re: "Preparing for Defense Budget Cuts"

Herschel Smith at The Captain's Journal ("dedicated to the dissemination of conservative views, based on a solidly and consistently conservative world view, on matters political and military") ponders defense spending and America's geo-strategery.

Money quote(s):

"I have always been a proponent of wise defense spending, and cutting where there is no reasonably feasible return on investment"

Congressional pork-barrelling notwithstanding, defense spending really isn't about spending money in everyone's district, or shouldn't have been (but is).

"Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has indeed warned against sweeping defense cuts"

Note the caveats with which Mr. Hershel follows that statement.

"(I)f we fail to stop Iran’s increased hegemony in the Middle East, if we fail to prevent Iran from going nuclear, if our military power and resolve isn’t sufficient to prevent Russia from invading Georgia again, if we relinquish the Pacific to growing Chinese Naval provocations, if we fail to deal a decisive blow to the Taliban and al-Qaeda aligned fighters in the AfPak region, there will be war. Israel cannot allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Eastern Europe is looking to the U.S. for direction, and our abandonment of a missile defense shield was indication that we aren’t serious about their security, much less entry into NATO. Russia is back up to their dirty tricks, and is poised to conduct yet another assault into Ossetia, and the Chinese still want Formosa."

That paragraph is a good a brief statement of America's current strategic challenges as any I have seen and is arguably better than some of the multipage national strategic papers with which the defense and intelligence communities have saddled themselves with.

"America has benefited from the defense doctrine of fighting our battles away from the homeland rather than allowing the threat to land on our own shores before we confront it. Troops are currently deployed in more than 100 countries, and while it may be a tantalizing prospect to withdraw from the entire world and focus inward, we should be careful what we advocate. It will be much more difficult to recreate that military presence and deterrent that it was to dismantle it, regardless of how much money we throw at the problems once they have become obvious.

Cuts are coming. That which cannot continue, won’t. That which cannot be sustained will fall by the wayside. The question is whether America will address the growing entitlement state, however painful, or retreat from the world, also painful, just in a completely different ways, and perhaps permanently."

Writers of speculative fiction such as John Birmingham have already started to make oodles of cash by considering just what a world without America, as a metaphor for American engagement in the world, would be like. Entertaining reading, but quite ghastly in long stretches.

re: "Why is Australia silent on Julian Assange? "

John Birmingham ("Blunt Instrument") at the Brisbane Times (Australia) provides a robust caution from Down Under.

Money quote(s):

"I had dinner once with Salman Rushdie. Meh. Big deal. Everyone in publishing's had dinner at least once with The Rush. Which means that we all had the interesting experience of dining under armed guard because of the fatwa hanging over him.

It's Allah knows how long since that vicious, sex- and death-obsessed old scrote Khomeini dropped a death sentence on Rushdie for having the temerity to commit a thoughtcrime against his barbarous form of religious derangement. And in that time, despite the damnable inconvenience of it all, and a significant lobby both inside and outside government in favor of letting the mad mullah's hitmen have their way, the West as a whole has mobilised the resources of the various states through which Rushdie has passed to safeguard him from mullah-sanctioned murder.

What a long way we've fallen then, to a position where various spokeswhores of the American Right - some of them occupying positions of state power - can call for the assassination or extrajudicial kidnapping of an Australian citizen with nary a word of protest from our own government or dissenting opinion from the opposition."

Some have made a decent start to a discussion of how Assange might qualify as an enemy combatant. I won't go into that here, other than to suggest one begin one's reading at Opinio Juris, but will note that Assange wouldn't be Australia's first such enemy combatant in the current unpleasantness. At least one former Gitmo detainee presently resides in his home country of Australia. So the good offices of the Australian government appear to have at least some pull with our own.

Which is as it should be. We loves us some aussies. They're like us, after all. Cranky and curmudeonly. Prickly about their honor and their rights. Hard not to admire that.

"(I)n the end Assange remains an Australian citizen and he is due the protection we offer to all our citizens when they are threatened by rogue actors, even states, because their actions have upset somebody in power somewhere. It doesn't mean he gets a free pass on the allegations against him in Sweden, but it should mean that at the very least those moronic politicians and media celebretards in the US who've been calling for his murder should be getting a visit from one of our consular officials, preferably an ex-SAS or Commando Regiment old boy, to have a quiet word in their shell-like about how seriously we take incitement to murder our fellow little Vegemiters."

See above. I'm all for consular access, after all, but might prefer that Australian consuls enjoy such with Mr. Assange in an American jail. Such as that operated at our former naval coaling station in Cuba.

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."