Category: Uncategorized

The God-Emperor puts more loyalists in place. For, you know, the transition….

Purge continues at the Pentagon with Trump team abruptly firing Defense Business Board members, installing Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, as multiple retired military Trump supporters like Mike Flynn and Scott O’Grady call for martial law and overthrowing election.

Oh noes! Lawsy, whatevah shall we do about this blatant disrespect for fake democracy? Meanwhile, according to the Washington Post, the newly purged Pentagon is blocking visits to U.S. military intelligence agencies by the Biden transition team.

But no worries. I’m sure they will arrange to accommodate them at Gitmo.

Or rather, correcting the famous mistranslation of Clausewitz:

As Mark Twain reputedly quipped, it’s not so much what we know that gets us in trouble; it’s what we know that just ain’t so. How much of what we know about martial ventures is wrong? In the naval sphere, for instance, it’s common knowledge that Alfred Thayer Mahan instructs commanders never to divide the fleet. Except he doesn’t. Once upon a time, it turns out, historians took to quoting other historians quoting Mahan to that effect. Over time the quotation — in reality, someone’s bowdlerized version of his ideas about concentrating naval strength — took on an air of authenticity and authority. “Never divide the fleet” endured as a truism despite its flimsy provenance. And it drowned out Mahan’s real ideas through constant repetition.

This is about more than salvaging a long-dead maritime strategist’s reputation. Faulty or outdated ideas can carry real-world repercussions. Acting on them creates a garbage-in/garbage-out effect that bedevils strategic endeavors. Nor is the problem confined to one apocryphal maxim from Mahan. We all know, don’t we, that strategic grand master Carl von Clausewitz defines war as “the continuation of policy by other means” (italics in original). Except he doesn’t. Read in the original German (insert favorite Hitler joke here), Clausewitz’s masterwork On War proclaims — uniformly — that war is a mere continuation of policy “with other means” (mit anderen Mitteln), or sometimes “with the addition of other means” (mit Einmischung anderer Mitteln). Nowhere in On War or his prefatory notes does the Prussian write “by” other means.

Yet this false quotation refuses to die. “By,” “with,” who cares? Well, any student or practitioner of warfare should. Substituting a two-letter for a four-letter word makes a big difference in how Westerners conceive of war. And as Clausewitz teaches, grasping the nature of war in general — and of the particular war we’re contemplating — constitutes the first, most fundamental, most crucial act of statecraft. Get the basics wrong and grim consequences follow.

It’s actually a rather serious mistake, and such an obvious one that it tends to suggest it was intentional. And given that I speak sufficient German to be clear on the difference between “bei” and “mit”, I feel very mildly embarrassed to have occasionally resorted to the mistranslation, although my excuse of never actually having read Clausewitz in the original.

China has successfully tested its ground-based carrier killer against a moving ship.

Adm. Philip Davidson, who is nearing the end of his tour as the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, has been warning about the changing military balance in Asia throughout his tenure. But his warnings have often fallen on deaf ears in a Washington mired in partisanship and dysfunction. The Trump administration talked a big game about meeting the challenge of China’s military encroachment, but Davidson’s calls for substantially more investment to restore the regional balance that has deterred Beijing for decades have gone largely unanswered.

China’s military has moved well past a strategy of simply defending its territory and is now modernizing with the objective of being able to operate and even fight far from its shores, Davidson told me in an interview conducted last month for the 2020 Halifax International Security Forum. Under President Xi Jinping, Davidson said, China has built advanced weapons systems, platforms and rocket forces that have altered the strategic environment in ways the United States has not sufficiently responded to.

“We are seeing great advances in their modernization efforts,” he said. “China will test more missiles, conventional and nuclear associated missiles this year than every other nation added together on the planet. So that gives you an idea of the scale of how these things are changing.”

Davidson confirmed, for the first time from the U.S. government side, that China’s People’s Liberation Army has successfully tested an anti-ship ballistic missile against a moving ship. This was done as part of the PLA’s massive joint military exercises, which have been ongoing since the summer. These are often called “aircraft carrier killer” missiles, because they could threaten the United States’ most significant naval assets from long distances.

“It’s an indication that they continue to advance their capability. We’ve known for years they’ve been in pursuit of a capability that could attack moving targets,” Davidson said. I asked him whether they are designed to target U.S. aircraft carriers. “Trust me, they are targeting everything,” he replied.

The Chinese Navy doesn’t yet possess the blue water capability to take on the U.S. Navy. But the combination of mini-bases constructed on real and artificial islands, combined with the anti-ship missiles, should suffice to deny the U.S. Navy operating space in its expanded home waters without facing unacceptable risks.

Which means that a move on Taiwan is rapidly becoming conceivably practical for the first time since end of WWII.