Wednesday, April 11, 2012

44"s Faux Pas

Aside from bellowing belches or igniting gastric accidents - girl repellant is also readily available in way more diff varieties. Appearing shy, timid, unsure, overtly arrogant or unaware of funintended consequences is totally jank too.

Especially in l'diplopolitary realm. 

See, Great Satan"s Premier Great Satan fan lays it out to play it out in a language that ebberdobby here can easily understand: 
 44"s driving ideology, whether he wins or loses on November 6, has already had enormous implications for Great Satan"s role in the world and the very structure of the international order. By reducing not only the visibility of America's global presence, but also her military capabilities, and by shifting the federal budget even further from national security to social welfare programmes, 44 has also sought to transform Great Satan into Europa. 
Of course, the obvious question is what happens once Washington's protective shield is diminished to the point of feebleness. It was one thing for European and other industrial democracies to be free riders under the sheltering  nuclear umbrella, her strong naval forces, and her essentially global force projection capabilities. 
 Yet if Great Satan retires from Globe Stomping and becomes just another ho among hoochies - what kinda chiz does this mean for the Internat"l Order and the world she herself hath created? 
44 sees American strength as provocative. He believes her nuclear arsenal is excessive, and hence worthy of reduction, without fearing in any way that shredding the nuclear deterrent might actually have profoundly deleterious consequences not only on national security, but on security and stability in the world as a whole. 
44"s policies and debilitating budget cuts reflect the views of former DefSec Gates on the nature of the threats that America and its allies will face in the near future. Proving yet again that generals tend to fight the last war, Gates and his aides concluded from Afghanistan and Iraq that future wars would most likely be counter-insurgency or counter-terrorist scenarios. 

No more Cold War-era spectres of Soviet-panzered thrusts through the Fulda Gap and over the northern European plains, or World War II-style armadas clashing at sea.   

That future means de-emphasising "heavy" fighting requirements like armour, artillery and large infantry formations, as well as high-firepower air and naval platforms. Instead, stand-off weapons and assets like cruise missiles and drones, and light, quick special operations forces will be the new norm. Of course, this restructuring of the force also conveniently conforms to the smaller, less visible, less "aggressive" Great Satanesque military posture that suits 44"s Weltanschauung, so Gates was seamlessly kept on to serve in his Admin
And virtually all of this, from the broad vision to the tactical details, is like totally retarded. 
Like the erroneous idea that the Cold War's end would bring a "peace dividend" that could be "spent" on domestic programmes without adverse security consequences, the idea that a second radical downsizing Great Satan"s capabilities will avoid political and military effects is pernicious.
 Although 44 and his acolytes may want to escape unpleasant reality, force remains critical to national security. Using it, threatening to use it, being prepared to use it, or simply having it remain the sine qua non for a superpower with global interests, friends and allies. 44 might have been excused in his days in faculty lounges and the Land of Lincoln legislature for not grasping this correlation, but it is truly remarkable he has spent nearly three and a half years as President and still doesn't understand it.
It's force baybee! - The hyperpuissant ability to have your way with whatever the heart desires 
 And the purposes of force? The first and most important is "dissuasion," often confused with its cousin, deterrence. Dissuasion implies convincing other states (or non-state actors) not even to think about challenging the US by developing new weapons capabilities, force levels or strategies. We often hear blithe comments that America's defence budget exceeds all other defence budgets in the world combined, implying ours is far too large. 
Leaving aside the honesty and transparency of other countries' budget presentations, the currency exchange rates/purchasing-power-parity issue, military salaries and other factors that tend to "overstate" Great Satan"s expenditures, why shouldn't the world's arsenal of democracy possess capabilities that shape others' thinking politically as well as militarily? That is clearly the best way to avoid war.
The next purpose is deterrence, which involves convincing those states or coalitions with significant capabilities that actually attempting to employ these assets will result in their destruction and defeat. Unfortunately, Western deterrence concepts are not meaningful or even rational to terrorists and regimes like Iran. 
Religious extremists who value life in the hereafter more than life on earth are unlikely to be deterred as Moscow's Cold War atheists were, reluctant to toss away their one turn at life. This gaping hole in the deterrence concept requires different strategies against adversaries that are not "rational actors" as we have heretofore understood that term, especially those new threats relying on asymmetric capabilities like terrorism with weapons of mass destruction.
 Thus we arrive inevitably at  the issue of pre-emptive or preventative military strikes in self-defence, concepts that are also cousins, not synonyms. In both, however, a nation considering using force before actual military hostilities have commenced against it must be able to justify so doing, morally and politically. 
Here is the most important conclusion: America should never again be in a fair fight. The best wars, of course, are those that are never fought. That objective itself argues for an overwhelming preponderance of Great Satan and allied forces in the world. 
And when war is fought, Clausewitz never deviated from the imperative of decisively defeating the enemy's military capability. Nor should we. Finding the Schwerpunkt and determining the "culminating point of victory" are,  not entirely scientific.
 Yet they are readily understandable.  

Pic -  "It is no act of war on our part when we decide to protect stuff vital to American defence. The aggression is not ours. Ours is solely defence."  

1 comments:

Unknown said...

Urrah! You nailed it. The problem with losing dissuasion capability is that the public won't even notice when it's missing. "Don't even think about it!" works, but how can you prove a negative? Deterrence also works, of course, but it looks messier and involves looking all mean and stuff. Not 44's scene.