeks, amid a sharp increase in migration through the region.

The U.S. Military’s Growing Weakness A new Heritage Foundation report warns about declining U.S. naval and air power.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-growing-military-weakness-heritage-foundation-index-of-u-s-military-strength-navy-air-force-army-11666029967?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Americans like to think their military is unbeatable if politicians wouldn’t get in the way. The truth is that U.S. hard power isn’t what it used to be. That’s the message of the Heritage Foundation’s 2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength, which is reported here for the first time and describes a worrisome trend.

Heritage rates the U.S. military as “weak” and “at growing risk of not being able to meet the demands of defending America’s vital national interests.” The weak rating, down from “marginal” a year earlier, is the first in the index’s nine-year history.

***

The index measures the military’s ability to prevail in two major regional conflicts at once—say, a conflict in the Middle East and a fight on the Korean peninsula. Americans might wish “that the world be a simpler, less threatening place,” as the report notes. But these commitments are part of U.S. national-security strategy.

Heritage says the U.S. military risks being unable to handle even “a single major regional conflict” as it also tries to deter rogues elsewhere. The Trump Administration’s one-time cash infusion has dried up. Pentagon budgets aren’t keeping up with inflation, and the branches are having to make trade-offs about whether to be modern, large, or ready to fight tonight. The decline is especially acute in the Navy and Air Force.

The Navy has been saying for years it needs to grow to at least 350 ships, plus more unmanned platforms. Yet the Navy has shown a “persistent inability to arrest and reverse the continued diminution of its fleet,” the report says. By one analysis it has under-delivered on shipbuilding plans by 10 ships a year on average over the past five years.

From 2005 to 2020, the U.S. fleet grew to 296 warships from 291, while China’s navy grew to 360 from 216. War isn’t won on numbers alone, but China is also narrowing the U.S. technological advantage in every area from aircraft carrier catapults to long-range missiles.

The Pentagon’s Recruiting Woes Fewer young people want or are able to serve, a big problem for U.S. security.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pentagons-recruitment-woes-army-military-navy-air-force-u-s-defense-11665664019?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The U.S. Army recently told the press that it missed its fiscal year recruiting goal by 25%, coming up short nearly 20,000 soldiers. For 50 years America has relied on volunteers to defend the country, but that system is a luxury maintained at a cost, and its struggles deserve attention.

The Army’s troubles are acute but not unique. The Air Force barely hit its numbers for 2022. The Navy met its targets for enlisted sailors but came up short about 200 officers. Both the Navy and Air Force had to dip into “delayed entry” pools of recruits usually kept in a holding pattern for later, which means the services will start a new recruiting year in an even tougher position. The numbers are worse in the reserves.

Several factors are contributing to the shortfall. Fewer than one-quarter of Americans ages 17 to 24 are eligible to serve, and the reasons for disqualification include obesity, addiction and criminal history. The decision to close high schools during the pandemic kept recruiters at bay and left many teens mentally unwell, another disqualification.

Record job openings and Covid transfer payments hurt enlistment, but the problems run deeper. Fewer than one in 10 youth are inclined to serve, according to survey data. Dismal civic education hasn’t helped; teenagers taught to think America is a racist or imperialist country won’t wear the uniform.

Cybersecurity Awareness: Chuck Brooks

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cybersecurity-awareness-chuck-brooks

With another National Cybersecurity Awareness Month upon us, few major things have changed from the past year in terms of threats. As the capabilities and connectivity of cyber devices have grown, so have the cyber intrusions from malware and hackers. The cyber- threat actor ecosystem has grown in both size and sophistication. They are also openly collaborating in sharing targets. And tools. The cyber threat actors include various criminal enterprises, loosely affiliated hackers, and adversarial nation states.

Information sharing on threats and risk is one of the most principal functions of government and industry collaboration.

Achieving a full awareness of nefarious actors who operate in the cyber realm and protecting against their capabilities is an arduous task. Clearly, industry cannot respond to growing cyber-threats alone, especially for small and medium businesses who lack the resources and expertise. Increased government and industry cooperation to meet those challenges is a viable course to help mitigate threats and challenges. It is a proven risk management model that makes good sense. In several areas.

Information sharing on threats and risk is one of the most principal functions of government and industry collaboration. Sharing such information helps allow both government and industry to keep abreast of the latest viruses, malware, phishing threats, ransomware, and insider threats. Information sharing also establishes working protocols for lessons-learned and resilience that is critical for the success of commerce and the enforcement against cyber-crimes.

Both Solar Winds and the Colonial pipeline breaches highlighted the government’s assistance in mitigating breaches and moving toward resilience. Government was directly collaborating with the companies to discover the extent of the breaches and options for amelioration.

Remediation of breaches is important to continuity; no matter what, breaches will happen. The incorporation of best practices and the lessons learned from the various and many corporate breaches over the past few years is certainly valuable data for both industry and government in terms of prevention, recovery, and continuity.

US Intelligence Warning: China Escalating Influence Operations by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18904/us-intelligence-warning-china-escalating

One of the organizations that US intelligence explicitly warned against is the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), which describes itself as a “national people’s organization engaged in people-to-people diplomacy of the People’s Republic of China.”

In reality, the organization is a front for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) foreign influence efforts. It has been operating successfully in the US for decades, especially by forging numerous sister-city relationships with US cities to influence local US political, business, media, and educational leaders. There are more than two hundred sister city pairs and fifty sister state/province partnerships between the US and China. Such partnerships, according to US intelligence, can also include business, technical, cultural, and educational exchanges between U.S. and Chinese communities.

China uses the same tactics when it comes to US business leaders: In 2021, “the PRC Embassy in Washington sent letters to select U.S. business leaders urging them to lobby the U.S. Congress to reject bills the PRC opposed, including bills designed to increase U.S. competitiveness vis-à-vis China….

[T]hese politicians have a strong incentive to remain uninformed. The focus is typically on economic and cultural ties and it’s easy to pretend that there is no political element… however, these local ties are in fact highly political…. This is the tactic of ‘use the countryside to surround the city'”. — Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World, 2021

China is doubling down on its efforts to influence state and local government leaders in the United States by exploiting the existing web of regional and local US-China relations, one of the main US intelligence agencies, the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC), warned in July.