Somewhere I recall, perhaps fallaciously, reading Russia described as being "Mexico with nukes."
(All apologies to Mexico.)
The main point apparently was that if Russia didn't have nuclear weapons, it's international significance would shrink accordingly to the purely regional powers, like Mexico.
As I observe what passes for foreign policy these days in Washington, I can't help but suspect that the over-arching strategic goal seems to be of reducing America's international significance to being something that could be summed up thusly:
Russia with precisions-guided munitions.
Showing posts with label nuclear weapons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nuclear weapons. Show all posts
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
re: "Dangerous Game"
Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") described a strategic downside to China's EMP weapon strategy.
Money quote(s):
"Planning to toss around nukes in the event of a local conflict – even low-yield nukes – would be a hilariously bad idea, were it not for the fact that it lacks any trace of hilarity. The risk of miscalculation in proportionate response is significant.
Strategic weapons, as the Chinese ought to know, are designed to guarantee national survival, and the distinction between a tactical nuke and a strategic weapon is chiefly one of perspective: If yours lands on him, it’s tactical. When his reply lands on you, it’s strategic."
Also bear in mind China's published strategies for waging multi-dimensional warfare, to overwhelm or paralyze response by major allied powers. The risk of strategic overreach is stunning.
7/22
Friday, July 29, 2011
re: "National Security Part 2: The Armed Forces"
The Curmudgeon Emeritus at Eternity Road takes a look at "military" missions.
Money quote(s):
"(I)n the event of an invasion of the land territory of the United States, America's armed forces should reply with their full speed and power. That's what armed forces are for. If we're not going to use them for that, we needn't have spent all that money on guns, ships, tanks, planes, and various sort of ammunition for them. Despite that self-evident fact, the existence of our armed forces is itself an element of ongoing controversy, mainly arising from two questions:
How large a military do we need?
What should it do when it's not fighting in the field?
It is here, rather than in the use of whatever military we have at the moment to respond to an attack on America or her vital interests, that questions of national security arise."
IIRC (from my long-ago days as an AROTC cadet), the Army's mission is to defend the nation and carry out the national mission.
Defending the nation sounds simple enough, but is actually extraordinarily complicated.
Carrying out the national mission is whatever the commander-in-chief or the Congress says it is, pretty much.
"Only after World War II did our peacetime military grow to "superpower size." In large measure, that growth was elicited by the alliances the U.S. entered in the years after the war, most particularly NATO.
The NATO alliance occupied about half of America's combat power for forty-five years. The great size of the putative opponent -- the USSR -- seemed to demand a large military presence in Europe, if the Old World was to avert yet another continent-shattering war."
Mission accomplished. Second- and third-order consequences which nobody predicted (no one ever does) shouldn't obscure that basic fact.
"After the World Wars, it became America's job to secure the world's oceans, those indispensable conduits for travel and trade. Thus, the Navy could not be permitted to shrink to its pre-war size (even though it has). The emergence of the intercontinental bomber and the nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile as strategic threats made it necessary to erect the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), best known for its redoubt in Cheyenne Mountain. The swelling of those two services required the support of vast defense-contracting and defense-procurement apparatuses; modern wars must be fought with modern weapons, wielded according to the best available strategic and tactical thinking available." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)
"This was inevitable; technological advance, plus the emergence of a new, aggressive ideology and its dominance of two enormous nations, demanded it. Those who objected to the large military, saying that that nuclear weapons made it unnecessary, completely missed the critical point: You cannot respond to small, confined incursions with large, indiscriminate weapons. Indeed, large nukes cannot deter a similarly armed opponent willing to use lesser forces and military proxies to advance its interests. To meet the threat of such an opponent, a military capable of responding with calibrated force, from the smallest engagements all the way up to global nuclear war, is required.
Yes, even in "peacetime." " (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)
"The current crisis along our borders, particularly our southern border, screams for a military response. Surely, an invasion need not be composed of uniformed men to be a danger to the nation. Indeed, it's arguable whether the armed drug gangs or the (generally unarmed) hordes of illegal aliens constitute the greater threat to our national security. "
This same argument has been posed, from a legal standpoint, to justify the exclusion of children born to illegal immigrants from birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment.
Money quote(s):
"(I)n the event of an invasion of the land territory of the United States, America's armed forces should reply with their full speed and power. That's what armed forces are for. If we're not going to use them for that, we needn't have spent all that money on guns, ships, tanks, planes, and various sort of ammunition for them. Despite that self-evident fact, the existence of our armed forces is itself an element of ongoing controversy, mainly arising from two questions:
How large a military do we need?
What should it do when it's not fighting in the field?
It is here, rather than in the use of whatever military we have at the moment to respond to an attack on America or her vital interests, that questions of national security arise."
IIRC (from my long-ago days as an AROTC cadet), the Army's mission is to defend the nation and carry out the national mission.
Defending the nation sounds simple enough, but is actually extraordinarily complicated.
Carrying out the national mission is whatever the commander-in-chief or the Congress says it is, pretty much.
"Only after World War II did our peacetime military grow to "superpower size." In large measure, that growth was elicited by the alliances the U.S. entered in the years after the war, most particularly NATO.
The NATO alliance occupied about half of America's combat power for forty-five years. The great size of the putative opponent -- the USSR -- seemed to demand a large military presence in Europe, if the Old World was to avert yet another continent-shattering war."
Mission accomplished. Second- and third-order consequences which nobody predicted (no one ever does) shouldn't obscure that basic fact.
"After the World Wars, it became America's job to secure the world's oceans, those indispensable conduits for travel and trade. Thus, the Navy could not be permitted to shrink to its pre-war size (even though it has). The emergence of the intercontinental bomber and the nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile as strategic threats made it necessary to erect the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), best known for its redoubt in Cheyenne Mountain. The swelling of those two services required the support of vast defense-contracting and defense-procurement apparatuses; modern wars must be fought with modern weapons, wielded according to the best available strategic and tactical thinking available." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)
"This was inevitable; technological advance, plus the emergence of a new, aggressive ideology and its dominance of two enormous nations, demanded it. Those who objected to the large military, saying that that nuclear weapons made it unnecessary, completely missed the critical point: You cannot respond to small, confined incursions with large, indiscriminate weapons. Indeed, large nukes cannot deter a similarly armed opponent willing to use lesser forces and military proxies to advance its interests. To meet the threat of such an opponent, a military capable of responding with calibrated force, from the smallest engagements all the way up to global nuclear war, is required.
Yes, even in "peacetime." " (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)
"The current crisis along our borders, particularly our southern border, screams for a military response. Surely, an invasion need not be composed of uniformed men to be a danger to the nation. Indeed, it's arguable whether the armed drug gangs or the (generally unarmed) hordes of illegal aliens constitute the greater threat to our national security. "
This same argument has been posed, from a legal standpoint, to justify the exclusion of children born to illegal immigrants from birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment.
Monday, June 27, 2011
re: "A “Troubled Marriage”?"
Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings ("Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!") calls them like he sees them.
Money quote(s):
"Pakistan is essentially at war with us, and has been for many years."
I'm not going to argue this one way or the other, but I am going to note that the "nation" of Pakistan is a geopolitical fiction. There's a territory on the map by that name, but it's really two or three different "nations" (for values of nationhood). There are definitely major factions (tribal, religious, political, combinations of the preceding, &tc.) at war with the West, with Western Civilization, with Christendom, and indeed with the United States.
"It would be an impossible military task to conquer the country, absent massive carnage, but I wonder if there would be some way to take away the nukes?"
That's a great question and I'm just going to quietly hope that there are some folks on the payroll who've given this some thought.
Money quote(s):
"Pakistan is essentially at war with us, and has been for many years."
I'm not going to argue this one way or the other, but I am going to note that the "nation" of Pakistan is a geopolitical fiction. There's a territory on the map by that name, but it's really two or three different "nations" (for values of nationhood). There are definitely major factions (tribal, religious, political, combinations of the preceding, &tc.) at war with the West, with Western Civilization, with Christendom, and indeed with the United States.
"It would be an impossible military task to conquer the country, absent massive carnage, but I wonder if there would be some way to take away the nukes?"
That's a great question and I'm just going to quietly hope that there are some folks on the payroll who've given this some thought.
Monday, June 13, 2011
re: "Historical Revisionism [Part 2]"
Bill at Castle Argghhh! revisits a personal pet peevasaurus (in other words, a Jurassic peeve of brobdingnagian proportions) of mine.
Money quote(s):
"(W)hat were some of the WMDs we found?
Well, for starters, we found 550 long tons of unrefined yellowcake (for the metrically-impaired, that’s 1,212,541 pounds of the stuff Joe Wilson *said* Saddam had no interest in acquiring). The Dems squeaked that it didn’t count, because Saddam had no centrifuges to use in enriching it to weapons grade – and then when we found the centrifuges, they squawked that the centrifuges (the exact same model Siemens centrifuge Iran used at Natanz to enrich its uranium, by the way) were for pharmaceutical purposes – even though they were found buried in the compound of the chief of Saddam’s nuke program.
By the way, the 606 US tons of yellowcake remained stockpiled in Iraq for anyone curious enough to want to look at it until 2008, when it was quietly shipped to Canada for refining." (Bold type added for emphasis. - CAA)
This is part of the "moving the goal posts" strategy of the previous administration's enemies.
Check out some of what the ISG found. Scary stuff.
"(T)hen the Dems changed “Where are the WMDs?” to “Those aren’t the WMDs we’re looking for!”Well, all righty, then, folks, just what *are* the WMDs you’re looking for?They wouldn’t say – they just kept repeating that, whatever we found, it wasn’t what they were looking for, and their Greek chorus in the MSM dutifully echoed them without even pausing for breath."
One-word snip.
"Now, exactly what were the WMDs that the Dems were looking for? Nobody’s saying, but the answer may lie in what happened during the countdown to the invasion. "
Stay tuned for the next installment.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
re: "Iraq War: Mission Accomplished?"
James Joyner at Outside the Beltway ("an online journal of politics and foreign affairs analysis") doesn't wholly agree or disagree.
And I get that. I really do.
Money quote(s):
"I was a reluctant supporter of the war who rejected the early arguments by Paul Wolfowitz and others but ultimately persuaded by the “we can’t let Saddam get nuclear weapons” argument after Kim Jong Il did it."
&
"Whether or not it was all “worth it” — a judgment that, sadly, it still remains too early to know — it makes sense to keep a reduced contingent of American soldiers there to prevent the unraveling of what has been accomplished.
But that’s hardly reason for celebration and gloating. It’s just a calculation as to our least bad option."
And I get that. I really do.
Money quote(s):
"I was a reluctant supporter of the war who rejected the early arguments by Paul Wolfowitz and others but ultimately persuaded by the “we can’t let Saddam get nuclear weapons” argument after Kim Jong Il did it."
&
"Whether or not it was all “worth it” — a judgment that, sadly, it still remains too early to know — it makes sense to keep a reduced contingent of American soldiers there to prevent the unraveling of what has been accomplished.
But that’s hardly reason for celebration and gloating. It’s just a calculation as to our least bad option."
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
re: "Beyond the rhetoric. Afghanistan is not the war, it's just a battlefield."
John Birmingham at Blunt Instrument gives us a viewpoint from Down Under.
Money quote(s):
"(A)n extra hundred Australians won't make any difference at all. And the 17 000 additional US troops is probably a fraction of the number actually required to secure the south of the country, where the insurgency remains a live concern, largely because of the jihadis ability to flee into the tribal areas of north west Pakistan."
"Australia should drop the pretense of sending a token number of extra troops and, as part of a wider Allied surge, commit a full battle group, which could deploy its own air, armour and artillery support, to engage and destroy anyone challenging control of its operational area. Depending on its composition the battle group could number up to one thousand strong and would be followed by a commitment of infantry similar to that needed in East Timor in 1999.
That would involve another five to six thousand Australian troops."
"Afghanistan is no longer the main game, but for now it's where our main efforts are in play. Much more important in the longer term is neighbouring Pakistan, a festering septic wound of a country, a nuclear armed state, teetering on the brink of collapse, its military and intelligence services thoroughly compromised by their incestuous relationship with the Taliban and several other Islamist terror groups."
&
"(S)o serious is the disintegration of central authority in Pakistan, so acute and dangerous the chance of collapse and civil war with the attendant risk of transition to a Taliban style successor state, that the contest in Afghanistan, an otherwise marginal wasteland, now looms large as one of the great strategic challenges of the next decade. Pakistan cannot be stabilized if Afghanistan goes under.
And Pakistan controls an estimated fifty to one hundred nuclear weapons, in the 20 kiloton to five hundred kiloton range."
Money quote(s):
"(A)n extra hundred Australians won't make any difference at all. And the 17 000 additional US troops is probably a fraction of the number actually required to secure the south of the country, where the insurgency remains a live concern, largely because of the jihadis ability to flee into the tribal areas of north west Pakistan."
"Australia should drop the pretense of sending a token number of extra troops and, as part of a wider Allied surge, commit a full battle group, which could deploy its own air, armour and artillery support, to engage and destroy anyone challenging control of its operational area. Depending on its composition the battle group could number up to one thousand strong and would be followed by a commitment of infantry similar to that needed in East Timor in 1999.
That would involve another five to six thousand Australian troops."
"Afghanistan is no longer the main game, but for now it's where our main efforts are in play. Much more important in the longer term is neighbouring Pakistan, a festering septic wound of a country, a nuclear armed state, teetering on the brink of collapse, its military and intelligence services thoroughly compromised by their incestuous relationship with the Taliban and several other Islamist terror groups."
&
"(S)o serious is the disintegration of central authority in Pakistan, so acute and dangerous the chance of collapse and civil war with the attendant risk of transition to a Taliban style successor state, that the contest in Afghanistan, an otherwise marginal wasteland, now looms large as one of the great strategic challenges of the next decade. Pakistan cannot be stabilized if Afghanistan goes under.
And Pakistan controls an estimated fifty to one hundred nuclear weapons, in the 20 kiloton to five hundred kiloton range."
Monday, March 30, 2009
S&S - U.S. nukes moved from Lakenheath, official claims
From my archive of press clippings:
Stars and Stripes
U.S. nukes moved from Lakenheath, official claims
By Charlie Reed, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Saturday, June 28, 2008
RAF LAKENHEATH, England — News that U.S. nuclear bombs had been removed from England has British protesters celebrating. But many now question why government and military officials are reluctant to announce weapons consolidations in Europe.
Read the whole article here.
Stars and Stripes
U.S. nukes moved from Lakenheath, official claims
By Charlie Reed, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Saturday, June 28, 2008
RAF LAKENHEATH, England — News that U.S. nuclear bombs had been removed from England has British protesters celebrating. But many now question why government and military officials are reluctant to announce weapons consolidations in Europe.
Read the whole article here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
