RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/12/a-plan-to-restore-the-navy-for-trumps-first-hundred-days/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

The “first hundred days” myth has had a hold on American politics ever since Franklin Roosevelt’s first inauguration. In March 1933, the president summoned Congress to a three-month special session in which it passed 15 major bills to correct the downward trends of the Great Depression. Nearly every Democratic president to succeed him, and even a handful of Republicans, has tried to recapture the magic of FDR’s accomplishment. As the nation confronts numerous threats amid a deteriorating security environment, that magic is needed more than ever.

The next administration, in its first hundred days, will face an urgent problem: the need to rebuild the U.S. Navy to deter China, which, in its global push for dominance, is backed by a rapidly expanding modern navy, maritime constabulary, and commercial fleet. But an effective effort will involve more than just the Navy. It will also require investing in the broader maritime industry and ensuring that the nation has adequate shipping in peacetime to prevent China from dictating our terms of trade and subordinating our economic interests to its own.

What would a successful maritime first hundred days look like?

It should begin well before the president takes office. The first thing that a president-elect must consider is the national-security team. As is often said, personnel is policy: Without the right people, good ideas remain just ideas. In his first term, despite a campaign commitment to increasing the Navy’s fleet to 350 ships, President Trump was never able to “build the bench” by fully staffing the Pentagon, including the Department of the Navy, and hence was never able to build the fleet that he had promised. As for President Joe Biden, the low priority he has placed on defense, and on the Navy specifically, resulted in a failure to staff the Navy’s political leadership before the final year of his term. Whether Trump or Kamala Harris wins the White House this time, the nation cannot afford to repeat such mistakes.

The secretary of defense and the senior civilian positions in the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force are important, but so too are the Senate-confirmed undersecretaries and assistant secretaries who implement decisions. The day after winning the election, the next president should begin building a national-security team supportive of his or her overall policy goals, possessed of the knowledge and experience to drive required changes through, and able to be confirmed by the Senate. A second priority during the transition should be to review all the Biden executive orders to ascertain whether they impeded the operational or material readiness of the fleet.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/14/restoring-deterrence-will-prevent-endless-wars/

On January 3, 2020, the Trump administration conducted a drone strike near Baghdad International Airport, killing Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani.

Soleimani had a long record of waging surrogate wars against Americans, especially during the Iraq conflict and its aftermath.

After the Trump cancellation of the Iran Deal, followed by U.S. sanctions, Soleimani reportedly stepped up violence against regional American bases—most of which Trump himself ironically wished to remove.

A few days later, Iran staged a performance-art retaliatory strike against Americans in Iraq and Syria, assuming Trump had no desire for a wider Middle East war.

So, Iran launched 12 missiles that hit two U.S. airbases in Iraq. Supposedly, Tehran had warned the Trump administration of the impending attacks that killed no Americans. Later reports, however, suggested that some Americans suffered concussions, while more damage was done to the bases than was initially disclosed.

Nonetheless, this Iranian interlude seemed to reflect Trump’s agenda of avoiding “endless wars” in the Middle East while restoring deterrence that prevented, not prompted, full-scale conflicts.

Yet in a second Trump administration, rethreading the deterrence needle without getting into major wars may become far more challenging. The world of today is far more dangerous than when Trump left in 2021.

An inept Biden administration has utterly destroyed U.S. deterrence abroad through both actual and symbolic disasters: the Chinese dressing down of U.S. diplomats in Anchorage; the humiliating skedaddle from Afghanistan; the brazen flight of a Chinese spy balloon across the U.S.; the invasion of Ukraine by Russia; the October 7, 2023 massacre of 1200 Israelis; the serial Houthi attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea; the visible restraint of Israeli from fully replying to Iranian missile attacks on its homeland; and renewed bellicosity on the part of both North Korea and China toward American allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/milley-tary-madness/

Joe Biden turns 82 on November 20 and until January 20 he is still president of the United States. In the wake of the Trump landslide, the senile Democrat may feel a need to regain the spotlight. Maybe some cracked general thinks Biden might attack, say, North Korea, and assure Kim Jong Un’s crew that if that were to happen he would tip them off. Such a thing did go down in 2020.

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, likened President Donald Trump to Hitler and Trump supporters to brownshirts. No Joint Chiefs boss had ever done anything like that, and there was more to it. Gen. Milley also hinted that he would tip off China in the event of an American attack, which he thought Trump might be planning. Milley actually called Chinese Gen. Li Zuocheng and defended the call as conducting the duties of his office. In effect, Milley appointed himself commander-in-chief, a move not exactly authorized by the Uniform Code of Military Justice or consistent with common sense.  Like Biden, Milley must believe that the leaders of a genocidal Stalinist slave state are “not bad folks.”

Last year, China sent a surveillance balloon over most of the continental United States, including military bases. It was first sighted by a private citizen, picked up by national media, and only then acknowledged by the Biden-Harris administration. China claimed that the balloon was for “mainly meteorological purposes,” that the craft had “limited self-steering capability,” and that “westerlies” blew it off course.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/08/making-america-safe-again-will-be-donald-trumps-highest-priority-as-president/

In my opinion, the most important of all of Donald Trump’s promises during the 2024 presidential campaign was to “make America safe again” by restoring American leadership and peace through strength.

This is because Joe Biden will leave Trump with grave national security challenges around the world. U.S. weakness under Biden, Biden’s frivolous foreign policy that designated climate change as the top U.S. national security threat, and major foreign policy failures have caused U.S. and global security to seriously deteriorate since 2021.

The war in Ukraine, caused by Biden’s weak foreign policy and his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, has become a stalemate and long-term war of attrition that could escalate, possibly with Russia using nuclear weapons, if Ukraine expands its attacks into Russian territory. President Biden and European leaders have no plan for a Ukrainian victory or ending the war and have instead promoted an endless war approach of arming Ukraine “for as long as it takes.”

U.S. relations with Russia and China plummeted during the Biden administration. Biden has not spoken to Russian President Putin since before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. There has been little meaningful U.S. diplomacy with China. Biden’s inept foreign policy has pushed Russia into the hands of China as part of a new anti-West axis that includes Iran and North Korea. Chinese military provocations against Taiwan and in the South China Sea soared during the Biden years with no serious response by the United States.

And then there is the Middle East, where Israel is facing a seven-front war in the aftermath of the horrendous October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack. Increased instability in the Middle East since Biden became president was caused by his appeasement of Iran, which is $100 billion richer today due to Biden’s refusal to enforce oil sanctions against Iran. Weak U.S. leadership under Biden also caused tensions to explode in this region. This includes recent missile attacks by Iran and Israel against each other for the first time and huge advances in Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Without a return of American deterrence and a strong U.S. president, the Middle East is facing the prospect of a full-scale Israel-Iran war that could go nuclear.

http://bit.ly/3zYf5Nw

The US State Department has rejected the regime-change option (which would gratify most Iranians) since 1978/79, when Iran’s Ayatollahs seized power, assisted by the State Department, which had stabbed the back of the Shah, who had been America’s Policeman in the Gulf.

Instead, the State Department has embraced the diplomatic option, which has generated hundreds of billions of dollars to the Ayatollahs – notwithstanding their systematically anti-US policies – facilitating their surge from a non-leadership regional stature in 1979 to global prominence, militarily and diplomatically in 2024. Furthermore, the diplomatic option has substantially upgraded the Ayatollahs’ support of terror entities such as Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.

*In 2024, independent of potential nuclear capabilities, the conventional military capabilities of Iran’s Ayatollahs constitute the most critical epicenter of anti-US global terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering and the proliferation of advanced missiles and predator unmanned aerial vehicles. 

The Ayatollahs’ conventional capabilities are a clear and present danger to the US homeland (e.g. proliferation of sleeper cells on US soil and the tight collaboration with Mexico’s drug cartels) and national security. Since the early 1980s, the Ayatollahs have severely eroded the US’ strategic posture in Latin America. In addition, the Ayatollahs pose an imminent lethal threat to every pro-US Arab regime, especially the oil-producing regimes (e.g., Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain), aiming to seize control of 48% of the global oil reserves.

*In 1978/79, the State Department deluded itself that Ayatollah Khomeini would be controlled by moderate advisors, distancing himself from Moscow, focusing on introducing liberty to the Iranian people, refraining from the exportation of the Islamic Revolution, evolving into an Iranian edition of Ghandi.

In 1978/79, the State Department policy doomed the pro-US Iran, transforming it into a venomous anti-US octopus with its tentacles stretched from the Persian Gulf, through the Middle East and Africa to Latin America and the US homeland.