RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-does-a-navy-sailor-spying-for-china-come-away-with-only-2-years-in-prison/

I have no idea why the DOJ is putting out a press release about this. It seems more like the sort of thing to never mention again.

A U.S. Navy service member was sentenced today to 27 months in prison and ordered to pay a $5,500 fine for transmitting sensitive U.S. military information to an intelligence officer from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in exchange for bribery payments.

According to court documents, Petty Officer Wenheng Zhao, 26, aka Thomas Zhao, of Monterey Park, California, pleaded guilty in October 2023 to one count of conspiring with the intelligence officer and one count of receiving a bribe.

Between August 2021 and at least May 2023, Zhao received at least $14,866 in at least 14 separate bribe payments from the intelligence officer. In exchange for the illicit payments, Zhao secretly collected and transmitted to the intelligence officer sensitive, non-public information regarding U.S. Navy operational security, military trainings and exercises, and critical infrastructure. Zhao entered restricted military and naval installations to collect and record this information.

Zhao transmitted plans for a large-scale maritime training exercise in the Pacific theatre, operational orders and electrical diagrams and blueprints for a Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar system located in Okinawa, Japan.

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/01/03/global_conflicts_expose_dire_us_munitions_shortage_1002444.html

The United States military is severely short on high-end and artillery munitions at a crucial and strategic moment. As the calendar turns to 2024, Ukraine, using bombs and bullets from the United States, continues its slog of a war with Russia with no foreseeable end. Simultaneously, the U.S. continues sending artillery rounds to Israel amidst the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) assault on Hamas in Gaza. In the Indo-Pacific, American tensions with China remain high as Taiwan prepares for a general election with fears of Chinese interference and Chinese leader Xi Jinping promises the reunification of Taiwan with mainland China. In DC, alarm bells ring regarding the dearth of rounds required for these three distinct kinds of conflict. Central to this issue is an American paucity of rare earth minerals indispensable in producing these bombs, shells, and rockets. To address this shortage and ensure the long-term viability of ammo for high-end conflict, the U.S. must invest in and maintain innovative systems for processing and refinement of rare earth minerals.

An Empty Cupboard: A Paucity of Rare Earth Elements

Rare earth minerals – a set of 17 metallic elements – are the essential materials of bombs, bullets, rockets, and missiles. They are critical in manufacturing powerful magnets used in precision-guided munitions. Some rare earth elements possess temperature stability necessary for some high-tech bombs exposed to intense heat during launch toward target, such as the Javelin missiles so crucial to allowing Ukrainian forces to fend off Russian tanks. Rare earths are in the fuzes of the 155mm artillery shells used in enormous volumes by both the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the IDF. Many air-to-air missiles needed in a fight with China, including the AIM-9X Sidewinder missile, require these materials. Rare earths are used to build actuators for many surface-to-ground rockets.

The rare earth minerals are not particularly rare – these materials are bountiful in the earth’s crust. It is rather the production and refinement capability for the use of these materials – turning these elements into usable material – that is scarce within the U.S. The chemical properties of these materials are nearly identical from one another, making it difficult and costly to separate and refine each one for industrial use. The process also incurs environmental hazards that require expensive cleanup, often making large-scale production economically infeasible.

https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2023/12/28/army-numbers-smallest-since-wwii-what-units-face-cuts-in-2024/

The new year will likely prove to be one of significant force structure changes for the Army, according to its senior leaders.

Although the service has maintained for years that embracing multidomain operations will require it to “transform” its force structure into one leaders believe is suited to tomorrow’s battlefield, back-to-back recruiting shortfalls led top officials to admit by mid-to-late 2023 that some pending cuts are influenced by a deepening numbers shortfall. The Army finished fiscal year 2023 with only 452,000 active duty soldiers, its smallest force since 1940.

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told Army Times in June that the service will see reductions to “close-combat forces” that were purpose-built for the War on Terror, in addition to other organizations based on their purpose or other factors like deployment rates.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/02/xi-jinpings-goon-squads/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

At a ritzy gala at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco on November 15, a crowd that included America’s top business leaders twice gave Xi Jinping a standing ovation as he delivered a speech full of reassurances about his fine intentions and the state of the ailing Sino–U.S. relationship.

Next door, from the fourth floor of a parking garage, a group of masked thugs came close to killing five Tibetan activists. “Before the secret entities and the clearly pro-CCP — and what looked like a bunch of trained — men, before they came in and ambushed us and stole our banner from the fifth floor, they actually started from the fourth floor and started pulling on the banner,” said Chemi Lhamo, an activist with the group Students for a Free Tibet. She told me that she and others lost their balance and almost fell off the side of the garage. Fifteen masked men who “really marched like a unit” then came up to the fifth floor and attacked them.

That was not an isolated incident. Outside the hotel that night, and throughout the week, pro-Beijing gangs stalked and assaulted opponents of Xi, most of them pro-democracy Chinese, Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, and Tibetans, who had flocked to the city to protest his attendance at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. Estimates vary, but it appears that at least 1,000 pro-CCP demonstrators from across America were involved. The anti-Xi crowd was around 100 people, if that.

The harassment started upon Xi’s arrival at the airport on November 14 and didn’t let up until after his departure on November 17, Allen Chen, a lawyer and leader in the pro-democracy Chinese community, told me.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-u-s-military-is-not-woke-but-the-woke-threat-is-real/

I remember the day vividly, standing in formation in the hot Kentucky sun at Ft. Knox. “Look to your left and to your right,” the sergeant said. “You are all wearing the same uniform, you all bleed the same color blood. There is no color here other than green.” But by the end of my career, there were directives coming down from Washington D.C. telling us that some of our service members were somehow different, as was the case when we were told we should counsel some of our soldiers letting them know they can change the gender on their ID cards. I wasn’t about to single out a soldier, and I doubt very many did in any branch of the services.

But aside from causing a few eyerolls, woke policies in the military are more of a distraction at this point than anything else and are thankfully being largely ignored other than service members being ordered to sit through the regularly occurring death by PowerPoint. However, that in no way diminishes the very real threat it poses.

The United States military remains the most effective fighting force on the planet, and although wokeness has not yet significantly infected the military, the woke cancer continues to grow, threatening the cohesion of America’s fighting forces. Every hour that a service member wastes sitting through unnecessary woke briefings, is an hour lost that should have been spent on warfighter training, leaving us less prepared for the next war.

Woke policies, unnecessary political correctness at the expense of readiness or the success of a mission, have been and continue to be pushed at the behest of politicians inside the beltway. But the problem with their efforts to change the way our military operates is that it doesn’t need changing. The military is one place where true diversity has already been achieved.

https://pjmedia.com/miltharris/2023/12/18/woke-ways-shrink-us-military-to-smallest-fighting-force-in-8-decades-n4924846

It was bound to happen. Another unwanted side effect of woke culture is raising its ugly head. The U.S. military is now at its lowest levels in over 80 years, and the reason is not general disinterest, as some would have you believe. Military experts have sounded the alarm about the Biden administration’s “woke” policies within the Department of Defense as the U.S. military is poised to be the smallest it has been in eight decades, while facing emerging global threats.

Retired Navy SEAL Mike Sarraille accused the White House of treating U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East like “cannon fodder,” claiming that the Biden administration’s leadership has heavily impacted the recruitment crisis.

“The few in the military have always carried the burden for the many, but the alarming decrease in numbers not only poses a threat to our national security and defense strategy, but it also raises a question: can we confront the emerging global threats? This is not a recruitment issue. This is a leadership problem,” Sarraille told Carley Shimkus on “Fox & Friends First.”

Sarraille continued: “Talent begets talent, and quite frankly, why would this younger generation want to go work for an administration that uses their troops as cannon fodder in the Middle East like we’re seeing? The administration, instead of creating a lethal force in raising our technology capabilities, has decided to implement woke progressive policies like renaming bases and funding or providing additional funding for DEI programs.”

Mike Glover is an Army vet and a counterterrorism expert. He teaches a special operations prep course in Utah. Glover has seen the number of sign-ups for his course dwindle as the various military branches struggle to recruit new service members. He believes the crisis stems from low morale, which has ultimately been impacted by a progressive policy push within the DOD.

https://www.securityinfowatch.com/critical-infrastructure/article/53078430/todays-hyper-connected-network-systems-face-myriad-security-challenges

The current state of the cyber ecosystem is a precarious one. The perimeters have become blurred, and as the capabilities and connectivity of cyber devices have grown exponentially, so have cyber intrusions from sophisticated malware to both Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) Industrial Control Systems (ICS), and SCADA networks. The threat is even more amplified as those networks are converging.

According to PMMI Business Intelligence’s “2021 Cybersecurity: Assess Your Risk,” report from, Information Technology (IT) attacks “specifically target the enterprise IT systems at a manufacturer, seeking to gain entry through vectors such as email, a CRM system, or an ERP program, which can span across an operation.” Operational Technology (OT) attacks “are designed to exploit the systems that are directly on the plant floor. An OT attack can originate through vectors such as individual sensors on the production line, SCADA/HMI panels, or even unsecured PLCs.” Cybersecurity 101: The Difference Between IT and OT Attacks | OEM Magazine

But in our increasingly hyper-connected internet environments, most physical security systems have become tethered to IT networks and evolving cloud infrastructure. The trend of integration of Industrial hardware and software combined with growing networked IT sensors is redefining the surface attack opportunities for hackers across all digital infrastructures.

The IT OT Convergence Supply Chain

Protecting the fusion of IT/OT networks from cyber-attacks is an urgent challenge that requires orchestration. They all have unique operational frameworks, access points, and a variety of legacy systems and are intertwined with varying regulation and compliance protocols. And a lack of trained skilled workforce is a continual issue in IT, OT and ISC cybersecurity.