Quotulatiousness

November 29, 2023

Grover Cleveland – more “republican” than any Republican alive today

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Not having studied American history in school, I don’t know a lot about most American presidents, especially those of the 19th century whose names aren’t Jefferson, Jackson, or Lincoln. One of the presidents I only knew about because his name turned up in a lot of original Trivial Pursuit questions was Grover Cleveland, the only man (so far) who has ever been elected to non-consecutive terms:

Grover Cleveland (1837-1908), President of the United States, 1885-89 and 1893-97.
Photo from the National Archives and Records Administration (NAID 518139) via Wikimedia Commons.

Cleveland won the White House in 1884 on a platform of restraining federal spending and corruption. Running for re-election in 1888, he won the popular vote but lost to Republican Benjamin Harrison in the Electoral College. A major reason he came out of retirement to run again in 1892 was the reckless spending of the Harrison administration. He beat Harrison that year and became the only man ever elected to non-consecutive terms (1885-89 and 1893-97).

I call to the reader’s attention an article ex-President Cleveland wrote three years after the end of his second term, in June 1901. Titled “The Waste of Public Money”, it was one of half a dozen he penned for The Saturday Evening Post. In this one, he referred to “a malign condition which threatens us,” an “evil” that he saw as “calamitous and destructive to our national character and integrity”.

In 1901, the federal government spent half a billion dollars over the whole year, roughly equivalent in real terms to around $12 billion today. Washington spends that much now in about half a day. Lest you think the feds were misers in 1901, ponder what Cleveland had to say in his article that year:

    Probably no one will have the hardihood to deny that the cost of our Government is excessive and wasteful, and that for this condition the heedless neglect and indifference of our people are in some degree responsible … If the aggregate mass of our people are at all blameworthy on account of the present advanced stage of public prodigality, it is largely because they overlooked and tolerated its small beginnings, when at all times they should have been vigilant and uncompromising. A self-ruling people … should constantly remember that nothing multiplies itself more abundantly than national extravagance, and that neither an individual nor a popular government can easily correct or check habits of waste.

The former president did not for a moment believe that only the politicians were to blame for excessive spending. He boldly asserted that many Americans embraced it. They were effectively bought and paid for, guilty of “accepting the bribes of selfish and personal advantage which public waste and extravagance offer”.

Cleveland was often warned by advisers to moderate his stances to avoid controversy. Biographer H. Paul Jeffers quotes him as responding once to such advice by asking, “What is the use of being elected or re-elected unless you stand for something?” When he vetoed a bill to relieve drought-stricken farmers with federal money, he made it plain that “though the people support the government, the government should not support the people”. He saw his job as upholding the Constitution and keeping the federal government in its proper place, not weakening “the bonds of common brotherhood” by robbing Peter to pay Paul.

This was a man who said what he meant and meant what he said, come Hell or high water. He spoke with a clarity of principle that makes a nation great, and the absence of which makes a great nation fail. He understood that no society in history that allowed itself to be bribed by its politicians ever survived such legal larceny.

In the final paragraphs of his June 1901 Saturday Evening Post article, Cleveland admonished his fellow Americans. With these words, he urged them to muster the character to resist being bribed with their own money:

    The lessons of extravagance and paternalism must be unlearned; economy and frugality must be reinstated; and the people must exact from their representatives a watchful care for the general welfare and a stern resistance to the demands of selfish interests, if our Government is to be an enduring and beneficent protection to a patriotic and virtuous people.

Many Americans today would undoubtedly dismiss Cleveland’s warnings as “quaint” and “old-fashioned”. They want the government to give them stuff and they don’t think much about who will pay for it. They think even less about how it corrupts the national character.

November 23, 2023

Canada’s bold move in an increasingly unsettled world is to … cut the military budget

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The rest of Canada’s friends and allies are almost all beefing up their military spending because the world situation has become objectively more dangerous, but Justin Trudeau has never been one to follow the trend, especially when it comes to icky military stuff. Tristin Hopper has the details:

Just as the Liberal government’s fiscal update confirms that they will be staying the course on high spending backed by high deficits, they’re making a notable exception when it comes to the perennially underfunded Canadian Armed Forces.

According to the latest budgetary projections, Canadian military spending is set to fall in absolute terms for at least the rest of Trudeau’s third term – the only G7 country to do so.

For the current fiscal year, Canada is set to spend $26.93 billion on its military. For the 2024/2025 fiscal year, that will drop to $25.73 billion, and then drop again to C$25.33 billion by 2026.

These cuts are all in spite of increasingly desperate calls by the minister of defence and the military’s own internal reports that the Canadian Armed Forces may soon struggle to fulfill even basic tasks. It also stands in sharp contrast to virtually all of Canada’s peer countries, who are roundly beefing up their defence spending in response to an increasingly volatile global environment.

While Bill Blair’s turn as Defence Minister has mostly involved shepherding nearly $1 billion in cuts, at the Halifax International Security Forum over the weekend he struck a very different tone of saying that Canada’s “aspirations” required “more resources”.

“We need to spend more on munitions. We need to spend more on military platforms, planes, submarines and ships. We need to spend more on the equipment, the resources and the training that the Canadian Armed Forces needs,” he said in comments published by the CBC.

Click image to download the PDF version

And Blair’s assessment was comparatively rosy when compared to the Department of National Defence’s annual departmental results report.

The 152-page document, which dropped earlier this month, painted a picture of a Canadian military that is hemorrhaging personnel and capability with no end in sight.

Among the highlights is a table indicating the “percentage of operations that are capable of being conducted concurrently”. Last year it was 100 per cent, but right now it’s plunged to a meagre 40 per cent.

“The CAF is currently unable to conduct multiple operations concurrently,” reads a footnote, adding that military readiness has been hit hard by “decreasing number of personnel and issues with equipment and vehicles”.

Recruiting is suffering an “applicant crisis”. There’s a shortage of “qualified aircraft technicians”. The military’s bases are in serious deterioration because they can’t afford “maintenance and repair”. Only about 40 per cent of the RCAF is operational due to “ongoing personnel shortages” and “inadequate maintenance infrastructure”.

It wasn’t too long ago that another defence minister, Anita Anand, was openly musing about raising Canada’s defence budget to the point where it would finally start meeting NATO’s minimum threshold for military spending.

November 1, 2023

Canada’s (deliberate lack of) strategy

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Vincent Rigby discusses Canada’s notable lack of any kind of strategy to cope with an international situation that seems to be changing (or deteriorating, take your pick) at a rapid pace:

On the foreign policy front, the Canadian government unveiled its long-awaited Indo-Pacific Strategy almost a year ago. It was a welcome development for Canada’s role in a region at the epicentre of global events. But it was remarkably light on security and is now under severe stress given the serious diplomatic falling-out with India. But more importantly, where is Canada’s broader foreign policy? What will we do in other parts of a turbulent world to protect our security and values? How will we balance regional priorities? Canada has not produced a comprehensive foreign policy statement in 18 years.

On the defence front, Canada unveiled a new policy, Strong, Secure and Engaged, in 2017. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the government committed in April 2022 to produce an update to that policy in the following months. A year and a half later, Canadians are still waiting. In the meantime, officials have spoken publicly of possible cuts to the defence budget of $900 million a year over four years as part of broader government spending reductions. A severely stretched military may soon be stretched even further.

On the home front, Canada continues to lurch from crisis to crisis — the Freedom Convoy with its populist underpinnings, Chinese interference in federal elections, possible Indian complicity in the murder of a Canadian citizen, and now tension at home over the fighting in the Middle East. More than ever, Canada’s large diaspora communities feature prominently in security and foreign policy discussions. While Canadians await the findings of yet another public inquiry into the China affair, a broader strategy to confront national security threats is nowhere to be seen. Canada has not produced a national security policy in 19 years.

To be fair, the government has not sat idle during recent global developments. For example, it has ramped up its support to Ukraine (notwithstanding a slow start and the recent embarrassment in the House of Commons), taken measures to improve economic security, and established a National Security Council. But these efforts are all too often modest, piecemeal and reactive.

A Canadian senator famously quipped nearly a century ago that Canada was “a fireproof house far from inflammable materials”. It was barely true in the 1920s, and it is even less so today. But Canadians, despite all recent evidence to the contrary, apparently still believe this to be the case. They assume that the threats are not aimed at Canada, and that the U.S. would come to their rescue regardless. On both counts, such assumptions are dangerous, especially if Donald Trump were to return as president. The government, echoing the indifference of most Canadians, chooses to focus on domestic priorities, from increasing affordable housing to improving health care to fighting inflation. All are undeniably important. But as every prime minister declares, the government ultimately has no greater responsibility than the security of its citizens.

Canada needs an integrated, coherent strategy (or strategies), supported by appropriate resources and capabilities, to respond effectively both at home and overseas to this new world order. It will require trade-offs, but the case needs to be made to Canadians that the generation-long, post-Cold War peace dividend is no longer on offer. Our allies get that — so too must Canada. In the absence of such strategy, the security of Canadians will deteriorate further, and relationships with key NATO and Five-Eyes allies, already in peril, will suffer even more. If not careful, Canada may find itself more alone in the world than ever.

October 12, 2023

Canada, “a country with short arms and long pockets”

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the National Post, John Ivison recounts Canada’s continuing inability to live up to expectations internationally, especially militarily:

US President Joe Biden talks to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, March 2023.

On the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mark Norman, the former vice-chief of defence, made a prediction that sounded overblown at the time.

“I really think the Americans are going to start ignoring us because they don’t think we are credible or reliable. They are not even putting pressure on us anymore,” he said in a January 2022 National Post interview, based on his conversations with contacts in Washington.

It turns out he was absolutely right.

Since then, leaked Pentagon documents have confirmed that sense, indicating that the U.S. believes “widespread defence shortfalls have hindered Canada’s capabilities, while straining partner relationships and alliance contributions”.

Canada left little room for doubt about its diminished capabilities when it took a pass on NATO’s largest-ever air exercise last summer, because its jets and pilots were involved in “modernization activities”. That absence left the impression that this country might not be able to show up in certain circumstances.

Even before the unfolding tragedy in the Middle East, America was letting it be known that it felt overstretched and needed regional allies to share the burden.

When President Joe Biden visited Ottawa in March, he asked Justin Trudeau to lead a mission to Haiti, which had descended into mob rule. Since the Liberals were elected on a peacekeeping ticket in 2015, it was a logical request. However, Trudeau demurred, presumably on the grounds that Canada’s security forces were stretched too thin by operations in Latvia and fighting wildfires at home. The upshot is that Kenya is set to send 1,000 security officers to the beleaguered island nation.

The recent news that Canada now plans to trim its defence budget by nearly $1 billion — a total of $17 billion over 20 years, if savings are recurring — has reinforced the image of a country with short arms and long pockets.

Against that background, it was no surprise that on Monday Biden hosted a call with the leaders of France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. to discuss the crisis in the Middle East — and didn’t include Canada.

A statement by the G7 minus Canada and Japan (which has a negligible Jewish population) was issued saying that the five countries would ensure Israel is able to defend itself.

Over at The Line, Matt Gurney discovered that the federal government was actively trying to hide the fact that Canadians in Israel were not able to access Canadian embassy services by pretending that the word “operational” meant “open and functional”:

On Sunday evening (hours after we published our dispatch), I received a reply from GAC. This was the reply:

    Since the beginning of this crisis, Canadian officials have been working around the clock to support Canadians. The missions in Tel Aviv and Ramallah remained operational through the weekend and will continue to be. Our missions will open on Monday October 9th, unless security conditions do not allow for it. We will be assessing the security situation daily, in coordination with our allies.

Okay! That seemed fair. But not having been born yesterday, and being in a profession where people try to spin me all the time, I noticed something immediately. The distinction GAC was drawing between “operational” and “open” stood out to me. I replied at once seeking clarification, and heard nothing back. Not even an acknowledgement.

This word choice mattered. The government publicly used the “operational” messaging. Members of the government repeated it. This was what they were telling the Canadian people: all is well, ignore those nasty media people and members of the opposition. Of course the embassies were “operational”!

See that tweet? The one pasted above? I checked out who was retweeting it. Lots of people did! And that included a bunch of Liberal MPs, a bunch of Canadian diplomats, members of the media, and what I’ll politely refer to as a group of “usual suspects” I recognize from online as being proxies for the Liberal government’s messaging (or at least really devoted True Believer Liberal partisans).

On Monday morning, having heard nothing back about what “operational” meant as opposed to “open”, I asked for a specific clarification in the terminology. What was “operational” vs. “open”? I also asked for specifics on what services were available locally from Canadian diplomatic missions in Israel over the weekend in real time, and how that would change when the embassy “opened” on Monday. I asked about the staffing level at the embassy on the weekend, and how that would compare to a normal workday, and also to a normal weekend.

Rather than answer a simple question, our government would much rather obfuscate and prevaricate as a matter of policy. That, by itself, tells you everything you need to know about both our political leaders and the civil service organizations they control.

September 30, 2023

With the international situation so stable and peaceful, Canada intends to cut military spending by $1 billion or so

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I didn’t think Justin Trudeau could possibly come up with another stunt to outrage our allies, but I stand corrected:

Canada’s top general revealed on Thursday that the armed forces is facing nearly $1 billion in cuts by the Liberal government, saying that military leaders are struggling to understand the change as the forces deal with more pressures in an unstable world.

Speaking to MPs Thursday during a meeting of the defence committee, Chief of Defence Staff Wayne Eyre was asked about proposals to cut $15 billion across the government, which the Liberals promised to do in the spring budget.

Eyre said the Defence Department’s piece of that cut will hurt.

“There’s no way that you can take almost $1 billion out of the defence budget and not have an impact, so this is something that we’re wrestling with now,” he told MPs.

Eyre said he had been discussing the cuts with military leaders and they’re struggling to understand the change.

“Our people see the degrading declining security situation around the world and so trying to explain this to them is very difficult,” he said.

Conservative Defence critic MP James Bezan said he hopes the military doesn’t weaken its readiness with these cuts.

“I sure hope we’re not going to hear stories that we can’t afford to put the fuel in the tanks and train guys in armour, we’re not going to put diesel in the ships and not have the Navy go out there and training, we can’t afford to do maintenance on our tanks,” he said. “We have to make sure we continue to move forward in training and operations.”

Deputy Minister of Defence Bill Matthews said the department is looking at ways to ensure the cuts don’t hurt the ability of the military to fight.

Not to be too cynical, but the Canadian Armed Forces are already well below the funding level we promised our allies we’d achieve, and it impacts pretty much everything the CAF needs to do. It’s quite possible that a budget cut of that size will end meaningful participation in NATO land operations in Estonia, Latvia, Poland, and other front-line allied nations.

September 18, 2023

Learning lessons from the plight of the British army in 1940

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Military, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Lessons from history are only occasionally learned easily … they’re more likely brought to our attention by the Gods of the Copybook Headings after we’ve suffered some awful setback. As the latin tag would have it, Si vis pacem, para bellum: if you want peace, be prepared for war. Most western democracies refuse to believe this is true, and one of the easiest things for peacetime democratic governments to do is to short-fund the military and use the “savings” for more politically popular things that will help them get re-elected. The Canadian government has been a shining example of this since the late 1960s, with no end in sight.

A recent book on the British army, tracing its decline from the end of the First World War to the defeat in the Battle of France in 1940 shows just how quickly a world-beating army can be reduced to second-best in its next conflict. Richard Dannatt & Robert Lyman, the authors of Victory: the British Army 1918-1940 to Defeat, had an article in the Sunday Mail, illustrating the parallels between the army in their book and the British army today:

WHEN IT comes to national defence, never take your eye off the ball. That is a lesson we can and must learn from history. Because the disturbing fact is that this country did just that in the 1920s and 1930s in the aftermath of the First World War and the result very nearly cost us our freedom as Hitler’s forces threatened our shores.

Britain won the war in 1918 but then shamefully lost the peace as our army was allowed to atrophy.

It is often forgotten how professional the British Army had become by 1918, to pull off a stunning battlefield victory over the Germans in northern France in the final Hundred Days of the war.

It had been a long time coming after years of static trench warfare and no decisive breakthrough, just massive loss of life in the blood baths at Ypres, Verdun, the Somme and Passchendaele.

But finally, at the Battle of Amiens, British commanders — often wrongly caricatured as dunderheads and “donkeys” leading lions – demonstrated that they were able to understand and master the intricacies of the modern battlefield. With their sophisticated co-ordination of all elements of combat power — infantry, artillery, air power, armour — the stalemate was broken.

Modern war-fighting skills, technology and methods — learned at great cost in lives over the previous three-and-a-half years — secured victory for the British Army and its allies in 1918 as the Germans admitted defeat and sued for peace.

And yet little more than 20 years later, the boot was on the other foot as the next generation of German soldiers poured into France and defeated the Allies in a lightning campaign that ended with British troops fleeing from the beaches of Dunkirk.

How had victory in 1918 turned so quickly to defeat and humiliation in 1940?

The answer is that it had become the deliberate policy of successive British governments to downgrade the Army — a lesson we must learn today, with a new Defence Secretary who knows little about the brief.

Spending on defence was dramatically slashed amid an ill-thought-through assumption that there would not be another major war within ten years and so.

So far as the then government was concerned, the “war to end all wars” (as the Great War was dubbed) had done its job. There was no need to consider or plan for a future one, whether in policy, financial or practical terms. Everything was an issue of money as budgets were decided by Treasury civil servants with no military advice.

The principal reason why the Army was so unprepared for war in 1939 was that the British government, through faulty defence planning and financing in the previous two decades, made it so.

June 22, 2023

CDR Salamander’s proposal to “encourage” NATO countries to meet or exceed their agreed defence targets

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Canada has been a notorious defence freeloader since the first Trudeau government took office in 1968. Every Canadian government since then — until the current government started telling our allies we had no intention of meeting our treaty commitments — has made more-or-less sincere noises about getting back to the 2% of GDP minimum defence budget and none have done much to make it happen (we’re around 1.39% at the moment). Several years ago, CDR Salamander proposed a new way to allocate NATO leadership roles according to how close to the minimum each member country has managed to get, and it’s surprising that something of the sort hasn’t already been implemented:

It should bring to the front that NATO can no longer allow unserious nations to play like they are anything but security free-riders. They need to contribute their fair share or pay some consequence. Alliances have benefits and responsibilities. You should not have one without the other.

While percentage of GDP is an imperfect measure of contribution, it is better than all the other ones. It is as simple benchmark of national effort.

As these are the best numbers we have, let’s look at 2021 and then forward.

It is amazing that after all Russia has shown Western Europe — both of its nature and the nature of modern warfare — that so many of our NATO allies continue to slow walk defense spending, doing the very minimum to be a full and fair partner in the alliance.

Russian victory — however they define it — or Russian defeat — however Ukraine defines it – will not change the geography or nature of Russia. She is not going anywhere.

[…]

There is so much deferred spending from our free-riding European allies.

    Between 1999 and 2021, EU combined defence spending increased by 20%, according to reports by the European Defence Agency. That compares with a 66% increase by the US, and 292% by Russia and 592% by China, over the same period.

“Out years” are where dragons live, so anyone not on guide-slope to 2%+ by the end of 2023 — when one way or another the Russo-Ukrainian War should be over — will find someway to not get there in a wave of excuses and bluffing.

We should call their bluff.

As such, and this is generous, we need to finally pursue PLAN SALAMANDER for NATO “Flags-to-Post” that I first proposed almost six years ago.

    In NATO, General and Flag Officer billets are distributed amongst nations in a rather complicated way, but this formula is controlled by NATO – and as such – can be changed.

    Entering argument: take the present formula for “fair distribution” and multiply by .75 any nation that spends 1.5% to 1.99% GDP on defense. Multiply by .5 any nation that spends between 1.25% to 1.499%. Multiply by .25 1.0% to 1.240%. If you fall below 1%, you get nothing and your OF5 (Col./Capt) billets are halved.

    1.25x for 2.01%-2.25%. 1.5X for 2.26%-2.75%; 1.75x for 2.76% -3.0%. 2x for +3.01%.

The math gets funky when a lot of people get over 2%, but we can refine it later. Doesn’t cost a penny and will unquestionably get the attention of those nations. Trust me on this. By January 1st, 2024 no more excuses. A small and symbolic punishment, but a good start that may be all that is needed. This is not the second half of the 20th Century any more.

March 24, 2023

Only a paper dragon?

Filed under: China, Government, India, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In UnHerd, Edward Luttwak suggests that China’s military may be much more apparent than real:

The day after Li Keqiang, China’s departing Prime Minister and the last of Beijing’s moderates, called for more market liberalisation to reach this year’s 5% growth target, Xi Jinping responded by announcing a muscle-flexing 7.2% increase in China’s defence spending. That is certainly consistent with Xi’s truculent stance (he replied to Nancy Pelosi’s recent Taiwan visit with a series of ballistic missile launches), and with his official promise to the Communist Party that China will become the world’s dominant power by 2049. But what do those percentages actually mean?

The declared total of China’s newly increased defence budget at 1.56 trillion yuan amounts to $230 billion, according to the current exchange rate. If that were the case, it would mean that China is falling further behind the United States, whose own fiscal 2023 defence spending is increasing to $797 billion (and actually more, since that figure does not include its funding for military construction or the added help to Ukraine).

China’s own figure is also generally assumed by experts to be greatly understated — not by fiddling the numbers one by one, but rather by wholesale exclusions, such as the attribution of research-and-development spending to civilian budgets. Even if a commando team of elite forensic accountants were sent into action to uncover China’s actual defence spending, with another team dispatched to determine what’s missing from the US budget, we would still only have a very loose indication of how much actual military strength China and the United States hope to add.

But one thing can be said with absolute certainty: each side is adding less than the rising numbers imply.
In China’s case, a manpower shortage undercuts military spending in the PLA’s ground forces and naval forces, and soon it will affect manned air units as well. The PLA ground forces now stand at some 975,000, a very small number for a country that has 13,743 miles of borders with 14 countries — including extreme high-mountain borders where internal combustion engines lose power, jungle-covered borders where remote observation is spoiled by foliage, Russian-river borders with endemic smuggling, and the border with India’s Ladakh where an accumulation of unresolved Chinese intrusions have forced each side to deploy substantial ground forces, with at least 80,000 on the Chinese side.

Except for Ladakh, which now resembles a war-front, borders are not supposed to be guarded by army troops but by border police. And China did in fact have a substantial dedicated border force, but it was abolished for the same reason that the PLA ground army is so small: a crippling shortage of physically fit Chinese men willing to serve in these regions. Cities and towns, by contrast, do not seem afflicted by such severe manpower shortages, leading to the weird phenomenon on Nepal’s main border crossing to Tibet where, according to an acquaintance, a group of freezing Cantonese city policemen were checking travellers and “guarding the border”. (They said they had been “volunteered” for two months.)

September 22, 2022

Waking – or shaking – NATO’s freeloaders (like Canada)

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Europe, France, Germany, Italy, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

CDR Salamander has a proposal to encourage cheapskate freeloaders like Justin Trudeau’s Canada (although it didn’t start with him … Canada has been freeloading militarily since the early 1970s) to take on more like a fair share of NATO’s needs:

So, what did you wake up to?

    President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday ordered Russia’s first mobilisation since World War Two and backed a plan to annex swathes of Ukraine, warning the West he was not bluffing when he said he’d be ready to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia.

    In the biggest escalation of the Ukraine war since Moscow’s Feb. 24 invasion, Putin explicitly raised the spectre of a nuclear conflict, approved a plan to annex a chunk of Ukraine the size of Hungary, and called up 300,000 reservists.

This should not be a shock to anyone. If it is, perhaps you should consider investing your time in cat-blogging.

It should bring to the front that NATO can no longer allow unserious nations to play like they are anything but security free-riders. They need to contribute their fair share or pay some consequence. Alliances have benefits and responsibilities. You should not have one without the other.

While percentage of GDP is an imperfect measure of contribution, it is better than all the other ones. It is as simple benchmark of national effort.

As these are the best numbers we have, let’s look at 2021 and then forward.

It is amazing that after all Russia has shown Western Europe — both of its nature and the nature of modern warfare — that so many of our NATO allies continue to slow walk defense spending, doing the very minimum to be a full and fair partner in the alliance.

Russian victory — however they define it — or Russian defeat — however Ukraine defines it — will not change the geography or nature of Russia. She is not going anywhere.

So, what’s to be done to encourage nations like Canada to put up or shut up? This might help:

“Out years” are where dragons live, so anyone not on guide-slope to 2%+ by the end of 2023 – when one way or another the Russo-Ukrainian War should be over – will find someway to not get there in a wave of excuses and bluffing.

We should call their bluff.

As such, and this is generous, we need to finally pursue PLAN SALAMANDER for NATO “Flags-to-Post” that I first proposed almost six years ago.

    In NATO, General and Flag Officer billets are distributed amongst nations in a rather complicated way, but this formula is controlled by NATO – and as such – can be changed.

    Entering argument: take the present formula for “fair distribution” and multiply by .75 any nation that spends 1.5% to 1.99% GDP on defense. Multiply by .5 any nation that spends between 1.25% to 1.499%. Multiply by .25 1.0% to 1.240%. If you fall below 1%, you get nothing and your OF5 (Col./Capt) billets are halved.

    1.25x for 2.01%-2.25%. 1.5X for 2.26%-2.75%; 1.75x for 2.76% -3.0%. 2x for +3.01%.

The math gets funky when a lot of people get over 2%, but we can refine it later. Doesn’t cost a penny and will unquestionably get the attention of those nations. Trust me on this. By January 1st, 2024 no more excuses. A small and symbolic punishment, but a good start that may be all that is needed. This is not the second half of the 20th Century any more.

July 28, 2022

Is the US Navy in crisis?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, China, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander outlines why he is very concerned about the current state of the United States Navy:

US Navy ships from the John C. Stennis and Nimitz Carrier Strike Groups with ships from the Bonhomme Richard Expeditionary Strike Group in the Gulf of Oman, 22 May 2007.
US Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Denny Cantrell via Wikimedia Commons.

If you believe the threat from China is overblown, our Navy is well led, and that our fleet is big enough, then this is not the post for you. If you are concerned for all of it, grab a fresh drink and dive right in.

We are facing of something our nation has not had to seriously consider in well over three decades; we do not have free and unfettered access to the sea.

Even when Soviet submarines roamed the world’s oceans at will – though closely watched – and the Red Banner Fleet could send battle groups on cruises through the Gulf of Mexico, we had fair confidence in one thing – the Pacific was an American lake.

No more.

The leaders of the USN seem to have very different notions about what the Navy needs:

f you feel the Navy needs a larger share of the budget to meet the challenge of China, then you need to advocate for it. You need to fight for it … and when I say “you” I mean “we” and the most important and powerful parts of that “we” are our institutions; our maritime power institutions dedicated to seeing the USA remain the premier seapower.

Let’s start with the most obvious. Our uniformed Navy is itself an institution. It reports to its civilian leadership in the Executive Branch with oversight from the Legislative Branch. There are your big pixel maritime governmental institutions; the uniformed and civilian leaders in the Department of the Navy.

As reviewed yesterday, the CNO is engaged in a rather low-energy talking point about 500-ships, but in 2022 that is not even remotely achievable. He knows it, you know it, Congress knows it as well. A number is not an argument, and yet he is investing personal and institutional capital on this line that is almost immediately ignored if it is heard at all. Why?

In the last year one of his highest profile public appearances was when he shoveled heaping piles of personal and institutional capital in a fight defending a red in tooth and claw racial essentialist Ibram X. Kendi against who would normally be the US Navy’s natural allies in Congress. Ultimately he lost that battle and removed Kendi’s racist book and others from his reading list, but in the face of everything else going on in the maritime world, why?

What about the Vice CNO, Admiral William K. Lescher, USN? Maybe he could throw some sharp elbows for the maritime cause? Sadly, not. Just look at his exchange with Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) back in March. He seems to be the “Vice Chief of Joint Force Operations” more than anything else. He is focused on something, but advocating for sea power is not it.

With the night orders from the CNO and VCNO as they are, if you expect any significant advocacy from the uniformed Navy leadership who report to them for — checks notes — the Navy, you are going to have to wait for a long time, time we don’t have. It isn’t going to happen.

[…]

Take a moment and ponder – when was the last time you heard the SECNAV or Under out front on The Hill or to the greater public about our maritime requirements? Yes, I fully understand what goes on behind closed doors, but that slow roll in an ever-slower bureaucracy infested with scoliotic nomenklatura is well past being of use. The American people must be provided the information and motivation to understand how their entire standard of living – and to a great extent their freedoms – is guaranteed by our mastery of the seas. Is even a rudimentary effort being made in this regard?

Just look at the USN’s YouTube feed – a primary communication device for the American people. What has the SECNAV talked about there this year? LGBTQ+ Pride Month, Juneteenth, Army birthday, Asian-Pacific Islander Month, Mental Health Awareness Month, Women’s History Month, carrier air birthday, and Black History Month.

There you go. There’s your communication. Dig harder if you want … but if you read CDRSalamander and you are not readily aware, then imagine the general population’s situational awareness of the dragon just over the horizon.

July 27, 2022

Baghdad Biden speaks

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray recounts the story of a local government attempting and — for a while — succeeding with the Baghdad Bob blanket denial strategy:

In the Deep Blue suburban town where I live, our city government has been stumbling through a series of crises. For a couple of years, employees fled from City Hall like the building was on fire, and nowhere was the crisis more acute than in the finance department — where we had five directors in a little over two years, and lost most of the other staff, including one who sued the city over her departure. There was a year when we couldn’t pass a budget, because the budget proposal was such a shambles, and a discussion at a meeting of an advisory commission in which a commissioner asked one of the many finance directors if the numbers in the city’s bank accounts matched the numbers in the city ledger. (Try to guess the answer.)

Recently, an ad hoc committee of local citizens — all finance professionals — wrote a report on the period of crisis, and presented our city council with a recommendation that they hire someone to do a forensic audit of the city’s accounting during those years. The council scheduled the report as a “receive and file” item, placing it on a 28-item agenda as, you’ll never guess, item #28. Then, in a brief discussion that began after midnight, they said that the report was nonsense and hearsay. The end.

So, yes, there was no financial crisis in our city during the years when we had five finance directors, when “permanent” finance directors left after a few months, when we lost most of the finance department staff, when we couldn’t pass a budget, and when we had no idea how much money we were actually supposed to have in the bank. Our city council says so. “These are not the ‘droids you are looking for.”

Meanwhile, we’re not in a recession, or even facing the risk of a recession, because that’s not Joe Biden’s view, and because the technical definition of a recession is very complicated.

Also, the inflation of 2021 was transitory. Zipped right by! Also, Joe Biden has a plan to shut down the virus.

The war in Ukraine is SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP, the economy is SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP, the continuing Covid-19 “emergency” is SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP, and the mRNA injections are REALLY REALLY SHUT UP. Actually, the way experts measure this is really complicated, and technically …

June 27, 2022

It’s not clear where the money will come from to fund the recently announced NORAD upgrades

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Aside from sticking knives in the backs of political critics, Justin Trudeau’s government loves announcing new programs and additional spending more than anything else. The boring, workaday details like actually implementing the newly announced programs … well, that sometimes gets forgotten in the rush to make new announcements. In this case, the recent announcement that Canada will be spending Cdn$4.9 billion to upgrade our contribution to NORAD for continental defence — and to no real surprise for anyone who’s been paying attention — it’s not clear even to the head of the Canadian Armed Forces just where that money is actually supposed to come from:

Canada’s defence chief says he doesn’t yet know where the money is coming from for $4.9 billion in promised upgrades to NORAD radar and surveillance systems.

In an interview with The West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson, Gen. Wayne Eyre was asked about growing questions facing the government to detail their spending plan on NORAD upgrades.

Sources have told Global News the military is uncertain about where the funds are coming from, and that there are meetings happening at the department trying to determine how much of the money is new. Those sources say there are significant concerns that the money may not be new, and may need to be re-capitalized from within the existing defence budget.

“I haven’t completely figured out myself the source of funds for this,” Eyre said.

“So I can’t say definitively where it’s coming from. I will say, though, the announcement was welcome.”

Eyre was also asked whether the military is planning any departmental cuts in order to be able to allocate $4.9 billion to the NORAD upgrades.

“We haven’t looked at cutting. But as always, we have to look at rebalancing,” he said.

“The force that we have today is not the force that we need to support tomorrow. So we need to look at force structure. Do we have it in the right place? Do we need to look at rerolling of units so that they undertake roles that are more relevant for the future security environment? That is all important.”

Global News has asked for clarity on the question to Defence Minister Anita Anand’s office.

No answer has yet been received.

May 11, 2022

City governments that can’t even set a budget want to spend, spend, spend to fix global problems

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s one of my standard quips that the more government tries to do, the less well it does everything, but Chris Bray‘s city government shows that I’m being far too Pollyanna-ish:

We’ve built political systems that are astoundingly disconnected; they go where they go, and you can’t turn them, or even try to communicate with them. I just spent weeks trying to get basic information about the operation of the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County, where I live — a problem I started writing about here. Just as I was getting really frustrated that I couldn’t get anyone in county government to tell me anything about anything, I saw an interview with Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who says that he’s never met our district attorney, and has only managed to speak to him on the phone once. Then a staff member in the office of our county supervisor finally responded to my repeated questions about local criminal justice statistics with a quick message letting me know that, as Supervisor Barger’s criminal justice staff assistant, she doesn’t have local criminal justice statistics. So, no, you’re probably not going to communicate with your government; it doesn’t even communicate with itself. The sheriff has never met the DA. That’s the world we’re living in.

I live in a tiny suburban city, a little over three square miles. As I’ve written before, the city is a relentless shambles, constantly fumbling its simplest tasks while holding city council meetings to offer bold pronouncements on the city’s direct role in managing the climate of the planet. We went the better part of the last fiscal year without a budget, because the fifth finance director in two years screwed up the budget proposal so badly that the council couldn’t vote on the worthless thing.

Cities are supposed to regularly adopt an updated general plan that makes educated guesses about business and residential growth, so they can prepare for change around questions like do we have enough fire stations for the population we expect to have in five years? Our current general plan was adopted in 1998; the city is now in its sixth year of a fumbling effort to write a new plan, with no sign that it’s moving toward success. Meanwhile, our small-town city council is focused on getting electric patrol cars for the police department — to control the climate of the planet — and banning the sale of tobacco products, to take the fight to Big Tobacco. (Three square miles.)

I can’t get my city government to fix a bunch of basic and obvious problems, in a city where I pass members of my city council in the supermarket. I send out email messages to them, but nothing comes back from them in response. They go where they feel like going, endlessly pursuing lawn sign politics in a city government that struggles to complete budgets and basic planning documents; currently they’re signaling that their next interest is in developing a local mandate for residential greywater systems, and they won’t be talked out of it in favor of completing their endlessly incomplete basic tasks.

Now: Put your hands on the levers to stop the madness of the United States of America sending tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine. Right?

April 17, 2022

The end of the (pandemic-induced) book boom

Filed under: Books, Business, Economics, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte metaphorically collects his winnings from predicting nearly a year back that the boom in book sales during 2020/2021 would not last once the pandemic lockdowns began to ease off:

I noted last June in SHuSH 103, “Big Guys Lose Their Minds”, that book sales, especially for the leading firms — Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster — were ramping up during the pandemic, reaching 10% to 20% above 2019 levels. I also noted that the numbers were making some of these publishers giddy.

HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray, for instance, gave an interview in which he proclaimed that humanity had entered a new era of permanently higher book sales and added that he was ratcheting up his spending to meet the increased demand.

“We are being aggressive in terms of buying books. We’ve seen the book pie grow, maybe 15 percent,” says Murray, “and so our response, which is part opportunistic and part defensive, is to be aggressive in buying right now. Because if that pie remains large, we want to make sure that we get a nice share of the larger pie … we want to make sure that we have a lot of new, exciting books in the future that will maintain our revenues at the current levels.” Yikes.

In that June newsletter, I anticipated the world returning to normal and book sales falling back to earth as vaccinations took hold and the coronavirus waned (we also promised to check back in a year — so here we are, a few months early).

It did not feel dangerous, that prediction. While it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between a temporary spike (or drop) in sales due to extraordinary circumstances and the beginning of a long-term trend, it’s always safest to pick extraordinary-and-temporary amid an unprecedented pandemic with people locked up and not behaving normally. Also, my buddy Jack David at ECW Press agreed with me and he’s been doing this forever. And it wasn’t like Brian Murray had any evidence to back his claim that an era of permanently higher book sales had dawned.

[…]

The share prices of big publishing companies don’t tell the same sort of story because they tend not to be pure-play book publishers: Simon & Schuster, for instance, is owned by multimedia giant Viacom; HarperCollins by the omnipresent Rupert Murdoch; Penguin Random House is less than a quarter of Bertelsmann’s business. But first-quarter 2022 revenue figures for those firms are available and they show that the great give-back is underway in the book world, too.

The headline in Publisher’s Weekly reads “The Book Sales Boom is over”. Here’s the US data:

And that’s just the beginning. Sales will continue to slide throughout 2022 and into 2023 as the world normalizes, people concentrate on doing all the things they’ve not been able to do the past two years, run through the extra cash they accumulated in the pandemic, and resume their former library borrowing habits.

What happens at the big publishing companies? If, as Murray’s comments would lead you to suspect, they’ve budgeted and spent for the good times to continue, unhappy times await.

March 18, 2022

Jean Charest tries to position himself as the pro-military Conservative leadership candidate

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Canadian politicians — generally speaking — are unwilling to tread too far into discussions of the Canadian Armed Forces and the utter disaster that is our federal government’s procurement “process”. There are lots of good, electoral reasons for this: Canadians have been propagandized over the last two generations to see Canada as a country with no real enemies and having no need of military force except for overseas peacekeeping and disaster relief. Any identified need for new equipment or even just updated replacements for existing capabilities is always a politically dangerous discussion, as it’s remarkably easy to get public support for almost any non-military spending instead of anything even vaguely warlike. Worse, on those few occasions when the government of the day bites the bullet to buy new ships/tanks/planes/helicopters/etc., the top priority isn’t military effectiveness or even lowest-price but where the money will be spent. Bidders for Canadian military contracts can’t just crank off a few extra units of the weapon or vehicle on existing production lines (which in almost every case would be both militarily better and economically cheaper): the government almost always demands new, expensive production facilities be constructed in Canada or for the foreign supplier to “partner” with an existing Canadian company to produce as much in Canada as possible.

This procurement charade usually means the Canadian Forces end up with far fewer weapons or vehicles because the increased costs of partial or complete production in Canada gobble up far more of the allocated budget. For example, back in 2017, we purchased a batch of new machineguns. It was the same model already in use with the Canadian army and with many of our NATO allies. If we’d just bought from one of the foreign manufacturers who already had production lines and tooling set up, each gun would have cost between US$6,000 and US$9,000 depending on configuration. But because we insisted on having Colt Canada set up a new production line, each weapon ended up costing C$28,000!

Multiply this across the entire range of equipment needed by the Canadian Army, the Royal Canadian Navy, and the Royal Canadian Air Force, and it’s quickly obvious that we’re running one of the least efficient military procurement systems in human history. And even on a domestic spin-off/job creation/vote buying spectrum, it’s insanely expensive and wasteful.

All of that out of the way, here’s Conservative leadership hopeful Jean Charest deliberately touching one of the “third rails” of Canadian politics by proposing an increase in funding for the military:

Our military procurement system is broken. For years experts have been warning about our incompetence at making major defence purchases. The past few weeks have shown us the price of our inaction.

While our allies, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, have entered into a new security pact to counter China in the Pacific, Canada wasn’t even invited to the table.

Germany, Sweden, and other NATO allies promise to increase their military spending to prepare for the uncertain times ahead. Canada has a moral responsibility to act. Now is the time.

If elected as the leader, my Conservative government will make significant changes and upgrades to our nation’s military capabilities. I will move quickly to ramp up Canadian defence spending to two percent of GDP, increase personnel to 100,000 and equip our forces for the challenging times ahead. I will modernize our cyber security infrastructure to prepare for future risks. And I will fix our embarrassing procurement system to ensure we get the equipment we desperately need.

The current conflict has also driven home the need to assert our sovereignty, especially in our North. As major sea lanes, essential to global trade and export of our natural resources, open within our arctic territory, we must be on high alert to Russian and Chinese encroachment. Neither recognizes our sovereignty there. In fact, no one really recognizes our sovereignty there and the imbalance in our military investments compared to our allies explains why that’s the case.

The war in Ukraine is a cruel reminder of why we cannot ignore these threats. Russia has a modern military base in the arctic — another area where indecision and delay could be extremely costly unless addressed.

A proud Canada must assert its sovereignty in the North and generate military support through major investments in equipment and coordination with our NATO allies. We need to get our act together.

The threats remain real and demand immediate attention from leaders willing to act in the best interests of their respective nations.

Canadians need experience and expertise overseeing our military. We need a government that supports our military.

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