RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/11/clown-commandant/

“President Trump can change this. He could start by relieving Smith of command and promoting an officer with a functioning brain to stand in his stead.We need serious reform in the Department of Defense. That change should start at the top. I, for one, would like to see my former branch become a serious warfighting organization. The Marine Corps is not a circus, and the Commandant should not be a clown.”

In recent comments at the Ronald Reagan Foundation and Institute’s National Defense Forum, General Eric Smith, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, stated that America could defeat China in a war because of our combat experience in the Middle East.

“The advantage lies with us because our last combat was captured on somebody’s iPhone 14… The Chinese’ last combat was captured on oil and canvas, and they should not forget that… I would not undersell the value that our combat experience brings to this fight.”

Smith went on to praise America’s “warrior culture”:

“It is easy to bluster. But it’s another thing when you actually have to go toe-to-toe and go in harm’s way. And we have a lengthy history of going in harm’s way—in Iraq, Afghanistan. We’ve built a culture of warrior excellence, warfighting, and interoperability in the joint force. The PRC has not yet had to deal with that. They haven’t had to deal with that in decades.”

These claims are remarkably stupid. For one, the Chinese’ last combat was not captured on “oil and canvas.”

The United States fought—and lost—a war with China in living memory! That combat was captured not in paintings but in photos and videos. Communist China intervened in the Korean War after UN troops pushed to the Yalu River on the border of North Korea and China in 1950.

Communist troops from the People’s Liberation Army pushed American and United Nations forces south in a series of bloody engagements that fall. The Battle of the Chosin Reservoir in November 1950 is well-known to Marines (save for General Smith) for the brutality of the cold conditions. Chinese forces pushed the Marines back to the 38th parallel, but we inflicted heavy losses in the process.

American troops displayed great bravery, but it should be noted that the conflict was a disaster for the Americans.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/01/the-new-cold-war-is-at-sea/

Since the end of Operation Desert Storm and the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. Department of Defense has failed to maintain one of the principal dictates of great power competition—the necessity of having a well-balanced military force. This deficiency has been most evident in the maritime domain. Tellingly, the size of the U.S. Navy has shrunk from about 600 warships in 1986 to just over 290 ships today. This decline in the size, and capabilities, of the U.S. Navy occurred in large part because the nation’s leader was obsessed with what has been termed as “endless wars”—those fought in the land domains of the Middle East (ME), Southwest Asia (SWA), and now Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, this myopic focus on ground war has occurred just as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has conducted the largest naval build-up and modernization of any nation since the end of World War II.

The reality of these two diametrically opposed trendlines was brought to a head this past week by a series of announcements from both the PRC and U.S., which signals what can be declared as the end of “endless ground wars” and what should be a return to a balanced national defense strategy—namely one that includes the foundational importance of maritime power—something that has been sorely neglected over the past three decades.

The first announcement was made by the PRC’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi who made the unusual statement that “China is ready to work with other countries to use the three global initiatives as an opportunity to elevate global maritime governance and improve the well-being of all people.” Since coming to power in late 2012, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping has implemented three global governance initiatives: the Global Development Initiative in September 2021, the Global Security Initiative in April 2022, and the Global Civilization Initiative in March 2023.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/01/isis-plots-its-return/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

The West can’t afford passivity

We are living through a momentous phase in the twilight struggle against the Islamic State. In the past year or so, the jihadist outfit has been an increasingly assertive presence in Syria’s hinterland, deploying a band of “holy warriors” to resurrect its dream of ruling a caliphate. Once more, an armed rebellion has blossomed there against the U.S.-led coalition, and, unless put down in short order, it promises to bring about an Islamic State resurgence.

The gathering of jihadist forces and the corresponding explosion of violence could prove potent enough to engulf Syria and consolidate another state with no law but God’s — a supposed kingdom of heaven on earth. This year, the pace of Islamic State attacks in Syria and Iraq has doubled. The primary targets have been U.S. garrisons in Syria and units of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Kurdish-led troops who worked with the U.S. to defeat ISIS five years ago. The jihadists’ immediate objective has been to curtail counterterrorism patrols and free thousands of their confederates who have languished in jail since the SDF and the U.S.-led coalition swept away the final remnant of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate at Baghuz in March 2019.

Since shattering the Islamic State, the U.S. has maintained a small military footprint in Syria and Iraq to keep the peace. U.S. warplanes carry out air strikes and provide live aerial surveillance to SDF ground forces that conduct raids on suspected Islamic State cells. Occasionally, American commandos conduct missions of their own to kill or capture senior Islamic State leaders. This year, the SDF has reportedly captured 233 Islamic State fighters in 28 operations, while American aircraft have conducted three strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria and one in Iraq. This level of activity mirrors that of 2023, when the U.S. carried out four strikes against the Islamic State.

Bolstering the tepid military campaign in Syria and Iraq is a necessary precondition to staving off the ISIS resurgence.

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.