Our Undeclared Wars

[youthathletics]

CENTCOM announced new deployment to the Middle East to counter Iranain naval threats in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Seas -
An Amphibious Readiness Group/Marine Expeditionary Unit (ARG/MEU) will join additional F-35s, F-16s, and a guided-missile destroyer.

I'm not sure how the marine amphibious units come into play. I guess having them there along with the navy destroyers and the fighter jets let's the Iranians know that Biden is done playing games.

https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/06/15 ... e%20region.

I just read an article that the Iranians have moved one of their elite divisions into a position to attack US forces still in Syria. I'm guessing however fanatical they are and how well trained they may be they are no match for the US Marines and remarkably superior firepower.

I sure you are right.....I just watched a move called The Ambush last night, the name says it all.

[old salt]

The Bataan ARG/MEU is 11 days out of Norfolk. If assigned to CENTCOM, they should transit the Med, Suez, Red Sea, into the Gulf of Oman.

They should have 6 AV-8B Harriers, 4 AH-1Y Cobras. & 4-6 MH-60S SeaHawks, all capable of engaging Iranian naval craft.
The MH-60's also have a mine clearing capability.

Not sure how they'd get the Matines in the embarked MEU all the way into Syria to engage the Iranians there.
Watch & see if the 2 ARG ships (Bataan & Carter Hall) transit the Strain of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf.

The Navy destroyer already there, with USAF F-16's & A-10's overhead, in addition to our USCG cutters & USN Patrol Craft based in Bahrain, are the logical candidates to escort tankers, if necessary.

https://news.usni.org/2023/07/20/u-s-se ... an-threats

[PizzaSnake]

Seems like a good enough place for these musings.

Given the number of US special forces and opportunities for post-military service in companies, is the deployment of forces with the US possible and likely? What arethe factors driving this phenomenon in Mexico?

“ The progression of the armored trucks has followed the flow of elite soldiers into cartels, starting with the recruitment in the 1990s of Mexican Army’s special forces into a paramilitary operation that became the Zetas cartel.

From the weapons they use to the vehicles they drive, the involvement of members of specialized military units in criminal organizations has led these groups to emulate and compete with the country’s elite forces.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/worl ... rucks.html

[Kismet]

a fan is going to LOVE these developments
https://www.justsecurity.org/87650/rene ... anker-war/

"The United States has responded to recent Iranian action by deploying F-16, F-35, and A-10 warplanes to the region, along with additional warships, and U.S. forces, including the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit. According to press reports, the Biden administration is now also deliberating over whether to station U.S. Marines on commercial tankers, whether to expand “collective self-defense” to vessels based on ownership of the ship or cargo (rather than solely based on U.S. registration), as well as potentially delegating further down the chain of command the authority of military commanders to use force.

The intent behind the proposal to station Marines aboard commercial vessels appears to be to use U.S. armed forces as a tripwire, whereby any Iranian attack on these commercial vessels would amount to an attack on U.S. armed forces. The apparent logic is that such a tripwire would deter Iran from further attacks or attempts to seize tankers or other commercial vessels.
The extension of the United States’ defensive umbrella over commercial vessels in the Persian Gulf has historic precedent, most prominently during the so-called Tanker War. In response to Iranian attacks on neutral oil tankers, the United States agreed to reflag Kuwaiti vessels as American and accompany them with U.S. naval convoys as part of Operation Earnest Will. As the Legal Adviser to the State Department argued at the time, “U.S. protection of the vessels is intended to deter rather than provoke military action by Iran.” In the event, this operation led to repeated hostilities between U.S. and Iranian forces in 1987-1988."

[old salt]

QFP : I'm posting this lengthy article here for future ref when I let my NYT subscription lapse.
I return to it whenever I second guess our decisions re. Iraq.
imho -- it documents the best of our involvement there, described by our most credible reporter/observer.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/week ... lkins.html

Back in Iraq, Jarred by the Calm

By Dexter Filkins, Sept. 20, 2008

BAGHDAD — At first, I didn’t recognize the place.

On Karada Mariam, a street that runs over the Tigris River toward the Green Zone, the Serwan and the Zamboor, two kebab places blown up by suicide bombers in 2006, were crammed with customers. Farther up the street was Pizza Napoli, the Italian place shut down in 2006; it, too, was open for business. And I’d forgotten altogether about Abu Nashwan’s Wine Shop, boarded up when the black-suited militiamen of the Mahdi Army had threatened to kill its owners. There it was, flung open to the world.

Two years ago, when I last stayed in Baghdad, Karada Mariam was like the whole of the city: shuttered, shattered, broken and dead.

Abu Nawas Park — I didn’t recognize that, either. By the time I had left the country in August 2006, the two-mile stretch of riverside park was a grim, spooky, deserted place, a symbol for the dying city that Baghdad had become.

These days, the same park is filled with people: families with children, women in jeans, women walking alone. Even the nighttime, when Iraqis used to cower inside their homes, no longer scares them. I can hear their laughter wafting from the park. At sundown the other day, I had to weave my way through perhaps 2,000 people. It was an astonishing, beautiful scene — impossible, incomprehensible, only months ago.

When I left Baghdad two years ago, the nation’s social fabric seemed too shredded to ever come together again. The very worst had lost its power to shock. To return now is to be jarred in the oddest way possible: by the normal, by the pleasant, even by hope. The questions are jarring, too. Is it really different now? Is this something like peace or victory? And, if so, for whom: the Americans or the Iraqis?

There are plenty of reasons why this peace may only amount to a cease-fire, fragile and reversible. The “surge” of American troops is over. The Iraqis are moving to take their country back, yet they wonder what might happen when the Americans’ restraining presence is gone. The Awakening, a poetic name for paying former Sunni insurgents not to kill Americans or Iraqis, could fall apart, just as the Shiite Mahdi Army could reanimate itself as quickly as it disappeared. Politics in Iraq remains frozen in sectarian stalemate; the country’s leaders cannot even agree to set a date for provincial elections, which might hand power to groups that never had it before. The mountain of oil money, piled ever higher by record oil prices, may become another reason to spill blood.

But if this is not peace, it is not war, either — at least not the war I knew. When I left Iraq in the summer of 2006, after living three and a half years here following the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, I believed that evil had triumphed, and that it would be many years before it might be stopped. Iraq, filled with so many people living so close together, nurturing dark and unknowable grievances, seemed destined for a ghastly unraveling.

And now, in the late summer of 2008, comes the calm. Violence has dropped by as much as 90 percent. A handful of the five million Iraqis who fled their homes — one-sixth of all Iraqis — are beginning to return. The mornings, once punctuated by the sounds of exploding bombs, are still. Is it possible that the rage, the thirst for revenge, the sectarian furies, have begun to fade? That Iraqis have been exhausted and frightened by what they have seen?

“We are normal people, ordinary people, like people everywhere,” Aziz al-Saiedi said to me the other day, as we sat on a park bench in Sadr City, only recently freed from the grip of the Mahdi Army. The park was just a small patch of bare ground with a couple of swing sets; it didn’t even have a name, yet it was filled to the bursting. “We want what everyone else wants in this world,” he said.

Everything here seems to be standing on its head. Propaganda posters, which used to celebrate the deaths of American soldiers, now call on Iraqis to turn over the triggermen of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the Mahdi Army. “THERE IS NOWHERE FOR YOU TO HIDE,” a billboard warns in Arabic, displaying a set of peering, knowing eyes. I saw one such poster in Adamiyah, a Sunni neighborhood that two years ago was under the complete control of Al Qaeda. Sunni insurgents — guys who were willing to take on the Qaeda gunmen — are now on the American payroll, keeping the peace at ragtag little checkpoints for $300 a month.

In Sadr City, the small brick building that served as the Mahdi Army’s headquarters still stands. But not 50 feet away, a freshly built Iraqi Army post towers above it now. Next to the army post, perhaps to heighten the insult to the militia, the Iraqi government has begun installing a new sewer network, something this impoverished and overcrowded ghetto sorely needs. “Wanted” posters adorn the blast walls there, too, imploring the locals to turn in the once-powerful militia leaders.

Inside the Sadr Bureau, as it’s called, the ex-militia gunmen speak in chastened tones about moving on, maybe finding other work, maybe even transforming their once ferocious army into a social welfare organization. I didn’t see any guns.
“Please don’t print my name in your newspaper,” one former Mahdi Army commander asked me with a sheepish look. “I’m wanted by the government.”

As for the Americans, they are still here, of course, but standing ever more in the background. Early this month, I joined a convoy carrying Tariq al-Hashemi, one of Iraq’s vice presidents. Hurtling through Baghdad at high speed, we came upon a caravan of American Humvees. I waited for Mr. Hashemi and his men to slow down, but the Iraqis — guns bristling, sirens wailing — barreled past. The Americans hurriedly pulled over and made way. Never in three and a half years in Iraq did I see anything like that.

A Familiar Face
The other day I rode in a helicopter to Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, the Wyoming-size slice of desert west of Baghdad. Two years ago, 30 marines and soldiers were dying there every month. In 2005, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia declared Anbar the seat of its “caliphate.” Since then, violence in Anbar has plummeted. Al Qaeda has been decimated. I was coming in for a ceremony, unimaginable until recently, to mark the handover of responsibility for security to the Iraqi Army and police.

Standing in the middle of the downtown, I found myself disoriented. I had been here before — I was certain — but still I couldn’t recognize the place. Two summers ago, when I’d last been in Ramadi, the downtown lay in ruins. Only one building stood then, the Anbar provincial government center, and the Americans were holding onto it at all cost. For hundreds of yards in every direction, everything was destroyed; streets, buildings, cars, even the rubble had been ground to dust. Ramadi looked like Dresden, or Grozny, or some other obliterated city. Insurgents attacked every day.

And then, suddenly, I realized it: I was standing in front of the government center itself. It was sporting a fresh concrete facade, which had been painted off-white with brownish trim. Over the entrance hung a giant official seal of Anbar Province. The road where I stood had been recently paved; it was black and smooth. The rubble had been cleared away. American marines were walking about, without helmets or flak jackets or even guns.

In the crowd, I saw a face I recognized. It was Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq’s national security advisor. It had been a long time since I’d seen him. Mr. Rubaie is a warm, garrulous man, a neurologist who spent years in London before returning to Iraq. But he is also a Shiite, and a member of Iraq’s Shiite-led government, which, in 2005 and 2006, was accused of carrying out widespread atrocities against Iraq’s Sunnis. Anbar Province is almost entirely Sunni.

As Mr. Rubaie made his way through the crowd, I noticed he was holding hands with another Iraqi man, a traditional Arab gesture of friendship and trust. It was Brig. Gen. Murdi Moshhen al-Dulaimi, the Iraqi Army officer taking control of the province — a Sunni. The sun was blinding, but Mr. Rubaie was wearing sunglasses, and finally he spotted me.
“What on earth are you doing here?” he asked over the crowd.
I might have asked him the same thing.

A General’s Choices
In August, before I came back to Iraq, I visited Gen. Ray Odierno in his office at the Pentagon. As the deputy commander in Iraq from late 2006 to early 2008, General Odierno had helped execute the buildup of American troops that has helped quell the violence. When we met, he was preparing to assume command of the American forces here, taking over for Gen. David H. Petraeus.

General Odierno, an enormous, imposing man, has come a long way in Iraq. As the commander of the Fourth Infantry Division in 2003 and 2004, he earned a reputation as an iron-fisted officer whose harsh tactics alienated the Iraqi population and helped the Sunni insurgency grow. General Odierno rejects that characterization, pointing out that he was based in Saddam Hussein’s hometown, possibly the toughest place in all of Iraq. “I had no choice,” the general told me. “There is a line you have to cross; you have to decide whether to use violence or not. I just felt at the time that I had to do that. It wasn’t that I wanted to.”

When he returned to Iraq in late 2006, General Odierno concluded that the American project in Iraq was headed for defeat. The American officers whom he was replacing had reached the same conclusion. “I knew that if we continued the way that we were, then we were not going to be successful,” he said.

Hence the troop increase. At its most basic level, General Odierno explained, the premise of this “surge” was that ordinary Iraqis didn’t want the violence. That is, that the chaos in Iraq was being driven by small groups of killers, principally those of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who, by murdering Shiite civilians in huge car and suicide bomb attacks, were driving ordinary Iraqis into the arms of Shiite deaths squads and the Mahdi Army. If that dynamic could be broken, ordinary Iraqis would stop relying on militias to protect them. Something approaching normalcy might return.

“We believed that the majority of the Iraqi people wanted to move forward, but you had these small groups that didn’t,” General Odierno said. “So we had to protect the people, and go after these groups.”

And so they did, with a series of offensives against the Qaeda insurgents in and around Baghdad in 2007 and then, earlier this year, in Basra and in Baghdad against the Mahdi Army. Along the way, the Americans got a huge break: The leaders of Iraq’s large Sunni tribes, which had included many insurgents, decided to stop opposing the Americans and join them against Al Qaeda. The Americans, seizing the opportunities, agreed to put many of the tribesmen, including many former insurgents, on the payroll.

The Sunni Awakening, as it is called, cascaded through Sunni areas across Iraq.
The result, now visible in the streets, is a calm unlike any Iraq has known in the five and a half years since the Americans arrived. Iraqi life is flowing back into the streets. The ordinary people, the “normal people,” as Mr. Aziz called them, have the upper hand, at least for now.

But for how long?
By any measure, General Odierno faces a huge challenge in the coming months: consolidating the gains the American military has achieved with possibly fewer troops, depending on the decisions made by Iraq’s leaders and America’s next president. Second, in all likelihood, General Odierno will have to oversee a potentially chaotic transition from one Iraqi government to another, assuming that Iraqi leaders hold nationwide elections in 2009 or 2010.

For reasons that are obvious — as a soldier, he takes orders from America’s civilian leaders — the general was less than precise on how he saw it all unfolding.
“If the next president changes the mission, then I have to figure out,” General Odierno said, stopping himself. “You know, whoever that may be.”

The Specter of Chaos
In Iraq, the calm is very fragile. The arrangements that keep the peace here are, by their nature, extremely tentative. They could come apart overnight. You don’t have to be a pessimist to recognize that.

I got a good sense of the fragility the other night in Adamiyah, the big Sunni neighborhood in northern Baghdad. I was standing on Al Camp Street as a wedding procession, made up of perhaps 25 cars, suddenly turned my way.
An Iraqi bride and groom sat in the back seat of the lead sedan, a black Mercedes-Benz, while a mass of revelers danced and tooted their horns. Two years ago, like the scene in Abu Nawas park, such a sight was inconceivable.
Spotting me, an American in ordinary clothes, the wedding train halted, with the music and the dancing carrying on. The groom, dressed in a dark suit, climbed out of the Mercedes, leaving his bride, in flowing whites and heavy rouge, inside.
“It’s wonderful, wonderful,” said the groom, Yassin Razzaq, 25, shaking my hand. And then Mr. Razzaq pointed to a group of plainclothes Iraqi gunmen who had gathered at the roadside to watch. “It’s all thanks to them.”
The “them” Mr. Razzaq was referring to were the members of the local Awakening Council, the name given to the Sunnis, many of them former insurgents, who now keep the peace in Iraq’s Sunni neighborhoods.
“Did you hear that — did you hear what he said?” asked Abu Safa al-Tikriti, a mustachioed former officer in Saddam Hussein’s army and a member of the tribe that dominates the dictator’s hometown. “Without us, there would be chaos.”

Chaos, indeed. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has expressed an intention to dismantle the Awakening Councils, which employ about 100,000 men, most of them Sunnis. Mr. Maliki doesn’t like the idea of paying people who used to be shooting at him. But many American and Iraqi officials worry that firing these men would drive them underground, and back to the gun. Mr. Tikriti, the Awakening leader, doesn’t make much of a secret of that. “I’ve come too far to turn back now,” Mr. Tikriti said. “It’s this or death.”

‘God Willing’
For obvious reasons, almost no one in Baghdad seems willing to predict the future anymore. Ask anyone, and you are likely to get to the all-purpose Arabic expression, “Insha’Allah” — “God willing.” Everyone, it seems, is trying to enjoy the calm while it lasts.
But if people here do not want to talk about the future, they still have to plan for it.

Sadiya Salman’s four sons and their families, for instance, returned home to Adamiyah recently after two years away. I found them crowded into their small, dimly-lit home in Zhrawaya, Adamiyah’s only Shiite neighborhood.
Like so many other of Baghdad’s mixed neighborhoods, Zhrawaya was the scene of terrifying sectarian violence in 2006 and 2007. As Shiites in predominantly Sunni Adamiyah, the Salman brothers — Wajdi, Luay, Rushdi and Feraz — considered themselves likely targets.
Then came the men in black masks one day, who spray-painted a warning on the wall: “Rafida,” Arabic for “rejectionist.” It is a derogatory word that some militant Sunnis use for Shiites.

And so the brothers left, taking their wives and children with them, 13 in all. Ms. Salman, an intense and energetic woman of 68 years, stayed behind with her four daughters; as a female, she felt safe.
“I never did get a look at them because they always wore masks,” Ms. Salman, seated on the couch in her home, said of the gunmen who took over Zhrawaya. “But the accents were Iraqi.”
Every other Shiite family also fled Zhrawaya; it is still largely empty. To slow the death squads, the Americans built a two-mile-long cement wall around the outskirts of her neighborhood. It’s 20 feet high and painted baby blue. It gives the neighborhood a bleak and claustrophobic feel.

In the 24 months that her sons were gone, Ms. Salman said she rarely ventured outside. The exception, she said, was when she saw American soldiers.
“Oh, I love them,” Ms. Salman said, brightening in her darkened house. “I always knew I was safe with them.”
With life returning to normal in Adamiyah, the Salman brothers and their families recently returned.
“We are the first Shia to come back,” Feraz said. “The rest of the families are still too afraid.”

Life is difficult; during the day, the temperature soars well above 120 degrees. For most of the day there is no electricity. When the sun goes down, the interior of the Salman house goes dark.
Yet for all the hardship endured by the Salmans, they appear to have lost neither their generosity nor their sense of grace. As I sat in their darkened apartment, Zaineb, one of Ms. Salman’s daughters served me tea. Her son Luay shone a flashlight over my shoulder for well over an hour while I took notes. As I talked and scribbled, another son, Rushdi, stood behind me, waving a fan to keep me cool.

[Brooklyn]

Beware of online FALSE FLAGS:





Journalist Whitney Webb: exposes the WEF false flag plan to carry out a massive cyber attack in 2024 that will pave the wave for a regional war in the middle east. The pro war media has jumped the gun by reporting that cyber attacks did take from Iran (precisely as predicted in the report):

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/02/12167352 ... ter-plants


As reported in the YT video, no actual evidence was produced to prove the claim. We've had similar reports in recent years, none of which have panned out but have succeeded in stirring up anti Iran and pro war hysteria:


https://www.google.com/search?q=Iran-li ... UTF-8#ip=1

[old salt]

This is the likely anti-ship ballistic missile the Houthis in Yemen are firing at ships in the Red Sea.
They've fired 3 at merchant ships & hit 2, causing limited damage.
A guided missile equipped Destroyer or Cruiser should be able to shoot them down, but they are a threat to undefended ships.
This could be a demo for what the IRGC can do in the Persian Gulf.
This is why we have so many anti-ballistic missile equipped destroyers & cruisers,
...& why allies like the Japanese like to sail in company with us.
Lots of maritime choke points in shipping lanes around the globe.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/milita ... hi-rebels/

https://web.archive.org/web/20130622072 ... 9203183968

[Brooklyn]

False flag alert ~ US wants war on Iran:





Prepare to pay up so that wealthy elites can profit and say good bye to your children as Uncle Sam embarks another war of imperialistic colonialism in the Mideast.

[NattyBohChamps04]

Is that 4 administrations he predicted would start wars with Iran?

Meanwhile, Venezuela getting feisty over Guyana's oil? Didn't have that on my 2023 bingo card.

[old salt]

This months free read from Foreign Affairs
Plz do not quote/repost the entire article.

The Case for Conservative Internationalism

How to Reverse the Inward Turn of Republican Foreign Policy
By Kori Schake, December 4, 2023

It is hard to think of a more chaotic moment in the history of the Republican Party than the present; perhaps only Andrew Johnson’s 1865–68 presidency comes close. The GOP’s de facto leader, former President Donald Trump, faces 91 felony charges in four separate criminal cases. After serving just nine months as Speaker of the House, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California was forced out of the speakership by eight members of his own party, triggering a round-robin tournament that left the House paralyzed for weeks before a little-known member pieced together the votes to replace him. House Republicans have been flirting with shutting down the government and defaulting on the national debt in legislation that has no prospect of winning support even from fellow Republicans in the Senate, while Trump spreads lies about the 2020 election and strategizes about weaponizing the U.S. executive branch against his opponents.

The GOP’s disorder is especially evident—and dangerous—in the realm of foreign policy. For decades since 1952, the Republican Party had a fairly clear international vision: promote American security and economic power while supporting the expansion of democracy around the world. That meant providing for a strong military, cooperating with allies to advance shared interests, and boosting U.S. power in international institutions. It meant advancing free trade, ensuring fair international competition for U.S. companies, and promoting the rule of law in immigration policy. And it meant opposing authoritarianism, especially when autocrats directly challenged U.S. interests.

Republicans’ commitments to these principles have weakened dramatically. Trump whiplashes between a wish to project U.S. power abroad and isolationism; recently, he has vowed to withdraw from NATO, end imports of Chinese goods, deploy the U.S. military onto American streets to fight crime and deport immigrants, and “drive out” “warmongers” and “globalists” from the U.S. government. Other conservative leaders—such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy—express outright hostility toward sustaining the United States’ international commitments. Most GOP presidential candidates offered unqualified support for Israel after Hamas’s attack, but Trump appeared to be impressed with it. On Ukraine, the party’s politicians are split, with just over half of House Republicans voting in September 2023 to halt U.S. aid to Kyiv’s defense against Russia’s invasion.

So it does not appear to be an auspicious time for traditional Republican internationalism to regain its influence over the GOP. To some degree, GOP leaders’ stances reflect an apparent isolationist turn among their constituents. An August 2023 Civiqs Daily Tracking poll found that 77 percent of registered Republican voters agree that the United States should become less involved in solving problems overseas. It might not even seem urgent that Republicans develop a clear foreign policy at all. As recently as April 2023, when a Wall Street Journal poll asked likely Republican voters which issues were most important when they assessed presidential hopefuls, foreign policy ranked fourth, tied with a candidate’s view on crime. By August 2023, foreign policy had sunk to GOP voters’ lowest priority among 14 policy positions, falling behind the economy, inflation, immigration, and others.

But foreign policy should be an urgent priority. The world is growing more dangerous, and foreign policy bears directly on the state of the domestic economy and, thus, Americans’ very livelihoods. Extending U.S. power abroad—and U.S. influence in international institutions such as NATO—deters foreign aggression that might otherwise disrupt the U.S. economy. Expanding trade helps create fair international competition for U.S. businesses. And U.S. President Joe Biden’s foreign policy has helped generate the economic discomfort that Republican voters put at the top of their list of concerns. The Biden administration works from the theory that U.S. foreign policy has failed the middle class and needs to be repaired through market protections and government subsidies; this approach has stoked inflation, distorted markets, stunted trade, and frustrated U.S. allies.

The United States needs a strong and vibrant Republican Party. To make a more coherent case for how it would solve the country’s problems, the party will have to clarify its foreign policy focus. Traditional conservative internationalism remains the best way to protect U.S. national security and steward the economy. And voters, in fact, may still be eager for an internationalist foreign policy agenda—if that agenda could be presented to them persuasively. A July 2023 Reagan Institute poll revealed that “strong majorities of Americans believe their country should lead the world, invest in military power, promote international trade, support freedom and democracy, and stand with Ukraine until it wins its war against Russian aggression.” Self-described Trump voters mostly identified as internationalists, not as isolationists, and their support for assisting Ukraine increased by nearly a third—from 50 percent to 64 percent—when the pollster explained how that aid contributed to U.S. security.

Americans, including conservatives, remain what they have always been: reluctant internationalists, but internationalists all the same. They do not respond well to abstract appeals about preserving the “international order.” But they understand that if the world lets China set the rules, U.S. liberties will become less secure, U.S. businesses will be disadvantaged, and U.S. allies will be left vulnerable. Voters do not need Republicans to pander to Trumpism or to polls that suggest soft support for internationalism. They do need Republicans to advance a theory for what is happening in the world and how the party intends to protect the country and secure Americans’ prosperity. No such theory can be developed without a clear foreign policy.

PROTECTION RACKET
Despite Biden’s abandonment of Afghanistan, his administration has done well in rallying support for Ukraine, strengthening U.S. defense alliances in the Pacific, and helping Israel respond to Hamas’s terrorist assault. But a gaping hole exists in the middle of Biden’s foreign policy, created by protectionist economics. At the heart of the Biden administration’s foreign policy is a belief that although the United States has many sources of dynamism—its deep private and public capital markets, its relatively permissive legal immigration policies, its world-class universities, its strong Chapter 11 bankruptcy protections, and its uniquely creative and skilled labor force—U.S. businesses cannot prosper domestically or compete internationally unless the government funds them and shields them from competition.

The consequences of this fundamental misconception are both geopolitical and economic. Biden has failed to recommit to ratifying the United States’ accession to the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a trade agreement with 12 dynamic Asian countries that President Barack Obama signed but Trump repudiated. Instead, Biden offered a vacuous alternative in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, a nebulous pact that the White House has readily acknowledged “is not a trade agreement.” The administration is forgoing a chance to lower tariffs and strengthen labor and environmental standards on imports, thereby directly advantaging China: in 2021, China applied for admission to the TPP in the United States’ place.

The Biden administration’s “Buy American” restrictions have stressed supply chains, penalized foreign companies such as Samsung and Toyota that have created a huge number of jobs in the United States, and embittered allies that the United States will need in future conflict with China. Biden has retained Trump-era tariffs that even he has described as self-defeating. The global South is eager for international trade and investment, but the Biden team is ceding these trade opportunities to Chinese businesses. That not only passes up mutually beneficial economic opportunities but affords developing countries little reason to support the United States when Washington appeals for help in its efforts to aid Ukraine and Israel.

Going forward, Biden’s foreign policy stance will prevent the United States from achieving the economy of scale that can match or exceed China’s, especially as Beijing deepens its collaborations with Moscow and Tehran. The guiding principle of U.S. policy toward China should be to force or motivate it to become a responsible economic and geopolitical stakeholder—to play by international rules. To prevent China from acquiring critical technologies such as advanced semiconductors, the Biden administration has advocated a “small yard, high fence” approach, protecting a limited number of technologies but imposing severe threats of secondary sanctions against adversaries and allies alike if they do not also restrict sales to China. This position risks alienating allies that share U.S. security objectives, invest in U.S. companies, buy enormous amounts of U.S. products, and boast cutting-edge firms whose technological innovations and manufacturing capacity U.S. companies need. For instance, unilaterally imposing restrictions on chip-making tools and telling allies to follow the United States’ lead was resented in both The Hague and Tokyo.

America’s allies are pleading for a U.S. economic strategy that helps them reduce their reliance on China.
Washington should long ago have tightened restrictions on U.S. funding for Chinese military technologies and reduced dependence on Chinese products in critical areas such as pharmaceuticals. But a better approach to China would also offer trade advantages to allied countries in the form of an economic NATO, urge allied governments to prevent companies from surging into markets that Chinese economic warfare restricts, and rally public demand for products that China penalizes. The United States should also license more friendly countries to produce products critical to the U.S. defense industry.

In a September 2023 Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey, 74 percent of Americans surveyed—nearly an all-time high—believed trade was good for the U.S. economy. Eighty percent believed it was good for their own standard of living, and 63 percent thought it was good for creating jobs. In the July 2023 Reagan Institute survey, 58 percent of respondents believed that negotiating favorable trade deals should be a foreign policy priority, and 62 percent of Republican respondents supported signing a trade agreement with Asian countries if the respondents were told that the agreement was designed to counter Chinese economic power.

The problem with U.S. strategy toward globalization in the past 20 years was not that Washington allowed too much trade but that it permitted trade that did not establish reciprocity—trade that did not create a level playing field on which U.S. firms could compete with foreign counterparts, principally China. Trade deficits with China cost the United States 3.7 million jobs between 2001, when China was admitted to the World Trade Organization, and 2018. Three-fourths of these lost jobs—2.8 million—were in manufacturing. After Washington allowed Beijing the benefits of free trade without requiring it to play by the rules, the consequences of unequal trade with China affected every congressional district in the United States. China maintained industrial subsidies, pirated intellectual property, forced companies into joint ventures, and restricted access to its market—practices it continues to this day.

In addition to placing more restrictions on China, the United States should engage in more meaningful trade talks with Indonesia, the Philippines, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. Washington’s current lack of an effective economic line of operations overmilitarizes U.S. strategy. Allies do not want a war with China, and they do not want a moral crusade against authoritarianism. They are pleading for an economic strategy that helps them reduce their reliance on China and remain prosperous. Good, inventive trade policy could create not only a bigger yard—a larger group of countries that adhere to fair rules and norms—but also higher walls, by encouraging more voluntary cooperation against China and others when they do not play fair.

BROKEN ARMOR
Little unites Americans more than the belief that the U.S. military should be strong. The Reagan Institute poll showed that 92 percent of Republicans, 81 percent of independents, and 79 percent of Democrats believe that sustaining the strength of the U.S. military is essential to maintaining the country’s peace and prosperity. More than 70 percent of Americans believe that Washington should increase its spending on defense.

But a gap is growing between what the United States commits itself to doing militarily and the force it funds. In March 2023, Biden proudly advertised his $842 billion budget request for the U.S. Department of Defense as the largest such request in U.S. peacetime history; it represented a 3.2 percent increase in nominal spending. With inflation running higher than that throughout most of 2023, however, the request amounted to a real reduction in defense spending for the second year in a row. Moreover, $109 billion, or one-eighth, of the U.S. defense budget that was approved in 2022 was spent on things that do not directly or indirectly assist in fighting and winning wars, such as breast cancer research.

The U.S. government’s neglect of the military has been a bipartisan problem. In 2011, Republicans helped pass the Budget Control Act, which over the ensuing ten years, cut $600 billion from the Defense Department’s budget. And if the budget agreement that McCarthy negotiated with Biden in May 2023 goes into effect in the spring of 2024, it will cut defense buying power by another $100 billion. Unless the U.S. government radically revises its willingness to fund defense, it will fail to deter its adversaries and could very well lose its next war.

In 2015, the Chinese navy had 255 ships capable of contributing to combat operations. Now it has 370. The U.S. Navy has only 291, and the Biden administration plans to further reduce that number to 280. Military unreadiness is now perhaps the greatest national security challenge for the United States. In a war against China, U.S. forces could run out of critical munitions in a week.

Fortunately, neither China nor Russia has yet directly challenged the United States in ways that require Washington to fight outright. But they are getting close. After World War II broke out, it was a lucky thing that the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union held out long enough for the United States to ramp up military recruitment and expand its defense industrial base to prepare to join the war. Americans may assume that the United States has similar leeway now; this assumption constitutes a very dangerous temptation to its adversaries.

As the war between Russia and Ukraine drags on, sentimental appeals about Ukrainian courage and Russian depredations are wearing thin. And Republicans have legitimate concerns: they want to reduce federal spending, ensure that U.S. aid money does not get siphoned off by corrupt Ukrainian officials, and understand where assisting Ukraine should rank in the hierarchy of U.S. interests.

Little unites Americans more than the belief that the U.S. military should be strong.
But Biden is giving only enough aid for Kyiv to keep fighting, not enough for it to win. There is a strong conservative case to make for continuing, even increasing, U.S. assistance to Ukraine. For a price of just five percent of the 2023 U.S. defense budget and no U.S. casualties, Ukrainians are fighting the war NATO feared it might have to fight. Voters should know that 60 percent of U.S. assistance to Ukraine goes to U.S. companies that make the weapons sent to Kyiv. And the United States’ engagement with Ukraine has revealed the dangerous deficiencies that Washington has allowed to creep into its defense. Ukraine is in some ways providing both the inspiration and the warning that the United Kingdom did during World War II, allowing the United States to see where its military is unready for what it may be called to do.

Adequately funding defense will ineluctably require entitlement reform. Neither party wants to touch existing entitlement programs—namely, Social Security and Medicare—even though they are becoming unaffordable: entitlements constitute 63 percent of federal spending, up from 19 percent in 1970. Outlays to these programs are squeezing Washington’s discretionary spending, and the interest the country must pay on its huge national debt will further constrict what it can spend on both defense and domestic programs. U.S. federal debt stands at $33 trillion. According to Moody’s Analytics, by 2025 or 2026, federal interest payments on that debt will exceed defense spending.

Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie are the only Republican presidential candidates who own up to the necessity of entitlement reform. But their acknowledgment of it is an excellent start. Legislators already have a blueprint for how to cut entitlement spending in the recommendations made by the 2010 bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Both parties need to change their attitude toward entitlement reform, but Democrats will likely keep whistling past the graveyard unless Republicans regain their own seriousness about putting entitlements on a sustainable footing to free up funding for defense and other domestic priorities.

BORDER FOLLY
According to analysts at the Brennan Center, a nonprofit law and public policy think tank, many Americans do not understand why the U.S. military does not protect U.S. borders. There is room here for better Republican policy; indeed, immigration policy has a crucial connection to foreign policy and to the United States’ economic health. A January 2021 Pew Research Institute poll found that 68 percent of Americans think the United States is doing a bad job of managing its borders. And that is true: since January 2020, an estimated 200,000 migrants have attempted to cross into the United States illegally every month via the Mexican border, more than at any other point in the last 20 years. Contrary to sensationalized media coverage, the vast majority of these migrants are adults, not unaccompanied minors.

The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the U.S. military from functioning as a domestic police force. Already overstretched generals do not want to take on the job of protecting U.S. borders and are hesitant to launch missions that might tarnish Americans’ respect for the military. But to build more support for U.S. engagements abroad, political leaders need to show they can bring more effort and resources to border security. The January 2023 Pew survey found that a majority of Americans support giving the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency more money to secure the U.S.-Mexican border.

More than money and extra personnel are needed. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency has estimated that over 60 percent of recent migrants are not from Mexico or Central America but begin their journey in farther-flung places such as Colombia, Cuba, Peru, and Venezuela and then travel through Mexico. The United States should invest more: in surveillance and other technologies that increase its ability to track migrant movements through Central America and to make interdictions beyond the U.S.-Mexican border; in new immigration courts to process asylum claims more quickly; in more cooperation with Mexico to forestall migrants’ transiting its territory; and in more engagement with migrants’ countries of origin, both to help resolve the problems that precipitate mass emigration and to ease the return of migrants who do not meet U.S. immigration criteria.

The failure to properly regulate immigration is leading the United States to neglect its current biggest geopolitical opportunity: consolidating North American cooperation. U.S. politicians do not worry enough about the downsides of Mexico sinking into criminality and do not act creatively enough to make Canada, Mexico, and the United States a common platform for energy, labor, and manufacturing. With clearer immigration policy, supply chains at risk of weaponization by China could be more easily relocated to Mexico; California’s and Texas’s creaky energy grids could be strengthened by increasing both imports and exports of energy from Canada and Mexico. If the United States created opportunities for nearby neighbors to prosper that directly enhance the U.S. economy, Americans would see the advantages of shaping the world in ways that expand security and prosperity. Until Americans are more confident that the United States has control over its borders, however, they may not be willing to support the cooperation opportunities that its geographical position offers.

HELLO, WORLD
The world that the United States and its allies created after World War II made the United States much safer and richer. But Americans need to be reminded that if the United States does not enforce this international order, someone else will. That someone else would likely be China. And China in charge would make for a dangerous world in which it and authoritarian allies such as Russia and Iran could amass the military and economic power to impose a repressive vision on the world.

Rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, negotiating and securing the ratification of other trade treaties, increasing defense spending while reforming entitlements and reducing the national debt, securing the U.S.-Mexican border, aiding countries fighting to preserve their liberty: these are big goals. The American Enterprise Institute scholar Fred Kagan observes that “no one wants to die for the international order.” It is too diffuse a concept.

But selling voters on an internationalist foreign policy may not be nearly as hard as some politicians imagine if they approach the public with more concrete arguments grounded in U.S. national interest. The Biden administration and too many Republican leaders now engage in nativist, self-interested appeals—false assertions that internationalism has made the United States weaker or that caring about the U.S. national interest means ignoring the world. This could not be further from the truth. The United States’ international choices shape its domestic landscape. Currently, U.S. leaders are making incoherent foreign policy choices that render the country less safe and less prosperous—choices that will only become much more painful to undo down the line.

Behind the United States’ partisan polarization lies a general confusion and disillusionment. A June-July 2023 Pew poll found that just 16 percent of Americans trust the federal government, the lowest level in 70 years of polling. Just 10 percent agreed that politics made them feel hopeful. In August, in a Wall Street Journal poll, 93 percent of likely Republican primary voters agreed that the United States is headed in the “wrong direction.” These are grim findings. But they also represent an enormous opportunity—an opening for good, clear policies to gain traction, because Americans are obviously dissatisfied with what they are getting.

The solution is not to adopt policies that abandon trade, weaken the U.S. military, leave the U.S.-Mexican border chaotic, and cease giving aid to deserving allies. Americans still resolutely want to secure a role for the United States as a leader in the world, both for the country’s sake and for their own individual safety and prosperity. U.S. leaders must show they know how to do it.

KORI SCHAKE is a Senior Fellow and Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Safe Passage: The Transition From British to American Hegemony. She served on the National Security Council and in the U.S. State Department under President George W. Bush.

[OCanada]

You can thank Gingrich for the impetus that has led to so much disillusionment and distrust. The actors themselves eg the Supreme Court have added a lot to the trend

[Brooklyn]

BREAKING! Deep State plans a massive FALSE FLAG cyber attack to disrupt 2024 election | Redacted
Investigative Journalist Whitney Webb joins redacted to explain the multi-year deep state plan to create a false flag cyber attack that would disrupt a general U.S. election ...



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_txxtWJSBw



... and to start another war.

[JoeMauer89]

BREAKING! Deep State plans a massive FALSE FLAG cyber attack to disrupt 2024 election | Redacted
Investigative Journalist Whitney Webb joins redacted to explain the multi-year deep state plan to create a false flag cyber attack that would disrupt a general U.S. election ...



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_txxtWJSBw



... and to start another war.

Why are you even posting this garbage? Find something more productive to do with your time!!

Joe

[Brooklyn]

BREAKING! Deep State plans a massive FALSE FLAG cyber attack to disrupt 2024 election | Redacted
Investigative Journalist Whitney Webb joins redacted to explain the multi-year deep state plan to create a false flag cyber attack that would disrupt a general U.S. election ...



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_txxtWJSBw



... and to start another war.

Why are you even posting this garbage? Find something more productive to do with your time!!

Joe

Garbage?

Obviously you are afraid of the truth it reveals. Do remember that the unpatriotic right wing told us that those who scoffed at traitor Bush's fairy tales about WMD were wrong and that we would regret what we patriots said.

Well, who turned out to be right?

We were.

Just open up your eyes a little wider and open up your closed little mind. When you and others do so our society will become safer and more peaceful.

[old salt]

There's a holiday Fri spate of news reports of an Iranian spy ship in the Red Sea providing targeting info to Houthi proxies in Yemen for missile & drone attacks on transiting commercial shipping. It feels like the stage is being set for something more than just the proposed multi-national naval task force currently being assembled.

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/i ... s-d6f7fd40
Iranian Spy Ship Helps Houthis Direct Attacks on Red Sea Vessels
Dec. 22, 2023 4:08 pm ET

Iran’s paramilitary forces are providing real-time intelligence and weaponry, including drones and missiles, to Yemen’s Houthis that the rebels are using to target ships passing through the Red Sea, Western and regional security officials said.

Tracking information gathered by a Red Sea surveillance vessel controlled by Iran’s paramilitary forces is given to the Houthis, who have used it to attack commercial vessels passing through the Bab el-Mandeb strait in recent days, according to the officials.

Earlier this week, the Pentagon unveiled plans for a multinational naval force to protect merchant vessels in the Red Sea. Meanwhile, many of the world’s biggest shipping lines, oil producers and other cargo owners have started diverting vessels from the region, prompting a rise in oil prices and insurance rates.

Many vessels sailing in the strait have been switching off their radios to avoid being tracked online, but an Iranian vessel stationed in the Red Sea is enabling the Houthi drones and missiles to accurately target the ships, the officials said.

The direct involvement by Iranian actors in the attacks raises the stakes for Israel and the U.S., which are eager to contain Tehran’s role in the region, and risks creating a new front in the conflict between Israel and its foes in the region, just as the U.S. is trying to stop it from escalating.

“The Houthis don’t have the radar technology to target the ships,” said a Western security official. “They need Iranian assistance. Without it, the missiles would just drop in the water.”

...U.S. officials have said privately they are looking at an offensive military response to the attacks.

Last week, the Houthis hit a Norwegian cargo vessel with an antiship cruise missile. The ship caught fire and was forced to sail to port after being damaged. None of the crew was injured.

On Friday, the White House declassified intelligence that it said showed the extent of the support Iran is providing to the Houthis for attacks in the Red Sea and on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria. The intelligence release appeared to be an effort to lay the groundwork for potential military action against the Houthis.

The White House said the U.S. had found the Houthis rely on monitoring and tactical intelligence from the Iranians to target vessels, and had provided Iranian-designed drones and missiles the Houthis launched toward Israel and at least one vessel in the Red Sea.

“Iranian support to these Houthi operations remains critical,” said Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the White House’s National Security Council.

The U.S. has previously said Iran was enabling the Houthi attacks on ships but hadn’t said how until now. Iran for years has supplied weapons to the rebels in their battle against Saudi-backed foes in Yemen.

While the Houthis have said the attacks are in retaliation for Israel’s war in Gaza, the ships they have attacked have little or in some cases no links to Israel.

Washington has told Israel to let the U.S. military respond to the Houthis instead of taking action that could expand its conflict with Hamas and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia, U.S. and other government officials said.

U.S. officials have also said they wish to dissociate the attacks in the Red Sea from the conflict inside Gaza. Describing the Red Sea attacks as an international problem demanding a multilateral solution, the U.S. hopes to dissuade the Israelis from striking the Houthis and broadening their conflict with Hamas militants.

A senior Israeli official said the Iranian ship’s intelligence support for the Houthis shows that the West needs to pressure Tehran to halt its assistance, which is disrupting the global shipping trade. “Iran is giving them weapons, and Iran could stop it,” the Israeli official said. “We need to work to put pressure on Iran, so they will stop.”

In 2021, Israeli mines damaged an Iranian spy ship that had also been stationed in the Red Sea, and it was replaced by the vessel currently helping the Houthis, Western officials said.

Israel has also been angered by Houthi missile attacks targeting the southern port of Eilat, though they were intercepted by U.S. defenses.

U.S. officials say there is little indication that Iran is attempting to dissuade the Houthis from the attacks, though other officials acknowledge the group is a “wild card” and hard to control.

The intelligence the U.S. declassified and released on Friday purports to link Iran to the specific weaponry the Houthi militants used in recent attacks in the Red Sea and against Israel.

On Oct. 19, the Houthis launched from Yemen 29 KAS-04 OWAs drones from Yemen and at least three land-attack cruise missiles, the U.S. intelligence showed. Those weapons systems were designed by Iran, according to U.S. officials. Another Houthi attack against the commercial tanker M/V Central Park on Nov. 27 used the same kind of ballistic missiles Iran has supplied to the Houthis, U.S. officials said.

On Friday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned his country could retaliate against the threats coming out of Yemen. “If they continue to provoke us, try to attack Eilat with missiles or by other means, we will know what to do,” he said, speaking onboard a warship sailing near the Israeli port. “We are preparing. The troops here are ready for any mission and any command.”

Western security officials have previously said Iranian assistance to the Houthis is overseen by the Quds Force, a branch of Iran’s paramilitary Islamic Republic Guard Corps that operates autonomously from the civilian cabinet in Tehran. The U.S. has placed a $15 million bounty on the Quds Force commander in Yemen, Abdolreza Shahlaei, for his role in supplying weapons and explosives to Iraqi Shia groups and planning a 2007 attack in Iraq that killed five American soldiers and wounded three others.

In messages passed to the U.S. through Switzerland and in public, Iran has said it had no control over the actions of the Houthi and other forces in the Middle East that have attacked U.S. and Israeli targets in response to the war in Gaza.

A spokesman for the Iran mission at the United Nations said last week that Iran opposed a U.N. Security Council resolution that imposes an arms embargo only on the Houthis. He said Tehran has abided by its implementation and that the Yemenis were capable of military self-reliance.

Biden & his NSC are obviously reluctant to engage Iran militarily. This might be the time for a Tom Clancy-like op which covertly deals with the Iranian spy ship while maintaining plausible deniability for the US, ...like a casualty to the rudder of that Iranian vessel that renders it unsteerable & a hazard to navigation in a busy international shipping channel. Fortunately, a USN destroyer is nearby & able to take the disabled vessel under tow.

On Nov 5, the US Navy took the unusual step of showing a Ohio class sub, the USS Florida entering the Suez Canal.
As this article details, the Floridia is one of 4 USN subs with special capabilities.
https://www.naval-technology.com/news/s ... e/?cf-view

The 1st photo shows it carrying what looks like a SEAL Delivery Vehicle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEAL_Delivery_Vehicle
The 2nd photo shows it with a missile tube hatch opened, which may be the missile tube converted for submerged SEAL deployment & recovery.

The Florida also carries torpedoes. An exercise torpedo with a disabled or inert warhead, fired at close range, up the stern, might disable the rudder, without putting the ship in danger of sinking. I have no idea if any such torpedoes are onboard.

Of course, this is all just idle speculation on my part. I'm not sure if such capabilities actually exist.

Something is going to have to happen in the Red Sea. This threat to commercial shipping is unsustainable.
Currently in the Red Sea, in addition to our Aegis destroyer that's been swatting down the Houthi missiles & drones, we also have the 2 largest ships of the Bataan Amphib Readiness Group with their embarked Marine Battalion & enhanced aviation squadron which includes Harrier attack jets, in addition to attack & troop carrying helos & V-22's. They could easily seize that Iranian spy ship, but that might prompt an Iranian response in the Persian Gulf.

[youthathletics]

More: https://x.com/sentdefender/status/17386 ... a82I2GssRg

[old salt]

This is rich -- German media wondering why no Arab navies are participating in the Prosperity Guardian Red Sea Naval Task Force.
Then also pointing out how EU/NATO allies France & Spain are backing out after being initially named.
No mention why Germany is not participating. Who relies more on Red Sea/ Suez shipping than the EU ?
What happened to the new improved revitalized post-Trump NATO ? This is a basic NATO naval mission.
Even Canada's sending a frigate (although it has almost no air defense capability). The Brits are coming & hopefully the Aussies.
As always, it's the US & RN(s) keeping the sea lanes open. Hopefully the Indians & Japanese will participate.
...& of course, the French are doing their own thing.
Norway's sending staff officers, but none of their very capable Aegis equipped frigates.
Epic NATO Fail (so far).

https://www.dw.com/en/red-sea-attacks-w ... a-67790545
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-red-se ... 023-12-20/

This is a farce, comical => https://english.elpais.com/internationa ... ngton.html
in an extraordinary meeting of the European Political and Security Committee (CPS), among ambassadors, it was agreed that the EU would take part in monitoring the Red Sea through Operation Atalanta, which has been fighting against piracy in the Indian Ocean since 2008. The EU High Commissioner, Josep Borrell, announced the decision and stated that Europe would step up its exchange of information with the United States and reinforce its naval presence with additional resources. “This demonstrates the EU’s role as a provider of maritime security. We match our words with actions,” he concluded. However, the next day, in a technical meeting, Spain vetoed changing the mandate of Operation Atalanta to include protecting maritime security in the Red Sea, according to the Spanish newspaper El Confidencial.
Spain plays a key role in Operation Atalanta, as it is headquartered at the Rota base in the Spanish city of Cádiz, and overseen by the Spanish vice-admiral Ignacio Villanueva Sánchez. What’s more, the Spanish frigate Victoria is currently the only ship that the European operation has, after the withdrawal of the Italian frigate. It does not even have a maritime patrol plane, since its deployment in the area is conditioned by the monsoon season.

The Houthi drones — which are carrying out most of the attacks — are slow, but raise the question of whether it is worth spending on expensive missiles to shoot them down.

[old salt]

Latest from the air war over the Red Sea. The IKE is now close by in the Gulf of Aden, launching F-18's into the fight.

https://twitter.com/CENTCOM/status/1739746985652158755
U.S. assets, to include the USS LABOON (DDG 58) and F/A-18 Super Hornets from the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, shot down twelve one-way attack drones, three anti-ship ballistic missiles, and two land attack cruise missiles in the Southern Red Sea that were fired by the Houthis over a 10 hour period which began at approximately 6:30 a.m. (Sanaa time) on December 26. There was no damage to ships in the area or reported injuries.

It will be interesting to see who shot down what & how. The Laboon would have downed the 3 ballistic missiles, the F-18's could have downed the drones & cruise missiles. It's good to give the F-18's something to do (they're gonna fly, regardless) & it will conserve the SAM's on the destroyers. The F-18's air-to-air missiles are cheaper than the destroyer's SAM's. The F-18's guns would be the most cost effective munition vs slow drones.

https://www.gd-ots.com/armaments/aircra ... ms/f18-ef/

Good shooting Padre. Father Laboon was the Catholic chaplain at USNA when I was a Mid.
https://www.navysite.de/dd/ddg58.htm

[old salt]

Here's why NATO, not the US, should be in Command of the Red Sea task force. What better mission for NATO ?
Another diplomatic success for the Team Biden NSC propeller heads.

https://new.thecradle.co/articles/hesit ... re-straits

Hesitation among US allies leaves Operation Prosperity Guardian in dire straits

Nearly half of the countries announced as part of the anti-Yemen alliance have refused to come forward to acknowledge their contributions, while most others have only confirmed the deployment of staff officers

DEC 28, 2023

Ten days after US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced the formation of an international task force to patrol the Red Sea, about half of the nations named as participants have yet to acknowledge their role, while others have pushed back against Austin's declaration.

Under the name Operation Prosperity Guardian (OPG), Washington's “coalition of the willing” was intended to confront attacks by the Yemeni armed forces against Israeli-linked ships attempting to cross the Bab al-Mandab Strait.

However, only two US allies have deployed warships to the Yemeni coast to support the coalition: the UK, which sent the navy destroyer HMS Diamond, and Greece, which announced the deployment of a Hellenic navy frigate.

Canada, Norway, and the Netherlands confirmed their participation in OPG but have so far committed only a handful of staff officers. Similarly, the Seychelles ratified their support for the coalition but clarified: “Our participation will not include putting boats or military personnel to patrol in the Red Sea. Our role is to help in providing and receiving information since many things that happen close by can have an implication for us.”

Authorities in Bahrain – the only Gulf nation named as part of the pro-Israel alliance – have not commented on their role in OPG, despite the fact that the US war chief announced the coalition's creation from the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama. Last week, Bahraini police detained a prominent opposition figure who criticized the government for joining OPG.

Complicating matters further for the Pentagon, the last three NATO members named as part of the alliance – Spain, Italy, and France – have outright refused to hand over command of their ships to the US.

The French defense ministry said last week it supported efforts to “secure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea.” Still, it highlighted that its navy already operated in the region and its ships would stay under French command. Italy took a similar approach, committing the naval frigate Virginio Fasan to patrol the Red Sea but emphasizing that this was part of “existing operations” and not OPG.

Spain has been the most vocal in its rejection of being named part of the anti-Yemen alliance, vetoing a vote at the EU that called for support of the coalition and making it clear that its forces committed to Operation Atalanta – a counter-piracy operation off the Horn of Africa and in the Western Indian Ocean – would not join OPG.

"Spain is not opposed to creating another operation, in this case in the Red Sea. We have communicated to our allies, both in NATO and in the EU, that we consider Operation Atalanta does not have the characteristics nor the nature that is demanded and needed in the Red Sea,” President Pedro Sanchez said on 27 December.

While the Pentagon last week proclaimed “over 20 nations” had joined OPG, reports have shown that more of Washington's closest partners are balking at the idea of joining war efforts in the Red Sea.

On 21 December, Australia announced it would be sending personnel to join OPG, but no warships or planes. India has also balked at the plan, with a senior military official revealing to Reuters that New Delhi is “unlikely to join" the US alliance.

Nonetheless, earlier this week, the Indian navy deployed several warships to the Arabian Sea in response to an alleged drone attack on an Israeli-linked vessel.

Saudi Arabia has also shown no interest in the venture, as the Gulf kingdom is reportedly more interested in ending its eight-year war in Yemen than in re-starting hostilities.

Yemen's Red Sea operations in support of Palestinians in Gaza have significantly hurt the Israeli import sector, as the vital Port of Eilat has seen an 85 percent drop in activity. According to Bloomberg, half of the container ships that regularly transit the Red Sea and Suez Canal are avoiding the route now.

However, marine traffic data shows that the transit of non-western tankers through the Red Sea has surged since the Yemeni armed forces began targeting Israeli-linked vessels.

[a fan]

Here's why NATO, not the US, should be in Command of the Red Sea task force. What better mission for NATO ?
Another diplomatic success for the Team Biden NSC propeller heads.

?

You have ripped me....repeatedly....for telling you that other nations are perfectly able to keep the shipping lanes that are nowhere near the US clear.

You have responded...multiple times...that ONLY the US can do it.

What happened to this opinion of yours?