2012 London Olympic Games Opening Ceremony

It's starting.

At NBC, "Britain stages a spectacular welcome for the world."

And at CNN, "London 2012: Live blog."

4:45PM Pacific: At the Guardian, "The best of today's pictures in the build up to the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony."

5:17PM Pacific: The New York Times is live-blogging: "Live Coverage of the Opening Ceremony."

5:28PM Pacific: London's Daily Mail has a thrilling roundup: "Going for gold! Team USA (complete with Made in China berets) makes star-spangled entrance at London 2012 Olympics."

5:44PM Pacific: More spectacular photos at Daily Mail: "Britain fires up the world: London gets the 2012 Games under way with the Greatest Show On Earth (rounded off by Macca, of course)."

5:51PM Pacific: Yes, I've been think the same thing, at WSJ, "Olympic Boos for NBC Arrive With No Delay."

During the opening ceremony to the 2012 London Olympics, many U.S. viewers were upset they couldn’t watch it live. NBC waived its right to live-stream the ceremony, choosing to show it on tape delay later in the evening, during primetime coverage.

Viewers vented their frustrations on Twitter. Some expressed anger at NBC directly. Others said they were disappointed they couldn’t watch the ceremony while simultaneously live-tweeting it, as British viewers did. We called NBC for comment, and will update this post if they respond.

Check the link for the response.

6:07PM Pacific: Now at the Times of Israel, "No Munich tribute as Olympics open with dazzling ceremony":

Israel TV commentary goes silent for 30 seconds in tribute to the Munich 11 as Israeli team enters stadium. Flag-bearer Shahar Zubari sports national flag cut into his hair-do. IOC chief Rogge, who rebuffed Munich campaigners, hails Olympic spirit. Sports Minister Livnat stands, head-bowed, to honor victims.

The London Olympics 2012 opening ceremony made for riveting viewing for almost four hours on Friday night. Its artistic content was overseen by director Danny Boyle, and was eccentric, compelling, and frequently surreal. Then came the delegations of athletes. And then the speeches.

Sports Minister Limor Livnat, wearing a black ribbon on her arm, stood in head-bowed, silent tribute to the 11 murdered Israeli athletes of Munich 1972, as International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge spoke — an image not shown on the Olympic feed broadcast by Israel’s IBA.

6:23PM Pacific: At the Times of Israel, "Sports minister stands silently at Olympic opening event":

Limor Livnat’s tribute to murdered Munich athletes, during IOC president’s speech, not broadcast on official Olympic TV feed; Israel TV shows picture after ceremony ends.

6:32PM Pacific: At the Los Angeles Times, "Let the Olympic Games begin: Unity is message as youth light torch":

LONDON -- Organizers of the London Olympics did exactly what they intended.

They surprised the world.

Roger Bannister, the first man to break the four-minute barrier in a mile race, did not take the final torch leg to light the Olympic flame as many had expected. Instead it was a ceremony of inclusion.

Seven young athletes, the hope of the sports future in Britain, were joined by past icons in the torch ceremony Friday night in the opening ceremony. The youngsters moved to the center of the field of play and each lighted a stem that ignited more than 200 petals. This eventually converged into a "flame of unity."

Others thought to be in contention for the final honor were rower Steve Redgrave, decathlete Daley Thompson and even soccer icon David Beckham. Earlier in the week, one bookmaker, anticipating the choice of Bannister, quit taking bets on him.

Beckham, of course, was involved in the torch's journey to Olympic Stadium, driving a speedboat on the Thames with soccer-playing youngster Jade Bailey aboard. Bailey handed the torch to Redgrave, who carried it into the stadium.

It culminated a magical night in London, the return of the Olympic Games here for the third time. The last time was 1948, and, often, the opening ceremony felt like it took 64 years to complete, a long journey deep into the night ... and morning.

The ambitious production, engineered by filmmaker and artistic director Danny Boyle, took more than 3 hours 45 minutes. Occasional rain fell on Olympic Stadium in the early part of the program.

But the showers were long gone by the time the youngsters supplied the emotional punch.

7:56PM Pacific: At the New York Times, "A Five-Ring Opening Circus, Weirdly and Unabashedly British":

LONDON — With its hilariously quirky Olympic opening ceremony, a wild jumble of the celebratory and the fanciful; the conventional and the eccentric; and the frankly off-the-wall, Britain presented itself to the world Friday night as something it has often struggled to express even to itself: a nation secure in its own post-empire identity, whatever that actually is.

The noisy, busy, witty, dizzying production somehow managed to feature a flock of sheep (plus a busy sheepdog), the Sex Pistols, Lord Voldemort, the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a suggestion that the Olympic rings were forged by British foundries during the Industrial Revolution, the seminal Partridge Family reference from “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” a group of people dressed like so many members of Sgt. Pepper’s band, some rustic hovels tended by rustic peasants, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and, in a paean to the National Health Service, a zany bunch of dancing nurses and bouncing sick children on huge hospital beds.

It was neither a nostalgic sweep through the past nor a bold vision of a brave new future. Rather, it was a sometimes slightly insane portrait of a country that has changed almost beyond measure since the last time it hosted the Games, in the grim postwar summer of 1948.

Britain was so poor then that it housed its athletes in old army barracks, made them bring their own towels and erected no buildings for the Games. The Olympics cost less than £750,000, turned a small profit and made the nation proud that it had had managed to rise to the occasion in the face of such adversity.

There was that same sense of relief intermingled with self-satisfaction this time. But such was the grandeur of 2012, even in these tough economic times, that 80,000 people sat comfortably in a new Olympic Stadium, having traveled by sleek new bullet trains and special V.I.P. road lanes to a new park that has completely transformed once-derelict east London.

A little rain fell, but it hardly mattered. Queen Elizabeth II was there, after co-starring with a tuxedoed Daniel Craig, also known as James Bond, in a witty video in which she appears to parachute from a helicopter (in fact, she entered the park the usual way). Looking mystified at times — the ceremony was pitched to a generation different from hers — she presided over a bevy of lesser royals and Prime Minister David Cameron.

The first lady, Michelle Obama, was in the audience to cheer on the United States athletes, who, it must be said, did a lot of cheering for themselves anyway during the athletes’ procession. And Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was there, too, although he was practically Public Enemy No. 1 around here after he appeared to question the British capacity for enthusiasm, something only Britons are allowed to do...

Chinese Antiaccess/Area Denial, U.S. AirSea Battle, and Command of the Commons in East Asia

This is a great piece.

From Stephen Biddle and Ivan Oelrich, at International Security, "Future Warfare in the Western Pacific: Chinese Antiaccess/Area Denial, U.S. AirSea Battle, and Command of the Commons in East Asia":

The United States has long enjoyed what Barry Posen has termed “command of the commons”: worldwide freedom of movement on and under the seas and in the air above 15,000 feet, with the ability to deny this same freedom to enemies. This command has contributed to a remarkable era of military primacy for U.S. arms against potential state rivals.

Many observers now fear that this era may be coming to an end in the Western Pacific. For more than a generation, China has been fielding a series of interrelated missile, sensor, guidance, and other technologies designed to deny freedom of movement to hostile powers in the air and waters off its coast. As this program has matured, China's ability to restrict hostile access has improved, and its military reach has expanded. Many now believe that this “A2/AD” (antiaccess, area denial) capability will eventually be highly effective in excluding the United States from parts of the Western Pacific that it has traditionally controlled. Some even fear that China will ultimately be able to extend a zone of exclusion out to, or beyond, what is often called the “Second Island Chain”—a line that connects Japan, Guam, and Papua-New Guinea at distances of up to 3,000 kilometers from China. A Chinese A2/AD capability reaching anywhere near this far would pose major challenges for U.S. security policy.

To avert this outcome, the United States has embarked on an approach often called AirSea Battle (ASB). Named to suggest the Cold War continental doctrine of “AirLand Battle,” AirSea Battle is designed to preserve U.S. access to the Western Pacific by combining passive defenses against Chinese missile attack with an emphasis on offensive action to destroy or disable the forces that China would use to establish A2/AD. This offensive action would use “cross-domain synergy” among U.S. space, cyber, air, and maritime forces (hence the moniker “AirSea”) to blind or suppress Chinese sensors. The heart of the concept, however, lies in physically destroying the Chinese weapons and infrastructure that underpin A2/AD. As Chinese programs mature, achieving this objective will require U.S. air strikes against potentially thousands of Chinese missile launchers, command posts, sensors, supply networks, and communication systems deployed across the heart of mainland China—some as many as 2,000 kilometers inland. Accomplishing this mission will require a major improvement in the U.S. Air Force's and Navy's ability to find distant targets and penetrate heavily defended airspace from bases that are either hard enough or distant enough to survive Chinese attack, while hunting down mobile missile launchers and command posts spread over millions of square kilometers of the Chinese interior. The requirements for this mission are typically assumed to include a major restructuring of the Air Force to de-emphasize short-range fighters such as the F-35 or F-22 in favor of longer-range strike bombers; development of a follow-on stealthy long-range bomber to replace the B-2, and its procurement in far greater numbers than its predecessor; the development of unmanned long-range carrier strike aircraft; and heavy investment in missile defenses and information infrastructure. The result would be an ambitious modernization agenda in service of an extremely demanding military campaign to batter down A2/AD by striking targets deep in mainland China, far afield from the maritime domains to which the United States seeks access.

ASB has thus proven highly controversial. Many observers object to its likely cost: a military program this ambitious will surely be very expensive in an era of increasingly restricted U.S. defense budgets.5 Others cite its potential for escalation: U.S. air and missile strikes against targets deep in the Chinese mainland could easily spur retaliation against U.S. or allied homelands and a possible global war against a nuclear power.

The need to incur any of these costs or any of these risks, however, turns on the underlying question of exactly how effective Chinese A2/AD can become. Many mainstream arguments, on both sides of the debate, take for granted a substantial A2/AD threat: ASB advocates would respond to this threat by battering it down; many ASB opponents would avoid it via a distant blockade of China at straits beyond A2/AD's reach; both sides tend to grant A2/AD an ability to deny U.S. access to large parts of the Western Pacific absent a massive U.S. offensive inland. Just how large a part of the Western Pacific the Chinese could close is often vague, however; many are skeptical that China can extend control all the way to the Second Island Chain, but few policy analyses have yet focused on the foundational military question of A2/AD's actual effectiveness and the range at which this capability can be expected to deny U.S. access or threaten allied shipping.

This article thus provides a more systematic assessment of the potential military effectiveness of Chinese A2/AD. We ask not whether ASB would be escalatory, but whether it is necessary. That is, to what extent will ongoing technology trends allow either side to deny freedom of movement to the other, and over what area? Will China be able to push U.S. forces far enough from its shores to threaten U.S. alliances? If so, which ones, and how gravely? And what, given this, represents the best military strategy for the United States to adopt for the long term?

To answer these questions, we focus on the long-run potential of key technologies rather than on an assessment of existing or even programmed forces, equipment, and doctrine, and we do so in the context of an extended competition between mutually adaptive peer competitors, neither of which can simply outspend the other. The A2/AD debate is mostly about the future, not the present. For now, there is little real A2/AD threat to confront: most analysts still see U.S. naval and air superiority over the Pacific except for the immediate Chinese littoral and sometimes the airspace over Taiwan. The Chinese today field only a handful of weapons with ranges anywhere near the Second Island Chain, and their military lacks experience in power projection beyond the vicinity of the Chinese coast. The chief reason for concern lies not in China's current arsenal, but in the trajectory of technical and acquisition trends whose maturation could take decades or even generations. Similarly, the ASB agenda for the United States is also mostly about the future: given the long service lives of warships, and the long lead times for developing new programs such as a stealthy long-range bomber to replace the B-2, the stakes in the A2/AD/ASB debate are mostly about the military prognosis for ten to twenty years from now, not tomorrow or next year. And by the time such major programs mature, faster-moving developments such as electronic countermeasures or tactical innovations may go through multiple rounds of adaptation, measure, and countermeasure, on both sides. The A2/AD debate is thus less about the military balance in 2016 or even 2020 than it is about the military future a generation from now, after an extended two-sided competition; below we use 2040 as a representative time frame for an environment with mature A2/AD technology on both sides.

Our focus on the long-term future motivates two critical framing assumptions. First, just as we cannot limit ourselves to today's Chinese arsenal, neither can we limit ourselves to today's Chinese military doctrine or current Chinese assumptions about the course of a war with the United States. Much can change in a generation. Perhaps Chinese doctrinal adaptation will be constrained by deep-seated cultural or historical factors, but twenty-five years of technological change will create strong incentives for doctrine to adapt, and it would be risky to assume that China will not respond. We thus focus on what technology will make possible for either side, from which we infer strategies and operational concepts that would be advisable, but we leave to others whether China will act on the incentives these changes will create.

Second, we assume that the United States cannot prevail by outspending China over this longer term. In the Cold War, the United States could do just that: a declining Soviet Union could not keep pace with Western economic growth, enabling the West to exhaust the Soviets in a protracted arms race. China, however, is not the Soviet Union: its gross domestic product is widely expected to exceed the United States' in coming years. A strategy that requires the United States to outspend a rising economic peer is unsustainable in the long run: it would simply lead to faster relative economic decline and ever-greater difficulty over time in keeping up. Calls to overwhelm Chinese A2/AD with superior expenditure are self-defeating for the time horizon at the heart of this whole debate.

Given such a long-run, two-sided assessment, we find that by 2040 China will not achieve military hegemony over the Western Pacific or anything close to it—even without ASB. A2/AD is giving air and maritime defenders increasing advantages, but those advantages are strongest over controlled landmasses and weaken over distance. As both sides deploy A2/AD, these capabilities will increasingly replace today's U.S. command of the global commons not with Chinese hegemony but with a more differentiated pattern of control, with a U.S. sphere of influence around allied landmasses, a Chinese sphere of influence over the Chinese mainland, and contested battlespace covering much of the South and East China Seas, wherein neither power enjoys wartime freedom of surface or air movement.

This finding derives from the physics of the key technologies coupled with inherent asymmetries in the operating environments of the land, air, and sea surface. Improvements in reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition (RSTA) technology underlie much of A2/AD's defensive potential, but RSTA effectiveness varies widely with the complexity of the background against which it must detect targets. The sky and the surface of the sea present much simpler backgrounds than the land. Land-based missiles deployed amid a complex background thus enjoy systematic RSTA advantages against airborne or sea-surface foes. As RSTA improves, land-based mobile missile launchers are likely to remain much harder to target than more-exposed aerial or surface-naval combatants of comparable sophistication. This asymmetry will make it increasingly expensive to sustain air or sea-surface operations over or near hostile territory defended by such missiles. The same underlying asymmetry, however, makes effective A2/AD control of the air or sea surface harder the farther away from a controlled landmass it must reach. For long-range RSTA, radar is essential and is likely to remain the most robust solution to the demands of sensing mobile targets over wide areas in a long-term competition. Radar, however, is inherently vulnerable as an active emitter whose physics require an unobstructed line-of-sight to the target for location information precise enough to direct weapons. Whereas mobile missiles can launch from concealment amid complex terrain, radar must reveal its location through the act of sensing. Radar can be defended, but its defenders must themselves survive preemptive attack; the farther one must operate from a friendly shoreline, the more challenging this defensive requirement becomes and the more difficult it becomes to provide the RSTA needed for A2/AD to control the air or sea surface. A2/AD's achievable reach will vary over time, but it will be especially difficult for either China or the United States to extend A2/AD's reach beyond about 400–600 kilometers from a friendly coast, a limit defined by the Earth's curvature and the physical horizon this establishes for airborne radar operating over survivable land-based protectors. Reach on this scale, however, falls far short of what either side would need to dominate a theater the size of the Western Pacific.

These findings imply that, with astute U.S. policies, A2/AD is not a decisive long-term threat to most U.S. allies in the region. Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines are all either mostly or entirely beyond the likely reach of Chinese A2/AD given appropriate allied military choices. The threat to U.S. alliances often raised in the A2/AD literature can thus be mostly averted even without ASB.

Our analysis is not, however, a straightforward good-news story for the United States and its allies. Taiwan, for example, is much closer to the Chinese mainland than Japan, South Korea, or the Philippines, and it is much more exposed to a Chinese A2/AD threat that U.S. arms are unlikely to be able to preempt. Its proximity to China will not necessarily expose Taiwan to a credible invasion threat—the same technologies that enable Chinese A2/AD will enable Taiwan, with U.S. assistance, to extend its own A2/AD zone around the Taiwanese landmass in a way that would make a Chinese amphibious invasion prohibitively costly. But while Chinese military shipping would not be able to survive long enough to sustain an invasion, China could prevent Taiwanese or neutral shipping from sustaining the Taiwanese economy. The fate of Taiwan in such a contest would rest on the threat of distant blockade by the United States against Chinese seaborne trade and the relative vulnerability of insular Taiwan and continental China to trade cutoffs. If AirSea Battle could preempt Chinese A2/AD, this scenario could be avoided—but it cannot. To do so would require sustained penetration of defended airspace on a scale that A2/AD will make cost-prohibitive by 2040; it is unlikely that ASB would be able to lift a Chinese blockade of Taiwan once China deploys mature A2/AD capability.

Second, our analysis does not indicate that Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines—or for that matter Vietnam, Singapore, or even Australia and the continental United States—will be wholly invulnerable to Chinese coercion. Technological change is progressively reducing the net cost of striking fixed targets such as power plants, cities, transportation hubs, or other civilian value targets with precision-guided ballistic missiles at ever-increasing ranges. This change will not enable A2/AD-like military control at great distances from China or the landmasses of U.S. allies, but it will make a form of coercive strategic bombardment available to any state that chooses to field the needed missiles, including China. Of course, China would be vulnerable to retaliation, either in kind or from distant blockade or other means. The outcome of such coercive campaigns would be shaped by the much-discussed dynamics of resolve and stakes. The ideal solution from the U.S. standpoint, however, would be an ASB-like preemptive capacity to destroy before launch the missiles that China would use for such missions, thus averting this threat altogether. This ideal solution, however, is at odds with the nature of the relevant technological trends.

To support these findings, we proceed in six steps. First, we establish an analytical context by sketching the political and geostrategic aims that the United States and China might pursue in potential future warfare in the Western Pacific and the role A2/AD and ASB might play in such a war. Next we describe A2/AD and its technological foundations in more detail, explaining why it constitutes a uniquely important issue for U.S. strategy in the Western Pacific. We then explore some critical weaknesses inherent in these technologies, especially the vulnerability of the long-range RSTA systems on which all else rests. This analysis implies a real but limited A2/AD ability to deny freedom of movement to an opponent. Next we consider the potential of ASB to deny China such a real-but-limited A2/AD capability; we reject this ambition as unachievable without sustained expenditures that would exceed China's. We conclude by summarizing key points and developing in greater detail their implications for policy and scholarship...

More at that top link.

Election Night Updates

Polls in Virginia are closing in about 15 minutes.


I haven't really thought much about it, but I'll start out with this post as a sticky up top and see how it goes.

There are election night posts at AoSHQ, "OFFICIAL AOSHQDD ELECTION NIGHT RETURNS," at Legal Insurrection, "Election Night 2012 — Live," and at The Other McCain, "ELECTION DAY UPDATES."

Plus check Instapundit as well.

4:07pm Pacific:

Early exit poll estimates in Virginia show presidential race 49-49%
— Steve Brusk (@stevebruskCNN) November 7, 2012

4:23pm Pacific: At Fox News, "Virginia too close to call; Romney wins Indiana and Kentucky, Obama takes Vermont."

4:35pm Pacific: CNN reported exit polls showing Obama up 51-48 in Ohio.

4:44pm Pacific: Robert Stacy McCain's not happy with CNN's South Carolina projection as too close to call:

John King is a goddamned dishonest Democrat propagandist. He should be collecting a paycheck from the DNC, not @cnn
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) November 7, 2012

5:07pm Pacific: Polls in a bunch of states just closed. I'll have news reports posted on those in a bit. Florida and Pennsylvania are too close to call but exit data shows an Obama edge. JPod responds to these on Twitter:

Remember exit polls and early exits classically oversample Democrats. That's why you can't believe them. They don't swing both ways.
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) November 6, 2012

5:13pm Pacific: From earlier, at AoSHQ, "GOP Sources: We're Looking Good In CO, IA, NH, and WI":

Assuming Romney wins Florida, NC, and Virginia, then Wisconsin, Colorado, and either Iowa or New Hampshire wins it for him.

I think Team Obama is trying to put out word that Virginia is shaky for Romney. I think they're trying to demoralize us. I don't believe it.

Still too close to call in Florida and Virginia, so we'll see.

5:55pm Pacific: Romney rolling up South, including Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. But no word yet on Florida. And of course we're waiting for Ohio and Virginia as well.

The Lonely Conservative is blogging, "Election Results Open Thread," and at Twitchy, "Moving pics of Romney’s final campaign flight; Visibly moved by supporters, talks to media on plane."

6:16pm Pacific: Im in the bathroom just now and I hear my wife scream: "Florida just flipped with Romney ahead!" Susan Candiotti has that:

CNN reports: with 76% of Florida's vote in, the vote is split 50/50 Obama/ Romney! #cnnelections
— susan candiotti cnn(@susancandiotti) November 7, 2012

6:20pm Pacific: Various sources call Pennsylvania for Obama.

6:41pm Pacific: Theo Spark provides an important election reminder:

Yeah, the CPUSA endorsed him again this year: "... re-electing Obama is absolutely essential."

7:12pm Pacific: CNN projects a New Hampshire win for Obama. And Florida remains within hundreds of votes either way. The path for the GOP ticket is narrowing.

Perhaps the editors of the Wall Street Journal saw the way things were shaking before going to press, but here's this leader, "The Republic Will Survive":

As our early editions went to press Tuesday evening we had no idea who'd win the Presidential race. But we'll venture the prediction that the Republic will somehow survive the outcome. Even if Barack Obama wins a second term.

These columns have made no secret of our disappointments—we're writing with the mute button on—with this Administration. Nor have we stinted on our criticism of Mitt Romney, both on tactics and policy. Sadly for us, Ronald Reagan wasn't on the ballot Tuesday. Sadly for some of our friends, Bill Clinton wasn't on it either, though sometimes you could have been fooled.

To choose between imperfect candidates representing unwieldy coalitions has been the American way since America's first contested election, the squeaker of 1796. If you think the stakes in 2012 are great, remember that Thomas Jefferson's Democratic Republicans accused John Adams of being a closet monarchist, while Adams's Federalists treated their opponents as closet Jacobins. Adams won that race, 71 electoral votes to 68, only to lose to Jefferson four years later. Who was it who said voting is the best revenge? So it has gone ever since. The U.S. has survived countless mediocrities in the White House, several placeholders, at least two scoundrels and some real unmitigated disasters. In that last category, we'd name James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, with Woodrow Wilson getting an honorable mention. As for President Obama, we'll resist historicizing until we know he's out of the White House. Perspective is usually the best teacher.

That's not to say we're indifferent to what lies ahead these next four years. Elections have consequences. At issue in this one is whether Mr. Obama's attempt to govern the U.S. from the left winds up being a parenthesis in U.S. history, or a point of departure. If the former, we have a chance to return swiftly to real growth in the U.S. economy. If the latter, we will have to wrestle with the negative consequences for many years.

Well, I think I said it earlier, but the country will take a long time to dig itself out from the destruction of the Obama years, and eight years in office will practically bury American exceptionalism. But as the editors note, the republic will survive. Read the rest at the link.

7:35pm Pacific: It ain't over 'till it's over, but folks are getting glum on Twitter:

@michellemalkin I guess they've chosen "die" in New Hampshire.
— Nick Holmes (@Brensdad_1974) November 7, 2012

7:39pm Pacific: As I was saying:

Dear A$$hole Republican leaders, you suck.You suck like a top of the line Dyson vacuum cleaner. and @reince eff buddy, eff off
— Em (@lamblock) November 7, 2012

8:36pm: This thread's done. I've got a new entry up: "Kenyan Witch Doctor Calls It Correctly: Barack Obama Re-Elected President."

HBO's 'The Pacific'

Pat in Shreveport has the video, "Tom Hanks on The Pacific":

It turns out there's some controversy over Tom Hanks' recent comments on the series. See Newsreal, "Tom Hanks: US Wanted to Annihilate the Japanese Because They Were ”Different”." There's a link there to Big Hollywood as well, which has more details. And more at Pundit & Pundette, "Tom Hanks on why we fought the Japanese."

Tom Hanks is a patriot. He's put enough chips in the hero bank to last for a long while. So I'll wait to watch the film before I hammer any of those involved in the production.

That said, there's a review at the Orlando Sentinel, "‘The Pacific’: HBO Miniseries is a Season High Point":

Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg want to send you to war.

Go. It is worth enlisting in “The Pacific,” their stupendous miniseries that re-creates World War II with gut-wrenching power. The 10-part drama, a pinnacle of the TV season, starts at 9 p.m. Sunday on HBO.

“The Pacific” is not for the squeamish. The production plunges viewers into the mud, chaos and terror as Marines fight through hellish conditions at Peleliu, Okinawa and Iwo Jima. ”The Pacific” smashes war-movie cliches to explore the Marines’ sacrifices and challenges. The men bicker, cry and suffer.

“We’re all afraid, all of us,” an officer confides. “The man who isn’t scared out here is either a liar or dead.”

Anyone who has seen “Saving Private Ryan” knows the drill. Yet “The Pacific” deepens the experience by depicting the Marines’ lives after the war. ”The Pacific,” which cost $200 million to produce, surpasses ”Band of Brothers,” the Hanks-Spielberg miniseries about World War II in Europe

At Least 7 Dead in Sikh Temple Shooting in Wisconsin

This is awful.

At the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal, "At least 7 dead, including shooter, at Sikh Temple."

At least seven people were killed, including one shooter, just after 10 a.m. Sunday at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, police said.

Four of the dead were inside the temple at 7512 S. Howell Ave. and three of the dead, including a shooter, were outside the temple.

A police SWAT team entered the building before noon and brought uninjured people out of the building at 7512 S. Howell Ave.

They started removing injured people from the temple's prayer room.

SWAT team members were still sweeping the building about 1 p.m. and an explosion was heard from the building at that time. It was unclear what the explosion was.

About six gunshots were heard at 2:30 p.m. in the area. The shots appeared to be coming from the temple.

The first officer on the scene Sunday morning encountered an active shooter and exchanged fire with him, according to Greenfield Police Chief Bradley Wentlandt who briefed media on the scene.

The shooter went down and is believed to be dead, said Wentlandt. He said authorities had no evidence of a second shooter.

Check the thread at Memeorandum as well.

So far progressives haven't blamed the tea party, but ... Oh wait, here's Kathleen Geier, at The Washington Monthly:

No details have yet been been released about the gunman, but it seems reasonable to suspect that the shooting was racially motivated. I’d say the odds are good that the shooter was some idiot who believed that Sikhs are Muslims (and that Muslims, of course, are all terrorists).

Right. No details. Just like Brian Ross had no details on the Aurora shooter, but went ahead anyway and fingered the tea party. And who would be most likely to attack Muslims? Why, conservatives, of course. Because progressives just love them some Islamofascism!

Also at Blazing Cat Fur, "Reports of shooting at Sikh Temple..."

Expect updates...

2:26pm Pacific: At The Other McCain, "‘It’s Pretty Much a Hate Crime’ — Seven Reported Dead in Sikh Temple Shooting UPDATE: Act of ‘Domestic Terrorism’."

2:39pm Pacific: At The Lede, "Reports from the Scene of Shooting at Sikh Temple."

2:41pm Pacific: And from the comments at Raw Story:

They should arrest Michelle Bachmann, Frank Gaffney, Trent Franks, Louie Gohmert, Thomas Rooney, Lynn Westmoreland, John Bolton, and Glen Beck as accomplices.

2:48pm Pacific: Still little is known about the shooter, but here from Sarah Betancourt at Liberaland:

Online forums are rampant with racist comments about Muslims. Sikhs don’t practice the same religion as Muslims, but their long beards and turbans often cause them to be mistaken for Muslims, advocates say. According to a CBS report, “Sikh rights groups have reported a rise in bias attacks since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The Washington-based Sikh Coalition has reported more than 700 incidents in the U.S. since 9/11, which advocates blame on anti-Islamic sentiment.”

5:35pm Pacific: At Lonely Conservative, "Sikh Temple Shooting Already Being Blamed on Republicans."

6:10pm Pacific: At Sooper Mexican, "How to Politicize a Tragedy."

Affirmative Action Crushed at the Polls? Clueless California Leftists Struggle to Figure Out What Went Wrong

Oh brother. 

In 2006, Proposition 209 passed 55 percent to 45 percent (a 10-point) margin. It banned racial preferences in the state.

In 2020, Proposition 16, which would have restored affirmative action in California, was defeated 57 percent to 43 percent (a 14-point margin). 

In 1990, ethnic whites were 60 percent of the state's population. In 2020, ethnic whites are 40 percent of the population. Hispanics now comprise more than 40 percent of the state's population, and we have a "majority-minority" demographic.

And Democrats still couldn't get race quotas approved by the voters? Maybe the problem's the Democrat Party and not the voters. Even in the bluest of states, race-neutral public policies command huge support. I mean Proposition 20, the left's "defund the police" and "abolish prisons" initiative was shot down by a whopping 62 percent to 38 percent, a 24-point margin). 

So, racial justice reform in California isn't going anywhere for now. Good thing, sheesh. 

At the Los Angeles Times, "Failure to bridge divides of age, race doomed affirmative action proposition":

Failure to bridge divides of age, race doomed affirmative action proposition https://t.co/gG10VKbdRP

— Seema (@LATSeema) November 25, 2020

Widespread skepticism in Latino and Asian communities and tepid support among younger Black residents combined with opposition from most whites to doom the effort this year to revive affirmative action in California, according to a new postelection survey.

The failure of Proposition 16, which voters rejected by 57% to 43%, marked a significant defeat for the state’s Democratic political leadership and many activist groups, which backed the Legislature’s move to put the proposal on this year’s ballot.

The findings of the survey provide the clearest evidence so far of the disconnect between those political leaders and many of their ostensible followers on an issue that has been a touchstone in the state’s political debates for years.

The survey, conducted by a coalition of community organizations, shows widespread support across racial and ethnic lines for diversity in education, public employment and contracting. At the same time, it showed broad skepticism about allowing government officials to use race, ethnicity or gender in making decisions.

On two other topics, the survey showed how attitudes toward the COVID-19 pandemic have grown more politically divided as the state heads into a period of renewed restrictions designed to limit the spread of the disease.

And it indicated that awareness and concern about racial and ethnic discrimination in the state has receded since reaching a high point this summer.

Asked how often they personally felt discriminated against because of their race or ethnicity, about one-third of Latino respondents said they experienced discrimination “frequently” or “sometimes.” That’s down from nearly half when the poll asked the same question in July.

The finding “reaffirms that these issues are difficult and complicated, and people just don’t have the bandwidth” to focus constantly on discrimination, especially when the impact of COVID dominates so many peoples’ lives, said Helen Torres, executive director of Hispanas Organized for Political Equality (HOPE), one of the sponsors of the survey.

“It’s hard to sustain for the long term,” she said.

The share of Asian and Pacific Islander respondents who reported feeling discriminated against showed a similar decline since July. The share of Black respondents who reported feeling discriminated against did not significantly decline.

The California Community Poll, conducted online Nov. 4-15, was designed to provide a more detailed view of the state’s racial and ethnic diversity than is typically possible. It surveyed 1,300 adult California citizens, with over-samples of Black, Latino and Asian Pacific Islander respondents in order to ensure enough in each group to allow analysis by age, gender and other characteristics.

The margin of error is estimated at 2.7 percentage points for the full sample. The poll is sponsored by three community organizations — the Center for Asian Americans United for Self Empowerment (CAUSE), the Los Angeles Urban League and HOPE.

California banned most government affirmative action programs nearly a quarter century ago, in 1996, when voters approved Proposition 209. Since then, overturning the ban has been a major goal for many Democratic lawmakers and state officials, especially at the University of California, where deans and chancellors have repeatedly said that their inability to take race into account in admissions has kept the number of Latino and Black students well below their share of high school graduates who meet UC eligibility standards.

But as the poll showed, many Californians have more mixed feelings on the subject than their elected officials do.

The results show “a limit on California’s liberalism” that “requires some examination of the progressive base,” said Drew Lieberman, senior vice president of Strategies 360, the polling firm that conducted the survey.

Two-thirds of the California adults surveyed said they believe “diverse representation based on race, gender, ethnicity and national origin” is important, with about 4 in 10 calling it “very important.”

That’s true across major ethnic and racial groups and among both voters and nonvoters, the survey found. About 6 in 10 white respondents said they considered diversity important, along with about 7 in 10 who identify as Latino or Asian or Pacific Islanders. Among Black respondents, the share rose to more than 8 in 10.

But that didn’t translate into support for affirmative action. Among Latino respondents, for example, only 30% said Proposition 16 was a good idea, compared with 41% who called it a bad idea and 29% who said they were unsure. The division was similar among Asian and Pacific Islander respondents, with 35% calling the proposition a good idea, 46% saying it was a bad idea and 20% unsure.

White respondents were slightly more opposed, with 32% calling the measure a good idea, 53% a bad idea and 15% unsure.

Only among Black respondents did the proposition get majority support, with 56% calling it a good idea, 19% a bad idea and 25% unsure.

The views of voters and nonvoters were very similar, suggesting that higher turnout would probably not have changed the results.

Roughly a third of those polled could be characterized as solid supporters of affirmative action — people who said that diversity is important and the ballot measure was a good idea. On the other side, just over 1 in 5 say diversity is not important to them and that the ballot measure was a bad idea.

Another 1 in 5 say diversity is important but that the proposal was a bad idea. The members of that swing group are more likely than others to describe themselves as moderates and to be suburbanites.

Since the election, some supporters of the ballot measure have speculated that voters may have been confused about its potential impact. The survey does not support that. After asking people their opinion, the survey gave a more extensive description of the ballot measure and retested people’s feelings on it. The additional information did not significantly change people’s views.

Still more.

HBO's 'Pacific': Hung Up on Knick-Knacks and Drama

A guest essay at Thomas Ricks' blog, from Eric Hammel,"HBO’s 'Pacific': Someone Please Flush!":

Tom Hanks is an accredited war history buff, and I think he really has put his heart into paying homage to WWII vets. His heart's in the right place, but his head is in Hollywood.

Why should I be surprised a "docudrama" like The Pacific is shit? The whole effort behind the docu part is invested in toys such as gunner's gloves. I long ago boycotted documentary filmmakers who want my brand to legitimize their sorry little TV vignettes. Their objective is entertainment centered on the dramatic visual, not the intellectual, and not quite the historical. If self-professed documentarians can't get it right because they edit the talking heads to accommodate their thin film libraries, why should self-professed entertainers make a better effort, show greater concern?

Has anyone else noticed that the talking heads -- nameless, unexplained vets -- in The Pacific seem to be reading from scripts rather than dipping into memories? They merely mouth error-filled platitudes. Band of Brothers used interesting people with interesting observations. This is the worst way to exploit vets -- making them look like idiots.

It is difficult to frame this story using this set of icons. But the people behind The Pacific volunteered for this. This is their befouled vision, perhaps with the aid of a few bought historians who were probably ignored when the script -- a visual outline -- was fabricated from its many disparate parts. Their good intentions ran afoul bad toilet training; they left the seat up and neglected to flush.

RTWT at the link.

When I first heard read Tom Hanks' comments on "why we fought the Japanese" I thought I'd withhold comment until I'd seen some of the episodes. But after last Sunday's showing, the series so far seems definitely down compared to "Band of Brothers." I'm not giving up on it, but here's hoping things get a little deeper.

My earlier posts on "The Pacific" are here.

Photo Credit: American Power off Hollwood Boulevard, March 20, 2010.

Candy Crowley Shills for Obama at Hofstra Debate!

I saw the pre-debate criticisms of Candy Crowley, and I held back from commenting. I wanted to give her a chance. But I can honestly say now that this was the worst debate moderation in presidential debate history --- and I've been watching them since 1988. The moderator's jobs is to moderate, which means to act as a referee and keep the proceedings on track. A moderator is never a participant, for to do so means inevitably to take up sides. So for President Obama to call on Crowley for a fact check during the debate is like asking the NFL refs to give you a favorable spot for the first down in the 4th quarter of a game that's all tied up. No one would ever countenance it, and as the post-debate spin picks up, especially over the next couple of days, CNN's going to come in for enormous criticism for propping up the president and violating the announced rules and advanced directives of the Commission on Presidential Debates.

Ann Althouse has this at Instapundit:

CANDY CROWLEY INSERTED HERSELF INTO THE DEBATE, OUTRAGEOUSLY, to break up Romney’s most dramatic moment, when Romney was questioning what Obama said the day after the attack in Benghazi. Obama had said he’d called the attack an “act of terror” and Romney was staring him down about it. Crowley broke up the showdown, saying “He did in fact call it an act of terror,” which took the wind out of Romney’s sails. We were advised to check the transcript, but the dramatic moment was lost. The transcript shows Romney was right, and Crowley and Obama were wrong.

Althouse updates with Patrick Brennan at National Review, "‘An Act of Terror’?" (at Memeorandum):

President Obama claimed tonight that he called the Benghazi attack an act of terror the day after it occurred, in the Rose Garden. Mitt Romney seemed skeptical, and asked him whether he stood by that statement — that he’d called it terrorism, rather than a spontaneous act arising out of a demonstration.

But here are his remarks....

One could take that as a reference to acts which include the tragedy in Benghazi, obviously, but there was clearly no effort made to label it an act of terrorism. One reason why this might be: According to U.S. law, acts of terrorism are premeditated. The Obama administration’s line for days following Obama’s Rose Garden statement suggested that the attack wasn’t premeditated.

Read the whole thing for the context. And while it's clear that the president only made an oblique reference to "acts of terror" ---- and not an explicit, purposeful condemnation of a premeditated attack ---- the exact wording provides presidential wiggle room, and then progressives will just continue to shill for the administration's cover up.

This was a new low in presidential debates. If folks will remember, as I always argue, we're no longer in a media environment where professionalism demands strict impartiality. We've long returned to a "partisan press" in which media outlets take sides. What was entirely new tonight is that a debate moderator who was charged with the trust of objectivity and fairness injected herself into a debate to deflate the momentum of the Republican challenger. It was as if Candy Crowley was of the monarch's cortege, and she juggled a court performance to place the king in the best possible light, not allowing a glimpse of true frailty of the man behind the throne. It was the spectacle of feigned impartiality in the service of entrenched power. In this case, the president was being brought down low, with truth to power charging from the challenger's attacks, then only to be deflated by a "fact-checking" moment that works to the default advantage of the incumbent. That alone made the debate a travesty of democracy.

There in fact had been a good number of back-and-forth rounds between the candidates, and I was expecting that folks might, some more moderate folks, call it a draw. But on the economy, on taxes and ---- especially ---- on energy policy, Mitt Romney was eviscerating the president. It was almost no contest at those moments. Romney, like during the first debate, was in his wheelhouse. And Crowley clearly sensed the president's trouble and gladly shilled for him at key points, shouting down Romney's attempts to get in brief clarifications and then, of course, taking sides when it came to the president's request to "check the transcript." Seriously. I've never seen such an outrageous thing at a debate. But clearly, Obama needed help.

More at Memeorandum.

Expect updates.

9:29pm Pacific: Fact-checking the debate fact-checker, at WaPo, "Fact Check: Libya attack":

What did Obama say in the Rose Garden a day after the attack in Libya? ”No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this nation,” he said.

But he did not say “terrorism”—and it took the administration days to concede that that it an “act of terrorism” that appears unrelated to initial reports of anger at a video that defamed the prophet Muhammad.

Romney was right.

9:42pm Pacific: Here's the headline at Astute Bloggers, "HUGE BREAKING NEWS: OMFG: OBAMA LIED AND CROWLEY SWORE TO IT: OBAMA DID NOT UTTER THE WORD TERROR AT THE ROSEGARDEN SPEECH!"

And over at Althouse's blog, "'The moderator will not... intervene in the debate except to acknowledge the questioners from the audience or enforce the time limits, and invite candidate comments during the 2 minute response period'":

That was the contractual term that Candy Crowley agreed to and blatantly violated in the debate tonight. She let us know in advance that she wasn't going to follow it...

More at the link.

And boy, like I said, she sure did blow off the advance directives not to deviate from the impartial script. It's a staggering assault of the process, and a blow to the decency and sense of fair play of the average voter.

9:55pm Pacific: At Breitbart, "CROWLEY'S FALSE FACT CHECK SAVES PRESIDENT, DERAILS DEBATE - UPDATE: CROWLEY BACKTRACKS."

This is a scandal; a total and complete media scandal committed by a woman who promised to violate her contract and to insert herself into the debate. All she did for weeks was brag about how she intended to grab the spotlight -- and boy did she ever.

Absolutely disgraceful.

Sea Power Makes Great Powers

At Foreign Policy, "History reveals a country’s rise and decline are directly related to the heft of its navy. So why is the United States intent on downsizing?":

THE NUMBER OF SHIPS A COUNTRY POSSESSES has never been the sole measure of its power at sea. Other factors, of course, play a role: The types of ships it has--submarines, aircraft carriers, destroyers--the manner in which they are deployed, the sophistication of their sensors, and the range and lethality of their weapons all make a difference. Still, on the high seas, quantity has a quality all its own. And over the past several decades, U.S. ship numbers have seen a dramatic overall decline.

The 1980s and 1990s marked the beginning of this downward trend. The U.S. government at the time cut subsidies for the nation's commercial shipbuilding industry, eventually hobbling the shipyards it would need to build a bigger fleet. With the end of the Cold War, policymakers went a step further, slashing funding to the U.S. Navy to create a shortsighted peace dividend. Now, with defense budgets flat or declining, leading Defense Department officials are pushing a "divest to invest" strategy--whereby the Navy must decommission a large number of older ships to free up funds to buy fewer, more sophisticated, and presumably more lethal platforms.

China, meanwhile, is aggressively expanding its naval footprint and is estimated to have the largest fleet in the world. Leading voices simultaneously recognize the rising China threat while also arguing that the United States must shrink its present fleet in order to modernize. Adm. Philip Davidson, who led U.S. Indo-Pacific Command until he retired this spring, observed in March that China could invade Taiwan in the next six years--presumably setting the stage for a major military showdown with the United States--while Adm. Michael Gilday, the chief of naval operations, has argued that the Navy needs to accelerate the decommissioning of its older cruisers and littoral combat ships to free up money for vessels and weapons that will be critical in the future.

Taken together, these views add up to strategic confusion and an obliviousness to history.

CENTURIES OF GLOBAL RIVALRY SHOW how a country's power--and its decline--is directly related to the size and capability of its naval and maritime forces. The ability to ship goods in bulk from places where they are produced to places where they are scarce has long represented an expression of national power. Athens had a robust navy as well as a large merchant fleet. Carthage in the third century B.C., Venice in the 13th and 14th centuries, and the Dutch republic in the 16th and 17th centuries also fielded merchant and naval fleets to pursue and protect their interests. In this way, they were able to transform their small- and medium-sized nations into great powers.

Following the Napoleonic wars in the early 19th century, a large Royal Navy effectively knitted together the British Empire upon which "the sun never set." By the latter half of that century, the British maintained a "two-power standard," whereby the size of the Royal Navy had to meet or exceed the next two navies combined. That ultimately proved unsustainable. It was the doubling of the U.S. Navy battle force under President Theodore Roosevelt that catapulted the United States to global power and prominence. Most historians view the 14-month world cruise of new U.S. battleships--Roosevelt's Great White Fleet--as the birth of what would come to be known as the American Century.

The dramatic expansion of the U.S. fleet through two world wars--finishing the later conflict with more than 6,000 vessels, by far the largest navy ever afloat--set the country on its superpower path. Finally, Ronald Reagan's 600-ship Navy, as much a public relations campaign as it was a shipbuilding plan, helped convince the Soviet Union that it would not win the Cold War.

Throughout history, large naval and merchant fleets represented not just a power multiplier but an exponential growth factor in terms of national influence. All historical sea powers recognized this--until they didn't.

IN OCTOBER 1904, ADM. JOHN "JACKIE" FISHER Was appointed first sea lord of the Royal Navy. He arrived in office certain who the enemy was--Germany--but also with clear direction from civilian leadership to tighten his belt and accept declining naval budgets. Fisher's solution to this strategic dilemma was to dramatically shrink the fleet in order to pay for modernization while also concentrating the remaining ships closer to Great Britain. His investments in modernization were breathtaking--most notably the introduction of a steam-turbine, all-big-gun battleship, the HMS Dreadnought, which would lend its name to all subsequent battleships that followed, transforming global naval competition.

But Fisher paid for his modernized vessels by massively culling the 600-ship Royal Navy he inherited from his predecessor. "With one courageous stroke of the pen," then Prime Minister Arthur Balfour approvingly stated, Fisher slashed 154 ships from the Royal Navy's active list. Fisher classified some of these ships as "sheep," which were sent to the slaughter in the breakers' yards; others as "llamas," downgraded but retained in the reserves; and still others as "goats," which retained their guns with the stipulation that no further maintenance funds would be allocated to them.

The cull, however, wasn't cost-free. Most of the cuts were taken from gunboats and cruisers assigned to nine distant stations where Britain had national interests, such as in Asia or Africa. The cuts generated great criticism not only from within the Royal Navy, which was manned by officers with long experience and strong views regarding the importance of a naval presence overseas, but also from the British Colonial and Foreign Offices, which instantly recognized that they would no longer be able to call on readily available Royal Navy ships to support the nation's diplomatic interests.

Ultimately, Fisher did modernize his fleet in the short term. Both the Dreadnought class battleships as well as their consorts, the smaller Invincible-class battle cruisers, rendered all previous designs instantly obsolete. What Fisher did not anticipate was that his contraction and modernization of the Royal Navy would create two simultaneous effects: It destabilized the international environment, and it triggered a global naval arms race.

Britain had already been under pressure in the Far East and had asked Japan for assistance protecting its interests there, but now it found itself without a fleet of sufficient size to defend its interests in other geostrategic locations like the Caribbean and Africa. It had to trust a new partner, the United States, to take on that job. The only alternative would have been for Britain to simply forgo its colonial interests in order to focus on what it viewed as the preponderant German threat in the Baltic, North Sea, and northern Atlantic Ocean.

There were other knock-on effects. Flaving surrendered its dominant lead in overall ship numbers, Britain found itself in a new naval arms race in which its previous, sunkcost investments in older ships offered no benefit. To its dismay, Britain began this new arms race from nearly the same position as its geostrategic rivals. Soon every European power, as well as the United States and Japan, was building modern dreadnoughts, and Fisher and his navy were unable to maintain or reestablish their previous two-power standard.

Today, Fisher's strategy would be recognized as a divest-to-invest modernization plan. And the lesson is clear: Britain found that it was unable to preserve even the facade of being a global power; it was quickly reduced to being a regional maritime power on the periphery of Europe. The ensuing conditions of international instability, shifting alliance structures, and the global arms race contributed to the outbreak of World War I and the end of empires, including Britain's.

THE UNITED STATES CURRENTLY FACES many of the same strategic challenges that Britain confronted just over a century ago. Much as the Balfour ministry faced strategic strain from the distant Boer War--as well as expanding domestic social instability and the rise of Germany--the United States is dealing with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, domestic civil unrest, and a rising China. Additionally, the White House Office of Management and Budget has attempted to impose on the Defense Department similar fiscal strictures to those that Balfour levied on Fisher's Admiralty: flat to declining budgets and demands to be more efficient. As a result, the Pentagon has made the decision to cut back on its shipbuilding plans, starting construction of only eight new ships in the next year, half of them auxiliaries, while accelerating the decommissioning of seven cruisers, dropping the fleet to an estimated 294 ships. Congress has indicated that it will seek to expand these numbers, but the future is increasingly murky.

Given that even the most capable ship can only be in one place at a time and that the world's oceans are vast, the fleet as planned will not meet the demand for a naval presence detailed by the various four-star regional combatant commanders around the world. On average, their requests equate to approximately 130 ships at sea on any given day, nearly half of the present fleet. Today the Navy deploys, on average, fewer than 90 ships per day, creating gaps in key regions where America's interests are not being upheld. The Navy previously sought efficiencies that would allow it to "do more with less," by curbing training or the time ships spent in maintenance. The result, however, was an uptick in serious accidents at sea and a decline in the material readiness of the battle fleet.

Still, the overarching U.S. naval strategy, stated repeatedly by defense leaders during this spring's round of congressional hearings, is to "divest" of older platforms in order to "invest" in newer platforms that, although fewer in number, would possess a qualitative edge over those fielded by competitors. As history reveals, this strategy will produce a fleet too small to protect the United States' global interests or win its wars. Ultimately, the U.S. shipbuilding base and repair yards will atrophy to a point where they will not be able to meet the demand for new ships nor provide repairs when war almost inevitably comes.

TO AVOID THE MISTAKES OF THE PAST, Congress Should follow its constitutional charge in Article 1 and allocate funds sufficient to both provide for a newer, more modern fleet in the long run and to maintain the Navy that it has today as a hedge against the real and proximate threat from China. Such an allocation requires a 3 to 5 percent annual increase in the Navy's budget for the foreseeable future, as was recommended by the bipartisan 2018 National Defense Strategy Commission.

Both steps are crucial. Weapons like hypersonic missiles and directed energy mounts like the much-hyped railgun are changing the face of warfare, although not its nature, and the United States must invest to keep up with its competitors in China and Russia, which are already fielding some of these systems in large numbers. However, the Navy, as the day-to-day patroller facing these two rival great powers, cannot shrink the size of its battle force. As both Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt and later Ronald Reagan all understood:

Great powers possess large, robust, and resilient navies. Conversely, shrinking fleets historically suggest nations that are overstretched, overtasked, and in retreat. Such revelations invite expansion and challenge from would-be rivals. To meet the demands of the current strategic environment, the U.S. Navy must grow--and quickly.

Not even a fleet of355 ships, the number advanced by the Obama administration in its closing days, will be sufficient to reestablish conventional deterrence on the high seas. Instead, the United States should seek a fleet of456 ships, comprising a balance between high-end, high-tech ships such as nuclear attack submarines and low-end, cheaper small surface combatants that can be added to numbers quickly. It should also seek to extend the lives of the ships it has now in its inventory to cover the short-term threat. The United States can do this by scheduling these ships for service life extensions of their hulls and power plants and for modernization of their combat systems and associated sensors within the constellation of the nation's civilian ship repair yards...

Biden's Foreign Policy is Driven by Impulse, Not Reason

From Caroline Glick:

Almost every day, questions arise about President Joe Biden‘s ability to make presidential-level decisions. The questions stem mainly from Biden’s repeated rhetorical gaffes.

In a recent column in the Boston Herald, Howie Carr assembled a sampling of dozens of Biden’s misstatements since the start of May. Among the highlights, Biden told guests at the White House, “I thank all of you for being here, and I want you to enjoy the rest of the recession.”

In a speech before an audience of policemen, Biden asked, “How many police officers have multiple time and put a lion and had to do things that they’d have to think they’d have to do?”

Whereas Biden’s domestic policy malapropisms are generally subjects of amusement (or derision) with few consequences, the same cannot be said of his parallel misstatements when it comes to foreign policy.

Consider the war in Ukraine. In late January, as Russian troops were situated on the border with Ukraine awaiting Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s marching orders, Biden gave a press conference in which he exposed NATO‘s disagreements by noting that the alliance would be divided over how to respond to a “minor incursion” by Russian forces.

Confusion, and worse, impulsiveness, have been the hallmarks of Biden’s decisions no less than his pronouncements. The helter-skelter withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan last August remains the paramount example of the impulsive nature of Biden’s foreign policy. Biden ordered U.S. forces to withdraw, ending a 20-year war in humiliation and defeat without first coordinating the move with U.S. allies.

Biden gave the order without first making arrangements for U.S. citizens to depart the country, and apparently without regard to an inspector general report that warned the Afghan military would not be able to maintain control of any part of the country without supporting U.S. air control and contractors.

Biden acted in callous disregard for the safety of the U.S.’s Afghan partners, and without first making arrangements to secure the $90 billion in U.S. weapons that the withdrawing U.S. forces left behind.

Obviously, much of the failure can be laid at the feet of the Pentagon, the CIA and the State Department. But it was obvious that in the case of the Afghan withdrawal, it was Biden calling the shots from the top.

The Afghan withdrawal devastated the credibility of the U.S. as both an ally and an enemy. Its direct and indirect consequences will haunt the U.S. and its allies for years to come.

Biden’s actions against Russia since it invaded Ukraine are similarly seen by allies and enemies alike as the product of impulsive decisions, made without sufficient consideration of easily foreseeable consequences. Three decisions stand out, in particular.

The first was Biden’s decision to freeze $300 billion in Russian dollar reserves. The decision was unprecedented. And although it harmed Russia economically, it devastated the credibility of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. In response to the move, China and Russia abandoned the dollar in their bilateral trade. Other key countries, including Saudi Arabia and India, have also agreed to sell and purchase oil and gas in local currencies, undermining the petrodollar.

In response to the U.S. move and to Washington’s decision to block Russia from the international banking system, Russia began insisting that foreign purchasers of Russian oil and gas open ruble and foreign currency accounts with Gazprombank. Germany, Italy and more than a dozen other EU member states have thus far complied.

The ruble is as strong as it was before the February invasion. Simultaneously, the U.S. dollar is weak and its role as the world’s reserve currency is being questioned around the world. Time will tell if this is the beginning of the end of the dollar-based international economy. But what is already apparent is that the U.S. move on Russia’s dollar reserves was a net loss for the U.S. A more carefully crafted sanctions package might have had less deleterious consequences.

Then there are the leaks from Washington regarding the direct role the U.S. is apparently playing in Ukrainian military operations against Russia. The sources of the leaks are unclear. Biden is reportedly angry about them. All the same, administration officials have informed reporters that the U.S. provided Ukraine with the intelligence that enabled Ukrainian forces to sink the Moskva, Russia’s flagship in its Black Sea fleet, as well as intelligence that has enabled the Ukrainians to kill Russian generals.

In other words, Biden administration officials are telling the media that the U.S. is not merely supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia; rather, the U.S. is an active participant in that war. Whether it is Biden’s wish to go to war against Russia, or whether he is being led by his advisors, is unclear. But what is clear enough is that the escalatory consequences of these leaks are dangerous. Moreover, the U.S. interest in such escalation is unclear—at best.

The same can be said regarding the sudden decision to add Sweden and Finland to NATO. Is the U.S. really willing to send forces, if need be, to defend these nations? If so, where is that reflected in U.S. military budgets, training, hardware and doctrine?

Finally, there is the issue of the sanctions’ impact on the U.S. economy and on the global food supply. For months ahead of Russia’s invasion, as Putin’s troops deployed along the border grew, the Biden administration signaled that the U.S.’s primary tool for defeating Russia would be economic sanctions. Under the circumstances, Biden and his team could have been expected to calculate the sanctions for their effects on Russia and their blowback for the U.S. and its allies, as well as to consider the implications of Russian counter-sanctions on the U.S. and the global economy. But from the looks of things, it appears that the administration considered neither of these things.

Take the embargo on Russian oil and gas. Due to Biden’s decision to drastically cut U.S. energy production well before Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. had moved from being a net energy exporter to a net importer. Fuel prices in the U.S. had already risen precipitously. Those price rises aggravated skyrocketing inflation rates caused by a rapidly expanding U.S. money supply unmatched by a corresponding rise in domestic production.

Biden’s embargo on Russian oil and gas, therefore, took a bad situation and made it much worse.

Then there are the banking sanctions on Russian nationals. Russia is the main global exporter of fertilizer. While fertilizer exports weren’t banned, the financial sanctions on Russian nationals have impeded the ability of Russian exporters to do business with foreign purchasers, driving up the cost of fertilizers—and through them, of all foodstuff.

This brings us to the issue of Ukrainian food exports. Ukraine is a major supplier of wheat and corn to global markets. Ukrainian production and exports dropped by roughly 50% following the Russian invasion. And now Russia is blockading Ukraine’s Black Sea ports in order to prevent any exports of what remains of the besieged country’s crop yield. Expectations of a global food shortage are already causing panic worldwide, particularly among poor, unstable nations that are dependent on wheat imports to feed their people.

Russia will bear primary responsibility for global famine. But a better conceived U.S. sanctions strategy might have provoked a less devastating Russian counter-response. Now, with the real prospect of global food shortages, the danger of a naval confrontation between U.S. and NATO forces and Russian forces in the Black Sea rises every day.

Russia’s conventional forces have performed far below expectations. But Russia’s nuclear arsenal is both larger and more advanced than its U.S. counterpart. And unlike the U.S., Russia has built extensive and credible defensive systems to protect its cities and military bases from nuclear attack. Putin and his top advisors are openly threatening to use nuclear weapons if they feel it is necessary. Under the circumstances, any military exchange between the U.S. and Russia has the potential of becoming a nuclear war.

In response to the Ukrainian grain crisis, India announced last week that it is suspending its wheat exports to secure its domestic food supply. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, India has repeatedly flummoxed the Biden administration with its unwillingness to join the U.S. and NATO in their campaign on behalf of Ukraine. India’s early decision to maintain its oil and gas purchases with Russia while moving the trade from dollars to rupees and rubles was the first clear sign that New Delhi was staying loyal to its Cold War ally and moving away from the U.S.

India’s decision to distance itself from the U.S. poses grave consequences to the U.S. in its rising superpower struggle with China. President Biden, like President Donald Trump before him, rightly views India’s participation in a U.S.-led Pacific alliance as a key component of the U.S.’s strategy for containing China.

This brings us to Biden’s latest foreign policy gaffe with strategic implications. In response to a reporter’s question on Monday during his visit to Tokyo about whether the U.S. would use military force to defend Taiwan from China, Biden said, “Yes, that’s the commitment we made.”

But that isn’t the commitment the U.S. has made. For decades, U.S. policy with respect to the defense of Taiwan has been one of “strategic ambiguity.” The context of Biden’s remark, made from Tokyo at a time of heightened Chinese aggression against Taiwan, was significant. And while Biden’s advisors worked feverishly to present his remark as inconsequential, and U.S. policy as unchanged, the president has now “misspoken” numerous times on Taiwan.

Biden’s many gaffes and whispers of possible dementia have led many to wonder whether he is really the one driving U.S. policy. But to the extent he is, Biden’s foreign policy is a bundle of impulsive actions, whose economic and strategic implications have been disastrous for the U.S. and destabilizing to the world as a whole.

 

Realities of War? An Update

As I noted at my post on Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard, "Realities of War?":

This is obviously touchy. My own view is that the public gets inadequate coverage of our wars, and certainly press blackouts raise questions of government suppression of speech.

I also noted that Bernard's father requested that AP not publish the photograph of his son's last moments. Also, photographer Julie Jacobson violated the embed's contract she signed not to publish images of wartime casualties without consent of the parties.

The response has been tremendously emotional, with good reason. I cited at my post the comments from the soldier at Afghan Quest, who called "bullshit" on the whole thing.

But there's another side on the question of publishing battlefield images, and Jules Crittenden really captures the essential compromise position in his post, "Professional Issues." Jules notes how Jacobson, the photographer, was accepted into the harsh environment by the Marines on the ground. They gave her the benefit of the doubt for enduring the same hardships, and ultimately accepted her as one of their own. Jules is clear to note that Jacobson violated ethics to forward the photos of Bernard to AP's headquarters. But check this out:

It’s a tough issue. Remember those shots of people falling from the Twin Towers? I know a photog who was there and didn’t shoot the jumpers, thought it was in bad taste. Too bad. Wrong call. You always shoot. Whether you publish or not is another matter. But the images other photogs shot of people falling were some of the most evocative photos, gut-punch photos that drove home exactly what was done to those people. The utter loneliness and resignation and finality of the act of falling when the alternative is burning. The image is etched in my brain. I’ve never forgotten it, any more than the deaths I have witnessed firsthand, that etched live images. It reminds me what this is about.

My professional feeling is, violent death happens and people should know about it. I don’t mind sticking it in people’s faces, and agree with some of Jacobson’s points on compelling people to acknowledge what is happening in their name and on their behalf. The United States government has struggled with this issue for a long time, initially banning photos of the dead in World War II, and then, for purposes of shocking the homefront, allowing publication of non-identifiable photos of the dead. Some of those photos, of GIs half buried in the sand at the waterline in the Pacific, are instantly recognized images that convey as best can be conveyed remotely the horror of an amphibious assault, a similar sense of loss, and the loneliness and finality of death much as the 9/11 jumper shots did, and a jarring sense what a generation of young men faced for us. Ernie Pyle described the dead intimately and poignantly in Normandy and Italy. Matthew Brady and others photographed them in their most vulnerable state, horrific states of decomposition that are at the same time heartwrenching and evocative, at Gettysburg, Antietam and other scenes of unimagineable carnage.

All that said, I entirely understand the reaction of families and grunts who don’t want their dead photographed.

There's more at the link, but that pretty much captures the balance of compromise that's been missing from a lot of the debate.

One of the more hysterical responses was Cassandra's at Villainous Company. As noted, AP explicitly violated the family's requests for non-publication, etc. But where Cassandra goes off the handle is in extrapolating the Marine's photo with situations away from the battlefield:

So if we buy into the notion that we need to see the results of violent episodes to truly understand their consequences, does this mean the media will now begin showing graphic footage of rape victims who have been beaten or tortured or cut to shreds by their attackers?

Rape - and the tolerance of it - has a cost, both to the victim and to society. How can we fully understand the tragic cost of rape unless we are allowed to view their injuries and vicariously understand their pain? According to the press, we can't.

Child abuse has a cost. Therefore, if a child is sexually abused or beaten, we need to see graphic close-ups of their torn vaginas or rectums. We need to see graphic photos of that little boy whose father ate his eyes. Otherwise, it's just too easy to gloss over the horrific damages - both mental and physical - done to these innocent victims. We have a right to know.

Would this further humiliate and traumatize the victims and their families? Undoubtedly. But the public's "need to know" outweighs silly concerns about the victim or family members who may be equally traumatized.

Here we get over to Cassandra's well-know proclivity to injecting hard-left-wing feminist perspectives into the debate. What we also see are rank double-standards and more of her ignorant hypocrisy. Recall how Cassandra attacked me for my initial report on the Erin Andrews scandal, and specifically my argument that the story was newsworthy. Here's what Cassandra wrote in reply (and the block quote at the middle there is mine):

For days I went out of my way not to make this personal. I've had many conservations with Donald in the past. As he repeatedly points out, he's hardly the only one who seems unable to understand that daring to work as a sportscaster or being "newsworthy" does not constitute voluntary surrender of the right to privacy in situations where any of us ought to have a reasonable expectation of privacy:

I wouldn't photograph my neighbor in a bikini by the pool, getting out of the shower topless, or shaving her legs in the bathroom. I am linking to the post though, for the purposes of argument. The difference between the Erin Andrew link and those links right here is that the latter have absolutely zero news values.

Good thing his neighbor isn't a Gold Star mother whose son was just killed in Iraq or Afghanistan! That would be newsworthy, and according to the media public curiosity about sensationalistic stories trumps all over considerations. It would seem many folks agree.

Okay, so here we have a young Marine killed in Afghanistan and Cassandra's attacking AP's argument that publishing Bernard's picture was indeed newsworthy.

So, what's it going to be? The fact is, for Cassandra all the talk about rape victims and the privacy of your naked mother in a hotel room are EMOTIONAL appeals, not rational ones. And these all come back to Cassandra's radical feminist perspective that it's (1) wrong to violate privacy in furtherance of public news values, and (2), because specifically there's an essential system of exploitation of women at work that makes all wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters at risk.

Cassandra is a military wife, so we should give her the benefit of the doubt beyond feminist hysteria. Still, there may be a case for sharing images of battle dead with the public that goes beyond news: It's the extention of service postumously. As miltary wife Lily Burana has written:

Within my own circle of active-duty military and veterans' wives, the numbers are little different. In fact, they're in constant flux, as we hotly debate the issue at playgrounds, in cafes and on blogs ...

One acquaintance, favoring privacy, said that if the worst were to happen to her husband and someone wielding a camera dared to elbow in on her family's grief, she'd "open up a can of Army wife whoop-ass." The image of the modern military spouse is half-frontier wife, half-Care Bear -- by turns stoically able and cooingly comforting. But when it comes to acting on behalf of our kin and the larger military family, make no mistake: Wives are warriors too.

I get where the privacy-or-else camp is coming from. Though I could not have anticipated this when I married a soldier in 2002, I have come to care for troops and their families with a ferocity that words fail to elucidate. My instinct is to wave away onlookers, to protect, to defend. The civilian world, in particular the media, is justifiably suspect. Though I have an occupational link to that realm, I harbor my own mistrust of the media, along with some cynicism about a public that fetishizes the warrior class yet can't wholly understand it. Times are stressful enough for military families without adding fear of exploitation.

But as much as I relate to the protective stance of "No, you can't come in," I respect those who would welcome the media, saying, in essence, "Take him, he's yours too. He is our country's son." Let these photos be his final act of service. In the name of honor and authenticity, I want the American people to see how the military respects its own, in aching ceremonial flourish, down to the last detail -- caskets being carefully loaded on planes; the gun salute; the rap-tap-tap of the sticks on the snare drum rim, marking the cortege cadence in the graveyard.

Mrs. Burana's discussion is focusing primarily on Secretary Gates' decision to open media access to Dover Air Force Base. But her mention of the "worst that could happen" is in fact what happened to Lance Cpl. Bernard.

Folks might also check out this essay at BAGnews, "Photo of a Dying Marine: The Larger View":

First, my condolences to the family of Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard. Although I believe strongly in the release of this image, noting that a month had passed since his death (and the release of more heroic images), and that Joshua had since been buried and the family informed in advance that the photo would be published, I also recognize the family's opposition and the additional pain it has caused.

That said, I have a few takes on the controversy surrounding the release of this photo....

1. Given that the military's rules for visually documenting images of American casualties is so restrictive that it effectively constitutes ongoing censorship and corporate media is so skittish in the face of political push back, the fact this single photo of an American casualty even made the light of day is quite remarkable.

And that brings us back full circle, to my original post, and my reservations against the Pentagon's aggressive reporting restrictions, which "raise questions of government suppression of speech."

Given so much sensitivity on the issue, I can't say exactly how I would respond if faced with similar circumstances (being embedded and taking fatal battlefield images). That said, the discussion here has at least opened up the more hysterical arguments to inspection and placed the Bernard controversy in the larger historical frame of "heartwrenching and evocative" wartime imagery.