Taking out tau.

Politics America’s Failed Grand Strategy Guarantees the Draft’s Return The U.S. is already overextended; what will happen if we actually enter a war? Credit: image via Shutterstock According to the most recent National Security Strategy, made public at the end of 2022, America’s official policy is “there is nothing beyond our capacity.” Such a statement is ridiculous, especially in light of America’s obvious overextension in the face of multiple simultaneous global crises.  America’s efforts to wage a proxy war in Ukraine are meeting with slow but grinding failure that has depleted our stockpiles and given Russia plenty of experience defeating numerous American weapon systems, ranging from Abrams tanks to Excalibur precision artillery rounds. Our seemingly limitless backing of Israel and its flailing about in the Middle East has further depleted our military stocks and required the repositioning of numerous naval assets. Because of this repositioning, not a single American carrier remains on station in East Asia, despite endless crowing about the need to contain China and wage holy democratic war for Taiwan if needed.  We are in over our heads without even being in an honest-to-goodness shooting war. Yet the foreign policy establishment seems only interested in expanding American commitments and entanglements hither, thither, and yon.  America’s military power is constrained not only by a shortage of equipment, but by a shortage of men. American recruitment has been abysmal, with massive shortfalls for successive years, which seems unlikely to improve anytime soon, especially given the widespread phenomenon of military families deciding to leave the profession.  American global ambitions are not becoming any more humble in the face of these facts. Rather than returning to America’s traditional Monroe Doctrine and a focus on hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, the powers that be will probably attempt to continue our forward deployed primacist grand strategy until it all comes tumbling down from one catastrophe or another.  One perfect example is the Navy’s plan to expand the battleforce fleet to 381 vessels, up from around 295 currently. Yet the Navy is also currently discussing plans to mothball 17 support ships because there are not enough sailors to crew them. If we can’t man the navy now at its current size, how will we do so with nearly 100 more ships? In the midst of the War on Terror, numerous military planners became convinced of the idea of “hybrid warfare”, meaning that the wars of the future, even between states, would be similar to the counter-insurgency operations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Obviously, the Ukraine war has demonstrated that the potential for full on modern industrialized warfare that requires the mobilization of vast portions of society to wage is a very real possibility.  The carnage in Ukraine has been too immense for our own leadership to ignore, and as a result we see more and more proposals and discussions emerging trying to come to grips with the radical reorientation in not just military posture, but all of American society, that would be needed to continue America’s failing efforts to run the world.  The Ukraine war has demonstrated beyond all doubt that no amount of technology can replace the need for actual flesh-and-blood humans manning the front lines. Russia learned this the hard way when its initial invasion bogged down into an industrial war of attrition and it suffered devastating setbacks in late 2022 in Kharkiv and Zaporizhia Oblasts when their undermanned lines were quickly overwhelmed by rapid Ukrainian assaults. Having learned its lesson, it called up 300,000 reserves and undertook a massive recruitment campaign.  Yet, America is already facing a dramatic recruitment shortfall and is in no way prepared to replace the massive losses that would be expected in a conflict similar to that in Ukraine. An essay in the U.S. Army War College journal published in the fall of 2023 acknowledges that such a conflict would result in 50,000 casualties—roughly the amount of casualties sustained in all 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan—in a mere two weeks. The authors estimated that the US would suffer 3,600 casualties per day, requiring 800 replacements per day.  The authors point out that the Individual Ready Reserve, which is composed of former service personnel who do not actively train and drill but may be called back into active service in the event they are needed, currently stands at roughly 76,000 troops (down from over 700,000 in 1973), all of whom would be needed within a month or so of the start of a conflict.  It is not surprising, then, that the authors state that there may be a need to reinstate conscription, stating, “Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.” (It is notable that last fall when I reported on this proposal one of the coauthors denied to the AP that the essay called for a return of the draft despite it unambiguously doing so, indicating that the foreign policy establishment is fully aware that such a move will be immensely unpopular.) In June of 2024, the Center for a New American Security issued a report titled “Back to the Drafting Board: U.S. Draft Mobilization Capability for Modern Operational Requirements.” The authors make several policy proposals to overhaul the draft system to ensure it can operate efficiently and smoothly if implemented. Among the many suggestions is the implementation of what amounts to a national database including health information, skills, and education of the entire population so that the draft could more precisely select people with required skills in the event of conscription.  Such a database would not only be worrisome due to privacy concerns and the like, but it would also give the government the ability, and therefore the temptation, to implement conscription for not just the military, but to implement war-time industrial central planning or any other scheme that someone might come up with, such as a “war” on climate change. The DoD has already begun to issue reports detailing the vast manpower shortages of skilled industrial workers in the military-industrial base, and they would no doubt salivate about being able to flip through the national manpower catalog to simply force people to man the production lines.  Such rumblings are not limited to academic musings. The 2024 NDAA contains provisions related to the draft in both the House and Senate versions. Both would make registration for the draft automatic, with the Senate version going even further to require women to register for selective service as well. The authors of the CNAS report and other advocates for reforming the selective service system stress that they desire merely to ensure that the system works properly in the event it is needed in a dire emergency. There is some merit to this idea. The Russian call-up of reserves went about as well as a trainwreck and demonstrated that a great deal of rust had built up on the system since it was last used in the Second World War. This provided a wake-up call that resulted in a great deal of modernization and streamlining. Nevertheless, while such modernization may make sense in theory, in the reality of America’s current context, modernizing or outright resuming selective service will do nothing but hand a hammer to people who already view every problem as a nail. The United States is not located in Eurasia and has no need to fear becoming embroiled in an industrial war of attrition unless it is by choice. We face no threats that would require mobilization, other than those we create by going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.  Despite the mounting evidence of U.S. overextension and vulnerability around the globe, it is worth reiterating that official government policy holds that “nothing is beyond our capacity”. Modernizing or even implementing the draft will not force the blob to confront the harsh reality that resources, especially manpower, are scarce. We face a looming military disaster and potential wars on multiple fronts as regional powers seek to settle scores in the face of American weakness. Everything is not in our capacity, but resuming the draft will be all but inevitable if the foreign policy establishment has any hope of trying to hold together our rapidly crumbling global position. The post America’s Failed Grand Strategy Guarantees the Draft’s Return appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs An Antidote to Europe’s Summertime Blues Complaints about Central Europe’s “democratic backsliding” don’t hold up under scrutiny. Credit: MDart10 Boarding my U.S.-bound plane once in Dublin, a stewardess cheerfully reminded the line of long faces that it’s never too early to plan next year’s vacation. The sentiment resonated more than the charitable stewardess knew. A cubicle beckoned. If I were going to seek truth, beauty, and goodness on my beloved Old Continent, the occasional weeklong vacation would be an inefficient route. Since that time, I’ve been blessed with undeserved opportunities to live, work, and travel across Central Europe, so I feel compelled to challenge some of Roger Ream’s assertions in a piece last week in The American Conservative. Mr. Ream describes a fantastic itinerary, one I’m sure we’d both recommend. Alas, too many visitors turn to establishment politico-journalistic narratives to make sense of what they experienced, and his analysis is guilty of this. It is a sort of “cubicle-ization” of regional knowledge consumption, and it plagues modern anglophone discourse. Mr. Ream laments the region’s perceived political and economic maladies. He asserts that “‘democratic backsliding’ is actually most stark in Central and Eastern Europe” and cites a report from the Swedish V-Dem Institute arguing that Hungary and Serbia are “‘electoral autocracies’—places where elections are neither fair nor free.”  Neither the rhetoric nor the claims are novel. In an Atlantic piece before last year’s Polish parliamentary elections, the author Anne Applebaum (wife of then-opposition politician and current Minister of Foreign Affairs Radosław Sikorski) warned the contest would be “neither free nor fair.” After her side prevailed—and it wasn’t particularly close—Applebaum didn’t have to defend her status as an opinion-shaper on the region. Likewise, in his recent book Goodbye, Eastern Europe, the author Jacob Mikanowski quips, “In several countries (Hungary, Belarus, Serbia), the state has effectively been captured by a single ruler or political party.” Categorizing the Carpathian neighbors—Mr. Ream’s chosen victims too—with Belarus is patently absurd, but such sentiments have the blessing of much of academia and corporate journalism.  And the V-Dem Institute that compiled Mr. Ream’s cited research? Its partners and financial sponsors include the European Commission, the World Bank, USAID, Facebook, and George Soros’s Open Society Foundation—a who’s who of transnational power brokers. Ostensibly objective institutions like V-Dem enjoy outsize influence in crafting regional opinions, but their output deserves the reception of, say, China Media Group’s reporting on the Middle Kingdom. It’s a daunting struggle for any country that challenges transnational dogmas. The only real antidote is to spend time there—really, truly spend time there and absorb the realities of local life. The reality in Serbia is a big-tent ruling party that mostly defies ideological classification, something many Americans would find enviable at the moment—not to mention, very democratic. Its track record includes standard neoliberal economic reforms and a singular focus on EU accession (careful what you wish for, Serbs), pretty vanilla stuff among regional neighbors 20 years ago; its great sin is keeping open channels to China and Russia. The latter holds true too in Hungary, where opposition activism isn’t just possible, but profitable. Earlier this year, the U.S. embassy announced funding for a number of left-wing opposition organizations. The Hungarian journalism expert Boris Kálnoky presents a media landscape that arguably leans pro-opposition, an assessment that should feel about right to a visitor scanning news racks or urban campaign signs. In my experience, Hungarians have grievances with over a decade of single-party rule, but they ultimately like the Fidesz party platform and distrust the chaotic and foreign-influenced opposition. Some traumatic, generation-defining political errors under the Socialists still matter. It’s a landscape far more reminiscent of Merkel-era Germany than anything that has happened in Belarus.  Incidentally, establishment political parties have ever more boldly dabbled in Minsk-style authoritarian tactics. The year-old Polish ruling coalition has shut down media, arrested political opponents, roughed up protesters, and disregarded presidential powers and inconvenient court rulings. In Slovakia, EU bullying flipped on almost immediately after a sovereigntist government replaced an unpopular technocratic one; Prime Minister Robert Fico even performed an early-summer trial run on surviving an assassination attempt for a friendly figure across the Atlantic. In these cases, air cover from media, political institutions, and NGOs is a matter of course.  Nor are these trends limited to Central and Eastern Europe. President Emmanuel Macron enlisted a rising left-wing coalition to stymie France’s most popular political party, then stifled his erstwhile allies’ attempts to form a government. Some analysts see no long-term resolution of the country’s most acute constitutional crisis in decades. In Austria, the nationalist, anti-migration FPÖ won last week’s elections, but establishment parties are likely to block it from government. In Germany, the establishment has formally initiated proceedings to ban the surging AfD (a topic I covered in TAC last year).  These political machinations are distinct from the economic headwinds Mr. Ream describes in his piece, but they are, of course, connected. Political dogmatism on environmental and energy issues has rekindled memories of recession and rationing. Mr. Ream is correct that Europe is uncompetitive, and that these burdens are largely self-inflicted, but he regrettably attributes these social ills to the wrong sources. The post An Antidote to Europe’s Summertime Blues appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Kerry’s Constitutional Confusion The First Amendment is not a “major block” to the functioning of a democracy. Credit: image via Shutterstock John Kerry, the former U.S. Naval officer, senator, secretary of state, and candidate for the presidency, a man who has taken the oath of allegiance to the Constitution many times now, says that “our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer [disinformation] out of existence.” So, finally, a major Democrat says the quiet part out loud. Our freedom of speech has made it too easy for disinformation to flourish in the media biome and it is becoming impossible to “govern” the masses, Kerry explained at a World Economic Forum meeting:  The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing. It is part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It’s really hard to govern today. You can’t—the referees we used to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have kind of been eviscerated, to a certain degree. And people go and self select where they go for their news, for their information. And then you get into a vicious cycle…. You know there’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc. But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence. Kerry articulated what many Dems have only hinted at: abolishing the broad protections of the First Amendment to “clean up” disinformation and create a “better” democracy. Jefferson saw the First Amendment creating an informed populace necessary for a democracy to flourish. Now, according to Kerry, that populace can no longer be trusted to read and must have “referees” to help keep them in line. In other words, government and private industry partnerships to police social media and other forms of information. We’ve seen a test case of Kerry’s dream in the wild with pre-Musk Twitter. As Twitter became a more powerful player in social media as a source of news for people in general, the company and the government worked together (see the Twitter Files; the same applies to Facebook and other social media giants) to censor information deemed detrimental to a gullible public. They deleted individual “bad” tweets, promoted “good” ones, and cleansed the environment of dissenting voices by suspending offending accounts. This of course was all done on the edges of the First Amendment; Twitter is a private entity, and therefore capable of regulating speech internally, but was doing so on behalf of the government, which acted like a dictator’s censor (until they got caught). The primary focus of all that censorship in contravention of the First Amendment was the Covid pandemic, when dissenting voices were stifled and what we now know to be government lies about masks and social distancing were promoted. Similar processes kept Americans from initially reading the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Russian Hoax materials claiming Donald Trump was a sleeper agent. While all censorship is bad, censorship that directly deprives a democracy of information is wicked. John Kerry thus already has a pretty good idea what a United States without the First Amendment might look like. What Kerry and his ilk want is already a part of life in Great Britain: prior restraint of speech. The UK has no First Amendment and, in fact, no written constitution at all. In the U.S., the highest law of the land is the Constitution, of which the First Amendment is part. Any law or regulation passed by Congress must also pass the constitutional test. But in Britain, Parliament is supreme and any act passed there is interpreted and enforced directly by the courts. So while Kerry cannot vote the First Amendment out of existence, the British Parliament can create any number of acts that shape or limit speech. Prior restraint is one of these restrictions, which enables the British government to preemptively halt the publication of material. In the case of governmental information the only criteria is when it is “in the national interest” to do so (this also gets into the fascinating tangle between the U.S. Espionage Act and the UK Official Secrets Act, a complexity beyond this article). The milestone year for all this was 1971, when the late Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Reporters at the Times feared jail, as leaked classified materials had never been published in the press before. A court ordered the Times to cease publication after initial excerpts were printed, the first time an American federal judge applied prior restraint to a newspaper. The Supreme Court case New York Times Company v. United States vindicated the First Amendment, and the Times won the Pulitzer Prize. Ever since, the American press mostly prints what it finds, secret or not. The law professor Steve Vladeck notes,  Although the First Amendment separately protects the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press, the Supreme Court has long refused to give any separate substantive content to the Press Clause above and apart from the Speech Clause. The Supreme Court has never suggested that the First Amendment might protect a right to disclose national security information. Yes, the Pentagon Papers case rejected a government effort to enjoin publication, but several of the Justices in their separate opinions specifically suggested that the government could prosecute the New York Times and the Washington Post after publication, under the Espionage Act. In Britain, an entity could theoretically be punished with prior restraint or if what they ultimately print is libelous. (Libel laws also differ greatly between the U.S. and the UK.) In the United States, however, even speech which may ultimately be punished in some way (for example, libelous speech) may not normally be subject to prior restraint. We have seen what a world without the First Amendment looks like, and it is not good. We are approaching a time when the freedom to speak may no longer exist independent of the content of speech. What you’re allowed to say could depend on the government’s opinion. We have had a peek at what government can do: blocking important debate on issues that affect the health of every American, or which could sway an election in the case of Russiagate or the Hunter Biden laptop. There is a reason the Founders placed so much emphasis on free speech. Kerry, who now reimagines free speech as a liability to democracy, has clearly forgotten those lessons. The post Kerry’s Constitutional Confusion appeared first on The American Conservative.

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