Michael Ramirez: Alexei Navalny 02-18-24
From America's Premier Editorial Cartoonist
The courage of Alexei Navalny 1976-2024—Michael
Navalny Lives —Scott Johnson, Power Line
Michael regrets that he will be late on his normal Sunday essay, but fortunately, our good friend Peter Huessy has permitted me to reprint an analysis related to today’s cartoon, and it is available for all our readers to enjoy. Michael’s essay will be available for our paid subscribers as soon as he can write it. Read more of Mr Huessy’s analysis and well as many other informative articles at Global Security Review
ICBM Ear Week of February 15, 2024
By Peter Huessy, President of GeoStrategic Analysis and Senior Fellow at the National Institute for Deterrent Studies.
Orbiting Russian Nukes?
The top nuclear news story is the assessment that Russia might orbit nuclear weapons in space, contrary to international law, and exactly the fear the US first faced when the Soviet satellite Sputnik was launched in October 1957. Now it is true ICBMs and SLBMs—long range nuclear armed missiles do go through space, but they are deployed on submarines, silos or trains that can be verifiably located. In this new threat we are talking about a deployed nuclear weapon in space where spaced based satellites would be destroyed.
One news story put it this way: The United States has informed Congress and its allies in Europe about Russian advances on a new, space-based nuclear weapon designed to threaten America’s extensive satellite network, according to current and former officials briefed on the matter. Such a satellite-killing weapon, if deployed, could destroy civilian communications, surveillance from space and military command-and control operations by the United States and its allies. At the moment, the United States does not have the ability to counter such a weapon and defend its satellites, a former official said.
The US has for many years supported the current ban on orbiting nuclear weapons—a treaty Russia has also signed. If a nuclear device were launched from space directly over the continental United States, the US would have very little time to detect the launch and be very hard pressed to intercept the warhead as well.
However, if the target is not some US city or military installation, but a series of satellites in space, Russia could take down sufficient satellites to shut down US industrial society and blind the US military as well as ensure all our “joysticks don’t work.” The effect would be similar to an electromagnetic pulse attack that could take down our grid and computers and shut down our society, putting us back to the early 19th century as former Speaker Gingrich wrote in “One Second After”.
New Aid Package for Israel and Ukraine?
Bipartisan House group tries for compromise on security supplemental
A bipartisan group of House lawmakers is working on a pared-down national security supplemental proposal focused on providing military aid for Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific and reinstating the Trump-era “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum-seekers.
Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., who is involved in the effort, told reporters Thursday the plan has an approximately $65 billion price tag — explaining the proposal “addresses what the Speaker wants… border security, [and] a more focused bill.” Bacon said of Johnson. However, Joe Courtney (D-CON) said the Senate does not have time to consider anything but the bill they have already sent over to the House.
Federal Budget and Debt News
Six times every year, I give a nuclear budget briefing to a group of USAF officers. The gist of this year’s presentation is that the modern elements in our nuclear deterrent are about $19 billion a year, while the cost to sustain and maintain our legacy nuclear programs are around $33 billion. And if we just decided to keep our 30–50-year-old systems in the future, (which cannot technically be done for all systems), the cost would grow sharply. In short, the modernization technology is a bargain and will keep our nuclear deterrent around through 2080. When looked at that way the average annual investment needed for the 40+ years when the modernized force will be in place comes to between $8-10,billion a year.
So it is with some interest that here are some overall Federal budget numbers from the House Budget Committee. First the spending. Given that inflation is still almost 20% higher than when Biden took office, coupled with the Congressional Budget Office’s projections showing additional deficits of $20 trillion over the next decade; national debt ballooning to $54 trillion; and taxpayers bearing $150,000 in debt per person by 2034 - there is more work to be done to get our fiscal house in order” says Chairman Arrington, House Budget Committee.
Now the media’s embrace of conventional wisdom tells you its tax cuts that made this mess. Don’t tax rate reductions lead to a loss of revenue and increase debt? Didn’t the Trump administration tax reform of 2018 lead to the current nearly $2 trillion annual Federal budget deficit?
Well let’s look at some numbers. The Epoch Times revealed that in FY2022 the Federal government took in $860 billion more compared to FY2020, a record growth in revenue over two years. A big factor was the recovery from the USA shutdown and pandemic. By comparison, for example, between FY1988-89 the last year of the Reagan administration, annual Federal revenue increased $82 billion. Between FY2016-7, the last year of the Obama administration, revenue climbed $50 billion.
A Trump Foreign Policy?
A comment on former President Trump’s quip about NATO:
Key to remember is that when a nation loses its deterrent strength, it is very hard to get it back. The world does not fully fear US deterrent power right now. That is clear. They did from 2017-20—that is important. The quip that if you don’t defend your own country Russia might mess with makes an important point, however badly made: How do you ask American soldiers to die for someone else’s country when that other country won’t die to protect their own country because they do not have adequate weapons to use in the first place?
If NATO members pay their dues, the alliance will work better. And the US will move heaven and earth to protect them, which has been the point all along. And NATO now spends $380 billion annually and with an equivalent collective GDP of near $17-20 trillion. US GDP is $23 trillion. So, NATO should spend 70% of the US defense budget or around $560 billion. True NATO does not have world responsibilities as does the US, but some NATO countries do have such roles. So, Europe is still some $200 billion short. Between 2017-20, NATO members added almost $100 billion a year to their defense budgets. The previous President pushed for a strong NATO and got NATO to spend $100 billion more a year, as well as increase the US defense budget markedly including those aspects of the DOD budget necessary for the defense of NATO. Britain had only a two-week supply of munitions. Germany two days. That had to be corrected. It is being corrected.
As we look to the election, what are the prospects of a Trump Foreign Policy? This is by Ben Domenech. He says the former president came into office as an agent of chaos, but his foreign policy ended up relatively stable. Will that change in the second term?
February 15, 2024
A month after the election shock of 2016, CBS’s John Dickerson sat down with the ninety-three-year-old Henry Kissinger to get his assessment of the incoming president. “Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven’t seen,” Kissinger pronounced, noting that many nations would have to weigh “their perception that [Barack Obama] basically withdrew America from international politics, so that they had to make their own assessment of their necessities,” along with “a new president who is asking a lot of unfamiliar questions.” Given “the combination of the partial vacuum and the new questions, one could imagine that something remarkable and new emerges out of it,” Kissinger added. “I’m not saying it will. I’m saying it’s an extraordinary opportunity.”
Extraordinary is one word for what followed — others could include chaotic, spastic, unnerving, nail-biting — a heart-attack inducing roller coaster of tweets that prompted Americans to fear for their lives. A Washington Post/ABC poll two years later found a majority of Americans fearful that Trump’s tweets would lead to a nuclear attack from North Korea. In the days after Trump’s infamous January 2, 2018, tweet — “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” — fearful Americans jumped online to Nukepills.com to order massive doses of potassium iodide, with some suppliers selling out within forty-eight hours. Yet there’s another word for Trump’s foreign policy, bizarre as it may seem from the perspective of average Americans: stable. For all the loud noises on the Twitter front, echoed at length in hair-on-fire intonations by CNN, Trump started no new wars and didn’t get sucked into maelstroms that had any impact on American households. Much as the saber-rattling toward China and Iran increased, the tone in the Middle East was surprisingly conciliatory, as Jared Kushner’s Abraham Accords project bore fruit.
The world kept on spinning, and prior to the global pandemic, the unexpected degree of stability led many in Republican circles to espouse the president’s leadership on the global stage. Even anti-Trump Republican megadonor Ken Griffin, who gave $5 million to a super PAC supporting former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley’s long-shot bid this January, acknowledged as much: “I know many of us, me included, struggle with some of Trump’s behaviors,” he said in a CNBC appearance. “But there was a dimension of greater global security with him as president.” (read the rest here at the Spectator)
Russian Nuclear Weapons in Space?
According to the House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner, Russia may be preparing to launch nuclear weapon into space.
Asked if the public have nothing to worry about, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said, “that question is impossible to answer with a straight yes.”
Russia wants to put a nuclear weapon into space, US intelligence indicates, in what was described as a “serious national security threat.”
Joe Biden was urged on Wednesday night to declassify US intelligence on the military operation, which has been shared with every member of US Congress.
The weapons system could be used to target Western satellites in space, potentially knocking out communications and military targeting systems.
The US president is understood to have been tracking the threat, described as “grave” but not “immediate,” for some weeks, according to White House sources.
Republican Mike Turner, the head of the House intelligence committee, revealed the information in a public statement calling on Mr. Biden to share it with the public.
Sources told ABC News that the intelligence had to do with Moscow seeking to put a nuclear weapon in space. The weapon would not be used against targets on the ground, the sources said, but described the intelligence as “very concerning and very sensitive.”
On Wednesday night, US officials told the New York Times the nuclear capability had not been launched and was still in development.
Joe Biden is understood to have been tracking the threat for several weeks CREDIT: Bloomberg
It comes amid growing fears that Russia’s war in Ukraine has escalated the potential for a clash between Moscow and NATO.
White House officials said on Wednesday that they assessed the threat to be “serious” but believed there were ways to “contain” it without triggering mass panic.
Dr Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said: “If Russia has, in fact, deployed, nuclear weapons in orbit, which would be a deliberate and direct violation of the 1967 outer space treaty by Moscow.
“The outer space treaty is a cornerstone of space stability, and this would be a grave setback for international arms control,” he told The Telegraph.
Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, is due to brief the so-called “Gang of Eight,” the top leaders in Congress, on the intelligence on Thursday.
Mr. Sullivan said he had taken the “highly unusual” step of offering himself up along with the country’s top “intelligence and defense professionals.”
Asked whether the public had nothing to worry about, Mr. Sullivan said: “That question is impossible to answer with a straight yes.”
“Americans understand that there are a range of threats and challenges in the world that we’re dealing with every single day,” he said.
Mr. Sullivan’s remarks came after senior figures in Congress who have been granted access to the intelligence voiced alarm and demanded the information be released to the public.
Mr. Turner said the urgent matter was in “regard to a destabilizing foreign military capability.”
Mike Turner, the head of the House Intelligence Committee, revealed the existence of the intelligence in a public statement CREDIT: Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
He took the rare step of making the information available to every member of Congress in the secure rooms in the Capitol, where the country’s most sensitive information can be viewed.
“I am requesting that President Biden declassify all information relating to this threat so that Congress, the administration, and our allies can openly discuss the actions necessary to respond to this threat,” he said.
His Democratic counterpart on the committee, Jim Himes, said Mr. Turner was “right to highlight the issue,” but urged calm. “People should not panic – that is unequivocal,” Mr. Himes said.
He added: “I don’t want people thinking that Martians are landing or that your Wednesday is going to be ruined. But it is something that the Congress and the administration does need to address in the medium to long run.”
Mike Johnson, the House Speaker, echoed the comments, saying there was “no need for public alarm.” “Steady hands are at the wheel, we’re working on it,” he added.
The letter from the House intelligence committee to all members of Congress warned the panel “has identified an urgent matter with regard to a destabilizing foreign military capability that should be known by all congressional policymakers.”
The White House was surprised by the move. Mr. Sullivan said: “I am confident that President Biden, in the decisions that he has taken, is going to ensure the security of the American people going forward.”
He added: “I’ll just say that I personally reached out to the Gang of Eight. It is highly unusual, in fact, for the national security adviser to do that.”
Mr. Sullivan went on to stress that the Biden administration had “gone further and in more creative, more strategic ways, dealt with the declassification of intelligence in the national interest of the United States than any administration in history.”
Last week, the Danish defense minister Troels Lund Poulsen warned the rapidity of the Kremlin’s military production meant it could attack a NATO country “within a three-to-five-year period.”
“That was not NATO’s assessment in 2023. This is new knowledge that is coming to the fore now,” he stressed.
Such an attack would test Article Five of the military alliance, which holds that an attack on one member represents an attack on all and should trigger a collective response.
Again: The Disarmament Advocates Sleep Through the Nuclear Alarm Bells
My weekly essay addresses criticism of the Strategic Posture Commission report. Disarmament (Global Zero) advocates generally oppose new US nuclear capability, having called for the killing of US ICBMS, and now stopping the pursuit of a Navy theater cruise missile and the new USAF gravity bomb, designed to deter limited theater nuclear strikes and hard to reach and deeply buried targets, respectively.
The disarmament folks dismiss the idea that Russia and China might use nuclear weapons for coercion or blackmail, as the Posture Commission highlighted in their October 2023 report. Their arguments, however, miss their target by miles.
The possession of a theater or regional nuclear strike capability gives any US President multiple options to deter the use of such weapons against NATO for example, avoiding being left with only an all or nothing response, exactly what then Senator John F. Kennedy worried about in 1959 when discussing the US deterrent capability.
As for escalate to win, or the use of nuclear weapons or coercion, that is an explicit Russian adopted strategy not for keeping deterrence but to help Moscow succeed in committing aggression.
As for the US warhead work, all US warheads on our submarines, cruise missiles and land-based missiles are multiple decades old and under law are required to be certified as working by the military commanders of the force. That can only be done through the current effort to refurbish, rebuild or life extend the warheads, without which the US would go out of the nuclear business.
Nuclear Alarm Bells
By Peter Huessy
The chance of a conventional military conflict going nuclear is growing. Can the US and its allies turn back that threat and effectively strengthen deterrence? Yes, if as urgently recommended by the report of the Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United, the US adds new nuclear deterrent capability to the US nuclear arsenal, including a prompt and survivable theater nuclear strike technology.
Unfortunately, trying to stand in the way are disarmament advocates often opposed to new US nuclear capability. Just recently the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Ams Control Association and the Federation of American Scientists have proposed killing a Navy deployed nuclear armed cruise missile, and both the USAF gravity bomb delivered by air and the land-based ICBMs.
What worried the Commission? Two major developments. First was the Russian “escalate to win” nuclear strategy. Russia seeks to threaten limited nuclear strikes during a conventional conflict, hoping to force the US and its allies to standdown but to avoid Armageddon.
Specifically, President Valdimir Putin of Russia has threatened limited regional escalatory strikes dozens of times over Ukraine which may be the reason the US and Ukraine have not escalated the conflict to where Russian territory is regularly attacked. Senior US military leaders have explained to Congress that US conventional warfare exercises end very badly when the adversary introduces nuclear weapons into the battlespace. Russia’s Putin knows this.
The Posture Commission also highlighted what then Commander of US Strategic Forces Admiral Charles Richard described as a “breathtaking” large buildup of China’s nuclear forces. China is projected to become a nuclear armed peer competitor to the United States by 2030-5. According to the US Strategic Command, China now has 500 warheads but for the first time more ICBM launchers than the US. With a 2030-5 projected force of 1500 warheads, a China attack on Taiwan looks more likely, and could draw the US into an overt nuclear armed conflict.
For the disarmament community, these twin developments are dismissed as potential emerging threats to the United States. For example, Daniel Post for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists argues an escalate to win strategy won’t work so the US has no need to match such a capability. And he further notes the United States has no moral standing to be against such a strategy as it was adopted by the United States during the Cold War. Unable to match Soviet tank armies “tank for tank,” the US relied on the deterrent threat to escalate to nuclear retaliation should the USSR conventional forces invade Western Europe.
Daniel Post says history reveals escalation doesn’t always win. He references an unpublished dissertation on non-nuclear battlefield escalatory attacks between Iraq and Iran in the 1979 “Marsh War”; the 1972 United States bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail and the North Vietnamese response; Hungary’s response to attacks by the Ottoman empire in the 16th century; and Japanese attacks on the Chiang forces in China during World War II.
He concludes only two cases resulted in the escalating power winning, while in the other cases the attacked military forces either continued fighting or counter-attacked. Thus, the professor concludes escalatory threats including nuclear ones, are not likely to succeed.
Michael Klare of the Nation takes on the question of how to deal with China’s growing nuclear force in similar fashion. He blames the United States for deciding without justification that China was a serious security threat to the United States. Klare points to the 2018 national security strategy as having unnecessarily scared China. Xi Jinping concluded China’s small nuclear force could not withstand a likely US nuclear first strike.
Thus, Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping initiated a nuclear military build-up to deter the aggressive United States, despite wanting to sustain a preferred policy of a no-first use, small or “minimum” deterrent force. The implication being the 2023 Strategic Posture Commission used the Chinese counter-buildup as the basis for asserting China would be a near-peer nuclear armed competitor by 2030-5, but without acknowledging the US “started the arms race.”
Both claims are wrong.
Daniel Post forgets that the description of escalate to win strategies by Dr. Brad Roberts and General John Hyten were of Russia as an aggressor nation, which initiated military conflict in the hopes of winning. The concern of the Commission is for the US to be able to prevent the use of escalate to win strategies, not to adopt such a policy. The challenge is when faced with the possible loss of a conventional fight, Moscow might seek to or threaten to escalate the conflict with limited nuclear strikes in order to secure the US and its allies “stand down.”
The coercive nuclear strike threat identified by the 2023 Posture Commission originated with President Yeltsin of Russia who explicitly in April 1999 called for the development of very accurate, low yield nuclear weapons for the battlefield. Some experts believe this was in reaction to the US conventional bombing of Serbia. More likely, senior Russian nuclear officials were convinced the large nuclear warheads in the Russian deployed forces were simply practically unusable on the battlefield, and only useful for massive Armageddon type attacks.
Thus, the Russians not the United States has developed such battlefield weapons by the thousands, while the United States has remained with a small stockpile of theater gravity bombs, hardly the “vast” stockpiles of US theater weapons described by Mr. Klare. In addition, it is Moscow that thinks such weapons are useful battlefield weapons, and that is what we have to deter. Russia sees nuclear weapons as instruments with which to pursue aggression, while the US sees nuclear forces as a deterrent to stop or prevent aggression. Mr. Post misses this critical distinction.
As for the Chinese build-up, the 2018 US security strategy report simply stated the obvious. China had previously published a strategy described as “unrestricted warfare,” identifying the United States not as a competitor but an enemy. And as the former Assistant Secretary of State Tom Fingar explained February 15, 2024, the Chinese reassessment that initiated its current major nuclear buildup was initiated in 2007-8, not 2018, and was triggered by the world economic downturn not aggressive US policy.
The assumed “peaceful rise” and benign posture of China is belied by the facts. In January 2009, the head of the National Security Agency, USAF General Keith Aleander told a private dinner of aerospace executives at the National War College that China was annually stealing $600 billion a year in intellectual property from US industry.
It is widely understood China infiltrates key government and private US data bases. And exports fentanyl through Mexico in what China calls a reverse “Opium war” against the US. While expanding unlawful island making in the South China Sea that harms freedom of navigation. And contrary to its obligations under the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty, assists its allies Iran and North Korea with both nuclear weapons and ballistic missile development.
There is little doubt of its objective: to replace the US as the world’s military, economic and political hegemon by 2049, as Dr. Michael Pillsbury details in his “The Hundred Year Marathon.”
As David Asher of the Hudson Institute has detailed, China has multiple dozens of agencies, bureaus, departments and banks that regularly assist North Korea to evade UN sanctions. In areas adjacent to Iran, Morocco, Yemen and Indonesia, China is seeking a military presence from which to exercise control over key maritime choke points through which 60% of daily oil production must pass. Finally, China is both helping to finance and arm Russia’s war against Ukraine. Add to this an unprecedented expansion of China’s nuclear force, is it any wonder the Posture Commission has sounded an alarm?
And the alarm may be late. During the post 2018 period, despite a genuine commitment to modernize the US conventional and nuclear forces, our Air Force was forced to downsize, now the oldest and smallest in our history. The Navy too is shrinking as legacy ships are retired. Even though our nuclear deterrent is aging, it has now reached some 40-70 years of continuous deployment, while declining in size by 90% over the past 34 years. How can that be described as an “aggressive” posture?
When the United States had over ten thousand nuclear bombs, there was ostensibly a Chinese nuclear force of around 20 nuclear warheads, usually portrayed as proof positive of China’s benign intentions. Now the US force deploys no more than 1350 deployed warheads on a day-to-day basis, with no strategic combers on alert and roughly one third of our submarines on patrol, and this compels the Chinese to now build more ICBM launchers than are in the US inventory while adding hundreds of nuclear weapons every year to its nuclear arsenal, and seeking 1500 warheads?
In both cases, as the Commission detailed, Russia and China’s hegemonic ambitions seek to expand borders, compel neighboring nations to diminish their sovereignty, and predictably dominate international affairs. Key to achieve these objectives are nuclear weapons which Chris Yeaw of the University of Nebraska projects will reach near ten thousand as early as 2035.
Especially worrisome are theater or short-range systems, aimed at the United States and its allies, just as the US nuclear stockpile remains at its lowest level since the Eisenhower administration, with a theater nuclear force in Europe outnumbered at least twenty to one. The Commission alarm bell is not some pranks; they are a serious wake-up call to the United States to get serious. Perhaps someday the disarmament advocates will also get serious and stop chasing unicorns.
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