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Donald Trump plans to use special operations forces assassination squads to wage war on Mexican drug cartels if he's elected president. //
About a quarter million US citizens die each year from overdoses of drugs brought into the US by Mexican cartels. This indirect cost is on top of the 30,000+ annual cartel-related murders. //
I think adopting a strategy the Romans used to defend the frontiers of the Empire makes a lot of sense.
When Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office in December 2018, the CIA concluded that drug groups controlled about 20 percent of Mexican territory. By 2022, the US Northern Command concluded that up to 35 percent of Mexico was under direct control of drug cartels. That does not seem like success. If that trend line continues, Mexico will be a narco-state within four years. The drug cartels directly employ about 170,000 people, making it that nation's fifth largest employer. If you consider people who make a living supplying goods and services to the cartels, they are probably the most significant economic engine in Mexico. //
With it becoming more evident by the day that the Chinese government is working hand-in-glove with the cartels to ensure fentanyl wreaks havoc in America, it has come time to recognize that we are facing a military problem, not a law enforcement problem. //
Our southern border is with a failed state. Its government can't enforce its laws, and it isn't a useful partner for keeping our border secure. Where the law ends, lawlessness flourishes. The situation here is no different from piracy in the 17th-century Caribbean ... //
... we can use the doctrine of Hostis humani generis to raise the cost of doing business for drug cartels and staunch the slaughter of millions of Americans in the process. //
ConservativeInMinnesota
12 hours ago
Drugs kill far more Americans than all of our wars ever have. We lost around 58,000 in Vietnam and 418,000 in WW2. We’ve been losing more than 100,000 Americans a year to just Fentanyl since 2021.
We went to war over 3000 deaths on 9/11 and 2400 in Pearl Harbor. How many Americans do we let drug cartels kill before we decide it’s time to shut them down?
One can only speculate as to why Biden Inc. would try to reclassify National Guard units to the Space Force, but it seems more than coincidental that more than a dozen Republican governors have sent state National Guard soldiers to help cope with the disastrous Biden border since 2021. Hmm.
One way for Biden to stop that upstaging and embarrassment is to simply move those personnel into the Space Force and prevent them from helping at the border.
The United States Navy's continued investment in aircraft carriers, notably the Ford-class, amidst evolving global military dynamics and emerging threats, particularly from anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) systems developed by adversaries like China, poses strategic and financial challenges. //
Of course, these aircraft carrier arguments are eerily similar to the ones made by proponents of battleships 80 years ago.
Back then, it was the battleship that was the centerpiece of US Navy power projection and the aircraft carriers that were viewed as strange ancillary elements in the fleet. //
First, it will need more Virginia-class attack submarines. Second, it will need to develop arsenals of sophisticated underwater unmanned vehicles (UUV) as well as advanced unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Third, the Navy needs to invest in its own hypersonic weapons capacity. Fourth, Navy resources need to be put into directed-energy weapons (DEW).
All these other expenditures, such as trying to replace the 10 Nimitz-class carriers with 10 Ford-class carriers when the Nimitz-class still has decades of service left, is one such example of wastefulness on the part of the Navy.
The chaplains say the Department of Defense continues to defy a 2023 law rescinding its Covid vaccine mandate. //
“The Department of Defense is hostile to religion,” said the chaplains’ lawyer, Art Schulcz, who is also a veteran. He said the way the DOD handled the vaccine mandate has contributed to the military’s recruiting crisis by repelling recruits and current soldiers with serious faith convictions. In response to ongoing shortfalls, U.S. military branches are lowering enlistment standards and issuing waivers of risk factors such as marijuana use.
The U.S. military’s chaplains “recruiting deficit is extreme,” wrote Rear Adm. Gregory Todd, the Navy’s chief of chaplains, last year.
On October 31, 2023, humanity discovered the history of war in Space. The interception of the warhead of a Yemeni medium-range ballistic missile by an Israeli Arrow-3 missile became the first combat operation to take place outside the earth’s atmosphere.
This is also the first time that a medium-range ballistic missile has been destroyed by an anti-missile missile in a real combat situation. All previous cases of interception of ballistic missiles were interceptions of short-range ballistic missiles or generally operational-tactical ones. An intermediate-range ballistic missile is a much more difficult target because it flies faster and follows a higher trajectory. Actually, this was also the first time a medium-range ballistic missile was launched in a real combat situation.
Israeli missile defense has successfully completed the task. Yemeni missile was destroyed outside the atmosphere; her load, whatever it was, dissipated harmlessly tens of kilometers above the ground. In the confrontation between the ballistic sword and the anti-missile shield, the first round was left to the defense.
Fascinating analysis of the use of drones on a modern battlefield—that is, Ukraine—and the inability of the US Air Force to react to this change.
The United States Marine Corps’ Operational Test and Evaluation Squadron One (VMX-1) spends most of its time trialing and evaluating new hardware, weapons, and software updates for Marine aircraft. In between all of those testing events, leaders at the squadron came up with an organic effort to bring in all of their assets for an ongoing test event with a heavy focus on Expeditionary Air Basing Operations (EABO) which is a major initiative that could prove essential to winning a war in the Pacific.
The unidentified drones were such an issue that assets were called in from around the government, including a NASA WB-57 high-altitude jet.
byJoseph Trevithick, Tyler Rogoway| PUBLISHED Mar 15, 2024
Langley Air Force Base, located in one of the most strategic areas of the country, across the Chesapeake Bay from the sprawling Naval Station Norfolk and the open Atlantic, was at the epicenter of waves of mysterious drone incursions that occurred throughout December.
This is a full posting of the short story by Arthur C. Clarke. It is titled “Superiority”. “Superiority” is a science fiction short story by Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1951. It depicts an arms race, and shows how the side which is more technologically advanced can be defeated, despite its apparent superiority, because of its own organizational flaws and its willingness to discard old technology without having fully perfected the new.
You ought to do your self a favor, if you never have, and listen to General Douglas MacArthur’s 1962 speech to the cadets at West Point shortly before his death explaining the meaning of Duty, Honor, Country:
gitarcarver | March 14, 2024 at 1:57 pm
According to West Point, the phrase “duty, honor, country,” was added to the mission statement in 1998 – a mission statement that has been changed 9 times over the last century.
That means the phrase has been around for only 26 of the 222 years (11.7%) West Point has been in existence.
How did West Point ever manage to train leaders like Lee, Grant, Pershing, the “Class the Stars Fell On,” Abrahms, Schwarzkopf, MacArthur, etc., without “duty, honor, country” being in the mission statement?
...
Finally, the “Character Development Strategy” at the USMA contains many statements such as this:
The West Point Character Development Strategy describes how, at all levels and across programs, the United States Military Academy (USMA) develops leaders of character who internalize the ideals of Duty, Honor, Country and the Army Ethic.
“Duty, Honor, Country” is being not removed from the core values at West Point.
Specifically, Conspirator A tasked Schultz with gathering information related to a variety of U.S. military weapons systems, including classified information, and information related to the United States’ potential plans in the event that Taiwan came under military attack. //
This arrest extends a disturbing pattern of relatively junior military personnel with access to classified information being successfully recruited by Communist China as spies. //
There is a problem somewhere. If we've busted four guys with security clearances selling low-grade information to the Chinese in six months, you can bet there are a lot more like them still operating. The counterintelligence for the motives for espionage is MICE: Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego. One can't help but wonder if an educational system that focuses on the evil America has done and is doing isn't producing an army of potential traitors at government expense.
The U.S. military has had its ups and downs, but since ending the draft half a century ago, it has been the most expertly trained and exquisitely armed force the world has ever seen. Even during the draft years immediately before World War II to the end of Vietnam, we paid for and usually got the best weapons and training the country could afford.
And unlike those militaries in all those shi*hole countries, our forces were apolitical. They didn’t serve a president or a party, but the country.
In the last several years, wokeness has come to infect our military just as it previously had our universities, news outlets, and the entertainment industry.
Our readiness now is about what you'd expect: “U.S. military is only ‘marginally’ prepared to defend America’s interests at a time when adversaries are ramping up military capabilities.”
I’ve begun thinking of our postmodern military not as a useless Woke Force but as a Third World military: a force that isn’t any good at fighting foreign wars but is perfectly suited for putting down domestic undesirables.
I’m back in that mood. Today’s AT&T cellular network meltdown was a reminder. It’s going down when we least expect it. //
tweet from Marco Rubio:
I don’t know the cause of the AT&T outage
But I do know it will be 100 times worse when #China launches a cyber attack on America on the eve of a #Taiwan invasion
And it won’t be just cell service they hit, it will be your power, your water and your bank. //
My prepping really hasn’t been for the “worst case scenario” – it’s been for the most likely bad scenario, mostly focused on energy grids on which we depend, and food. (I know, readers always tell me to focus on home defense, but that’s not something we talk about.) //
. it’s obvious that if we ever get in a hot cyber war with China they are taking down our electric grid as the first shot, and that will start everything spiraling downward. Of course our civilian infrastruture will be a prime target, and if this administration is too stupid to see that, we are in worse shape than I thought.
The US military is almost entirely dependent upon China and Russia for a metal used in many military applications, such as explosives and armor-piercing bullets. The metal is antimony, and China currently owns 53 percent of the world's supply. However, it processes over 80 percent of antimony ore through contracts with other producers. The US's last source of antimony, the Stibnite mine in Idaho, ceased operations in 1997.
It isn't just the military that relies on antimony, though it does appear insane to import the key element in manufacturing modern military munitions from your most likely adversary; the private sector is also heavily reliant on the metal.
This issue has hit the front burner of Capitol Hill. The House Armed Services Committee is investigating the status of the Defense National Stockpile, which is charged with maintaining a strategic reserve of rare minerals. Our stockpile and the infrastructure to operate it will largely cease to exist by 2025 unless urgent action is taken.
Crap like this simply validates the idea that we are ruled by fools and buffoons. Congress has nearly sold off the stockpile of to, according to Defense News, " over the past several decades to fund other programs."
The stockpile was valued at nearly $42 billion in today’s dollars at its peak during the beginning of the Cold War in 1952. That value has plummeted to $888 million as of last year following decades of congressionally authorized sell-offs to private sector customers. Lawmakers anticipate the stockpile will become insolvent by FY25.
“A lot of what happened is Congress just getting greedy and finding politically convenient ways to fund programs that they weren’t willing to raise revenue for,” said [Massachusetts Democrat Seth] Moulton.
Between Biden's cavalier attitude and the observable results, this is starting to look like a tabletop exercise in how to create regional instability and a global economic downturn.
Perhaps most important is US prestige. American diplomatic, economic, and military influence has kept the peace since 1945. Biden's timidity and the collection of third-string midwits that he's moved into critical positions are shattering that hard-won credibility. //
As if to add insult to injury, the French have started to escort French ships
Ryan Petersen @typesfast
·
The French Navy just posted these photos as they escort French container ships through the Red Sea. Before the American-led order that followed World War 2 this is how trade was done, with each nation protecting its own ships. Is this the future of globalization?
11:48 AM · Jan 16, 2024 //
The chorus of the Marine's Hymn honors America's history of suppressing piracy for the common good. Instead of trying to micromanage possible "escalation" and worrying about making Iran angry, we should be laying down a marker that says interfering with international trade is a terrible evolutionary strategy.
We can't complain about broken supply chains, high prices, inflation, unemployment, and regional instability if we won't take even a baby step toward teaching rogue actors that there are limits on acceptable behavior. Most of all, we can't let ourselves become a laughingstock. Without American power lurking on the horizon, other areas of the world could take a page from the Houthi lesson and interfere with global trade to get attention.
Rampant corruption comes with the territory when it comes to having complete control over every aspect of your country, including the economy. //
The corruption, however, has resulted in some hilarious setbacks for Xi, according to the Bloomberg report, "including missiles filled with water instead of fuel and vast fields of missile silos in western China with lids that don’t function in a way that would allow the missiles to launch effectively." //
U.S. think tanks and defense contractors believe that Xi aims to have a completely modernized military that is capable of taking on any global power by 2027. One such example is the rapid assembly of aircraft carriers and other naval vessels at a rate that far outpaces the U.S. Navy. But just because they can be rapidly assembled doesn't mean they're ready to go right away.
puhiawa in reply to rduke007. | December 29, 2023 at 1:54 pm
No. What they are saying is the Chinese have no military communications satellite above America, a rather startling discovery. //
starride | December 29, 2023 at 12:13 pm
Notice the flight path is a direct line through our northern icbm installations.
Now, when the chips are down, we see that our "allies and partners" have figured out what the rest of us have. The US is an erratic, unstable, and unreliable ally. It will abandon you at the drop of a hat. It will do profoundly stupid stuff without a second thought. American military leadership is so weak and feeble that you need to think twice about placing your men and ships under American command.
On the whole, I think we can safely say that Joe Biden has fully implemented Barack Obama's "lead from behind" strategy. Our military is so physically weak that it can't do some missions alone and is perceived as so incompetent that no one cares to follow us. //
Proud American Patriot
11 hours ago
Another major foreign policy failure by the Biden Administration. We cannot expect other countries to follow the U. S. lead when we have a weak, compromised and corrupt president who cannot make clear and decisive decisions. //
streiff Proud American Patriot
11 hours ago
Bingo. I needed to see this before I finished the post. It is a great summary. //
Laocoön of Troy Brubaker5
6 hours ago
And the failure to figure out what exactly were we trying to accomplish was what the Weinburger Doctrine was designed to fix. It failed because the Bush family loved interventions and they were jealous of Reagan's success. They shelved the Weinburger Doctrine because it limited them too much. They wanted to engage in world affairs independent of what Reagan accomplished. //
Asurea streiff
6 hours ago
Near as I can figure, the most sensible goal to take on for Iraq and Afghanistan would have been to find a dictator we could stomach and with the personal ability to keep their country under control, and support them. Alternatively, just keeping chopping heads off the snake until one fits those criteria... that would have probably been more effective, if far bloodier. //
Dieter Schultz Asurea
5 hours ago
I've argued this before... we need a 'failed state' protocol that, while we neutralize any threats to targets outside of the "states'" borders, we leave the state in both incapable of striking other nations and, this has to be right up there as a priority, prohibited from exploitation by other nations like China, Russia, and Iran.
The 'failed state' protocol must allow us to, like in the case of Yemen, take out any power within the states' borders that are threatening other nations' shipping or, like Afghanistan, coordinating attacks on other countries like the US.
The idea that a national boundary in a 'failed state' is sacrosanct needs to be rejected if, and only if, they are allowing extra-territorial attacks on other countries' interests.
Previously, we focused on the sheer physicality required of close-combat unit members, in this particular case, tank crewmen. Today, we will focus on two competing issues. First, we can recognize that it is indeed possible to find women who can meet minimum standards for just about any given position. Second, the effort required to do so, must be an analysis of the costs, versus any expected benefits of doing so…especially when finding men to exceed the standard is so much easier than finding women to can barely meet it. We’ll get into that particular discussion in a follow-on piece.
Here’s why the discussion. It’s just biology. Let’s look at one physical act in detail to explain the point. These two extracts show the “military/shoulder press” capability of both men and women, aged 25, at varying levels of weight lifting experience/ability. The source is from Strength Level website, where you can compare and contrast various factors in physical fitness. I chose this particular exercise as experience shows it’s closest to the movement required to lift a main gun round overhead and hand it to another crewman on the tank deck. //
At this point, we have determined that for this particular requirement (and there are a host of others in this category) it takes extra effort to bring females up to the physical standard of the average male. When we begin to consider national-level personnel policy for our armed forces, we need to consider this and a number of other factors as we weigh the cost versus benefit of deciding to put/keep women in close combat units.
There is a piece of video propaganda making its way around the news services and the internet. It features imagery of an all-female, Israeli Army tank crew. //
That crew of dedicated Israeli patriots deserves nothing but kudos. They have stepped up to defend their nation against an evil force of terrorists who murdered infants in the crib among other atrocities. My beef, is with Americans who want to use those achievements to promote the provably and long-proven, false proposition, that generally speaking, females perform just as well as males in close combat units–moreover that somehow this Israeli example justifies the continued feminization of the American military. That’s. Just. Not. True. //
Two (of many) things left out of the video would demonstrate why women are physically unsuited for the role of tank crewman. What occurs inside the tank during combat isn’t relatively speaking, the physically demanding part. It’s what occurs prior to and after the battle that beats your body to death and requires strength and stamina to perform.
One of these crew tasks, is the manual upload of the “basic load” of tank ammunition from the ammo carrier or ground pallet, into the turret of the tank. Tank main gun rounds, depending on the type, weigh between 40, and over 50 pounds each. The Israeli Merkava 4, carries 48 rounds of 120 mm main gun ammo. Each round must be manually uploaded and placed into the vehicle’s storage magazine. //
Another onerous task required to be performed by armored vehicle crewmen, is “breaking track.” This physically demanding operation takes place when one or more of the track shoes must be taken out and replaced by a new one…or when the tank, or other armored vehicle, “throws” a track and it must be manually put back in place.