#US National Defense

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Michael de Adder

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 30, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 31, 2024

Today, according to Clare Foran, Manu Raju, and Morgan Rimmer of CNN, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told his Republican colleagues that he will not bring forward the bipartisan immigration bill senators have been working on for months, calling it “absolutely dead.” 

Although Johnson insisted in November that border security was so crucial that he wouldn’t bring up aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and Gaza until such legislation was attached to it, Trump has made it clear he wants immigration and border security left on the table for him to use as an issue in his run for the presidency.

Instead of addressing border security through legislation, House Republicans instead are moving forward with their plan to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. They wrote articles of impeachment even before holding hearings. Today, members of the House Homeland Security Committee held a hearing to mark up those articles, which claim that Mayorkas committed high crimes and misdemeanors because he allegedly breached the public trust and refused to enforce immigration law. 

In all our history, only one cabinet officer has been impeached. William Belknap, whose eight years as secretary of war under President U. S. Grant had been marked by ostentatious displays of wealth and apparent kickbacks from army contracts, was charged with corruption in March 1876 just hours after he tearfully handed Grant his resignation. 

The House charged Belknap with “criminally disregarding his duty as Secretary of War and basely prostituting his high office to his lust for private gain.” The Senate agreed that it had jurisdiction to hold an impeachment trial even for a former government official, for an officer should not be able to escape justice simply by resigning. After hearing more than 40 witnesses, a majority of senators voted to convict Belknap on each of five charges, but no vote reached the necessary two-thirds threshold for conviction, and he was therefore acquitted. 

Almost 150 years later, the impeachment of Mayorkas would be the second effort to impeach a cabinet member. Yet there is no suggestion that Mayorkas has done anything but try to implement the law, even as the administration has repeatedly asked for more funding to make it possible for him to do his job.

In the hearing today, Representative Seth Magaziner (D-RI) noted that “across the system, we are at and above capacity, and so, what should the secretary do? The secretary, because he has not received the funding to provide adequate detention capacity, has to use his judgment for who to detain and who to release. That is not illegal. It is certainly not impeachable. And it is the exact same kind of discretion that every other director before him has used. In the last two years of the Trump administration, 52% of migrants apprehended at the southern border were released, not detained…. Nearly a million people. I did not hear my Republican colleagues trying to impeach the secretary or acting secretary under the Trump administration during those years. But here they are, trying to impeach Secretary Mayorkas for doing the exact same thing.”

Rather than passing the laws the country needs, the extremist Republicans appear to be determined to tee up an issue on which Trump can run for president in 2024. House speaker Johnson has demanded “ZERO” illegal crossings into the U.S., but this is a standard that no previous homeland security secretary has met because it is impossible to wall off every single means of entering this country by water, air, or land. And—despite Republicans’ false claims that Biden has established “open borders”—immigrants were more likely to be released into the country during Trump's term than during Biden’s. 

What is going on here is an attempt of the extremist Republicans to undercut the administration by attacking a key cabinet officer not for actual misbehavior but on policy grounds.  

There is no chance the Senate, dominated by Democrats, will convict Mayorkas even if the House, with its razor-thin Republican majority, impeaches him, but the extremist minority in the House that is going after him is attempting to set a precedent that a minority can stop the government from functioning. 

The cost of that obstruction has been clear in domestic politics over government funding, but it has now become a global issue over the question of U.S. support for Ukraine. Johnson had said he would not bring forward a bill to provide supplemental funding for Ukraine unless it included measures for increased border security; now his rejection of a bill to provide that border security threatens Ukraine aid. 

Ukraine is defending itself against an invasion by Russia, but the struggle there is larger than one between two countries: it is the question of whether the rules-based international order put in place after World War II will survive, or whether the world will go back to a system in which stronger countries can gobble up less powerful ones. 

Military aid for Ukraine is widely popular among Americans and among American lawmakers, who recognize the larger questions at stake. But extremist Republicans are siding with Trump, who has made his preference for Russia and its autocratic leader over Ukraine clear. The realization that a few extremist Republicans are scuttling Ukraine aid has prompted officials from both parties to warn of the consequences if the U.S. stops providing support to Ukraine.

In Foreign Affairs today, Central Intelligence Agency director Wililam Burns noted that the war has weakened Putin’s Russia significantly. Aid to Ukraine has amounted to less than 5% of the U.S. defense budget, “a relatively modest investment with significant geopolitical returns for the United States and notable returns for American industry,” he wrote.

“For the United States to walk away from the conflict at this crucial moment and cut off support to Ukraine would be an own goal of historic proportions,” Burns said. The secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Jens Stoltenberg, has been in Washington, D.C., this week, urging Republicans to back the aid, if only on the grounds that most of the money appropriated goes to support jobs in the U.S. 

The man behind the extremists, Trump, was in the news today for the fact that the political action committees that back him spent about $50 million covering his legal bills in 2023. That money came from donors and arrived primarily in the months after the 2020 presidential election, when Trump lied that he had actually won the election and needed financial support to challenge the results.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[decolonize-the-everything]

Hey if you:

Hate the military (industrial complex)

Are American 🦅 and/or

Are scared about project 2025

Trans/genderqueer 🏳️‍⚧️

Someone who generally cares about people around the planet🇵🇸🇸🇩🇨🇩

I need you to know:

the US Senate has started considering spending $911 billion dollars on the military to erode more human rights.

And the act to do so already passed through one dem-controlled committee.

It passed after anti-trans amendments were added

Links and such below the cut

TLDR: The military hates trans Palestinians and trans Americans and will systematically harm both in 2025 unless someone does something about it so now is a great time to do something about it. We have til about August to convince our reps this is a Bad Move.

The Fiscal Year 2025 NDAA authorizes a topline of $911.8 billion for military and national security programs at the Department of Defense and Department of Energy.

"The United States Senate’s committee report for the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, which provides funding for the U.S. Military, was uploaded onto the Senate Armed Services Committee website Monday night. In it, two anti-transgender “riders” were included through an amendment process with the support of independent Senator Joe Manchin, who caucuses with Democrats, while a third was defeated; many more Democrats then voted to approve the full bill committee report.

[...]The amendments are key parts of Project 2025, a policy document put forward by the Heritage Foundation aimed at radically transforming the United States government. Project 2025 seeks to concentrate power into the hands of the President and implement ultra-conservative policies across various domains, including reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ issues, and more. The initiative has drawn support from over 110 conservative organizations and former Trump officials.

And of course it's the military budget so it's not like trans military members are the only ones being harmed by this and it'd be ignorant of me to suggest it to say the least:

"Israel has the right to defend itself from Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah," Rogers told the Washington Free Beacon. "The FY25 NDAA makes it clear that the U.S. stands with Israel by investing in U.S.-Israel cooperation and joint exercises.

Additionally, the FY25 NDAA fully funds critical missile defense programs, like Iron Dome, Arrow, and David's Sling, that benefit both the U.S. and Israel."

What do I do??

Be calling/emailing your reps. Tell them you will Not vote for them in the upcoming election if they pass the budget as is and that you support any protests against it AND them if they pass it.

ORGANIZING: educate yourself, friends, family, and start figuring out what actions you can take together to make a difference in your area (protests, blocking roads, threaten to flip/withhold your votes as a collective, harassing politicians IRL, signing petitions, spreading the word, [redacted] etc). This one is really up for interpretation and depends on your ability and proximity to do things so...yeah.

protest the budget however you can: irl protests, include it in Palestine protests, starting hashtags, etc

Start prioritizing U.S queer & Palestinian solidarity because the military and it's committees are happy to make no distinction at all between who's giving the order, a Democrat or a Republicans. And if it doesn't matter to them who's calling the genocide shots then it shouldn't matter to you, especially when the order is to lim it your human rights.

Learn about pinkwashing in regards to solidarity because, "The most painful thing is to see LGBTQ people, who have personally experienced exclusion and discrimination, then inflict the same violence on others. It’s sad that the state has succeeded in making many think that integrating into the Zionist enterprise is the way to integrate into society."

Call the news. I'm serious. Tell them how you heard about a bunch of people talking about Kamala must hate trans people cuz she's letting the NDAA pass with anti-trans ammendments, express concern 'as a voter' that this will cost her the election.

Pressure cook these politicians about the NDAA budget!!!! Do whatever you have to for them to take you seriously

What do I say?

End all U.S support for the occupier state known as Israel

I demand the NDAA budgets to be decreased by $300 billion, it would still be 2x the budgets of the next top military spender.

And I demand the funds be redistributed to human rights initiatives such as trans healthcare

Someone on here said the people accepting these calls just do tallies, they aren't taking the names and number of everyone who calls: so call back to back.

The NDAA isn't usually signed until after August so this gives us plenty of time to spread the word.

Because it's absurd to have a military budget this big when we have foster kids starving on the street and mentally ill vets keeping them company.

If anyone has other suggestions please add them

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Thom Hartmann

Kevin Roberts, who heads the Heritage Foundation (largely responsible for Project 2025) just implicitly threatened Americans that if we don’t allow him and his hard-right movement to complete their transformation of America from a democratic republic into an authoritarian state, there will be blood in the streets.

“We’re in the process of taking this country back,” he told a TV audience, adding: “The reason that they are apoplectic right now, the reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning. And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

He’s not wrong. America has been changed as a result of a series of corrupt rulings by Republicans (exclusively; not one of these rulings has been joined by a Democratic appointee) which have changed America’s legal and political systems themselves.

As Roberts notes, this is really the largest issue we all face, and our mainstream media are totally failing to either recognize or clearly articulate how radically different our country is now, how far the Republicans on the Court have dragged us away from both our Founder’s vision and the norms and standards of a functioning, modern democratic republic.

First, in a series of decisions — the first written by that notorious corporatist Lewis Powell (of “Powell Memo” fame) — Republicans on the Court have functionally legalized bribery of politicians and judges by both the morbidly rich and massive corporations.

This started with Powell’s 1978 Bellotti opinion, which opened the door (already cracked a bit) to the idea that corporations are not only “persons” under the Constitution, but, more radically, are entitled to the human rights the Framers wrote into the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments).

Using that rationale, Powell asserted that corporations, like rich people (from the Buckley decision that preceded Belotti by two years), are entitled to the First Amendment right of free speech. But he took it a radical step farther, ruling that because corporations don’t have mouths they can use to speak with, their use of money to spend supporting politicians or carpet-bombing advertising for a candidate or issue is free speech that can’t be tightly regulated.

Citizens United, another all-Republican decision with Clarence Thomas the deciding vote (after taking millions in bribes), expanded that doctrine for both corporations and rich people, creating new “dark money” systems that wealthy donors and companies can use to hide their involvement in their efforts to get the political/legal/legislative outcomes they seek.

Last week the Republicans on the Court took even that a huge step farther, declaring that when companies or wealthy people give money to politicians in exchange for contracts, legislation, or other favors, as long as the cash is paid out after the deed is done it’s not a bribe but a simple “gratuity.”

So, first off, they’ve overthrown over 240 years of American law and legalized bribery.

Last week they also gutted the ability of federal regulatory agencies to protect average people, voters, employees, and even the environment from corporations that seek to exploit, pollute, or even engage in wage theft. This shifted power across the economic spectrum from a government elected by we the people to the CEOs and boards of directors of some of America’s most predatory and poisonous companies.

Finally, in the Trump immunity case, the Court ruled that presidents are immune from prosecution under criminal law, regardless of the crimes they commit, so long as they assert those crimes are done as part of their “official” responsibilities. And who decides what’s “official”? The six Republicans on the Supreme Court.

These actions — corporate personhood, money as speech, ending the Chevron deference to regulatory agencies, and giving the president life-and-death powers that historically have only been held by kings, shahs, mullahs, dictators, and popes — have fundamentally altered the nature of our nation.

It’s almost impossible to overstate the significance of this, or its consequences. We no longer live in America 1.0; this is a new America, one more closely resembling the old Confederacy, where wealthy families and giant companies make the rules, enforce the rules, and punish those who irritate or try to obstruct them.

In America 2.0, there is no right to vote; governors and secretaries of state can take away your vote without even telling you (although they still must go to court to take away your gun).

They can destroy any politician they choose by simply pouring enough cash into the campaign system (including dark, untraceable cash).

The president can now go much farther than Bush’s torturing and imprisoning innocent people in Gitmo without legal process: he can now shoot a person on Fifth Avenue in plain sight of the world and simply call it a necessary part of his job. Or impoverish or imprison you or me with the thinnest of legal “official” rationales.

America 2.0 is not a democracy; it’s an oligarchy, as I wrote about in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. The South has finally — nearly — won the Civil War.

While it will be months or more likely years before all of these new powers the Republicans on the Court have given the president, rich people, and corporations begin to dawn on most Americans, they will, step-by-step transform this country into something more closely resembling Hungary or Russia than the democracies of Europe and Southeast Asia.

The only remedy at this late stage in this 50+ yearlong campaign to remake America is a massive revolt this fall at the ballot box, turning Congress — by huge majorities — over to Democrats while holding the White House.

If we fail at this, while there will be scattered pockets of resistance for years, it’ll be nearly impossible to reverse the course that America’s rightwing billionaires have set us on.

There has never been a more critical time in the history of our nation outside of the last time rich oligarchs tried to overthrow our democracy, the Civil War. Like then, the stakes are nothing less than the survival of a nation of, by, and for we the people.

[anxiously-sidequesting]

Not to keep beating dead horses like I so much love to do but I am still completely Flabbergasted and Astonished at how you (Merle Ambrose) could discover the most terrifying fact that a child that is essentially under your care has been indoctrinated into a cult (which, by the way, a process that has taken over the course of years) ((by an agent that has been stationed in a direct position to make it easier to access and manipulate children, that has easily escaped your notice for such a long time)) that worships a nihilistic entity whose ultimate goal is the absolute and total destruction of Everything and Everyone around you, and your one, single, simple-sentenced response to that is to say "Oh, that's a shame. He (Duncan) always was pretty terrible. Hope he gets better someday." And then to move on from those extremely worrying and dangerous bundle of issues permanently without taking any sort of action to protect the vulnerable and make sure nothing like this ever happens again

[punkeropercyjackson]

'No girl would choose Aang over Zuko' said by the same people who write ex boyfriend Jet and Jetkotara love triangles,as if any girl would choose Zuko over Jet LMFAOOOOOOO

[news4dzhozhar]

[zoey-angel]

Thinking about the Iranian person who asked to translate my work into persian and, when I said I'm from Israel, replied by saying they don't see why that's relevant, and can they please translate my work because they really like it and want to make it accessible to their friends. Made me question my entire worldview. Had it been a western leftist I would have been crucified I'm pretty sure

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[tmarshconnors]

Julian Assange is FREE!

Today marks a historic moment for press freedom and free speech advocates worldwide. After spending 1,901 harrowing days in Belmarsh Prison, Julian Assange is finally a free man. The news of his release, following a plea deal with the US, has brought tears of joy and relief to many who have tirelessly campaigned for his freedom.

Assange, 52, has been a central figure in the fight for transparency and government accountability. His work with WikiLeaks, which disclosed critical information about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, sparked global debates about the balance between national security and the public's right to know. However, it also led to severe legal repercussions, culminating in his incarceration in a high-security British prison since 2019, where he fought against extradition to the US on charges of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information.

The emotional response to Assange's release is palpable. His wife, Stella Assange, expressed deep gratitude to his supporters, stating, "Words cannot express our immense gratitude to YOU - yes YOU, who have all mobilised for years and years to make this come true. THANK YOU. THANK YOU. THANK YOU,” in a heartfelt post on X, formerly known as Twitter. This acknowledgment highlights the power of collective advocacy and the unwavering dedication of Assange's supporters over the years.

According to CBS, Assange will spend no time in US custody and will receive credit for the time he has already spent incarcerated in the UK. The plea deal, which requires him to plead guilty to one charge, is set to be finalized in a court in the Northern Mariana Islands on Wednesday, 26 June. This unique location, a US commonwealth in the Pacific much closer to Australia, underscores the unusual nature of Assange's legal journey.

The US has long argued that the release of the WikiLeaks files endangered lives, a claim that has been hotly contested by Assange's supporters and various human rights organizations. The debate over his actions and their implications for press freedom and government transparency has been one of the most significant of our time.

As Assange prepares to return to his native Australia, as confirmed by a letter from the US Department of Justice, the global conversation about press freedom and free speech is reignited. His case has underscored the crucial role that journalists and whistleblowers play in holding power to account and the significant risks they face in doing so.

For many, including myself, this news is overwhelming. The fight for freedom of speech and the protection of those who dare to speak truth to power is far from over, but today's victory is a testament to what can be achieved through persistent and passionate advocacy. Assange's release is not just a personal victory for him and his family but a beacon of hope for journalists, activists, and free speech defenders worldwide.

As we celebrate this momentous day, we must also reflect on the importance of continuing to defend press freedom and the rights of individuals to expose wrongdoing without fear of persecution. Julian Assange's journey has been a stark reminder of the stakes involved, and his release is a powerful affirmation that the fight for truth and transparency is worth every effort.

In the words of Stella Assange, "Thank you" to all who have stood by Julian and advocated for his freedom. Today, we witness the impact of our collective voice and the undeniable power of solidarity in the face of adversity.

[workersolidarity]

🇺🇸 🚨 THE US FOREIGN AID AND DEFENSE SPENDING RACKET EXPLAINED IN THREE GRAPHS

In three graphs, why the United States is clearly in extreme, rapid decline, and the evidence for why ordinary Americans will pay the price for the decades of perpetual-war policies in their own standard of living.

There's a reason why the minimum wage hasn't been raised since 2009. Why there's no money for schools, why our hospitals and doctors are a mess, why theres homeless people on every city's streets, including the mentally ill, the drug addicted, and veterans, no money to deal with out of control crime in American cities, the waves of constant immigration meant to destroy your wages... There's only ever money for more federal law enforcement, more war, more "foreign aid" aka corruption rackets for US vassal states.

During the very years we watched this decline take place, spending on foreign aid and defense spending have gone constantly upwards while wages declined and income Inequality skyrocketed.

The evidence for the betrayal of the American people by their corrupt elite is everywhere, and the debt we will be saddled with for generations is unimaginably large: $34.209 trillion at the time of writing this.

Every American will suffer the consequences for the imperialism of their elites, and in fact already are as displayed clearly by the flattening of US wage growth simultaneously alongside the increase in foreign aid and defense spending.

It's elites taking money out of your pocket, out of your retirement, your children's college education, your family's healthcare, your wages, your life, and putting it into the same super wealthy, billionaire elites who've wanted to kill social security and Medicare and use the US Military to enforce a system of control, impoverishment and censorship on all of us across the world. Or fund genocides, you know, whatever's profitable. 🇵🇸

It is nothing more than an old fashioned racket, an upward transfer of wealth, and it always has been.

@WorkerSolidartyNews

[tomorrowusa]

There's been another tranche of student debt forgiveness by the Biden administration.

The Biden administration on Friday announced another $5 billion in debt forgiveness for 74,000 student loan borrowers. Why it matters: Although the Supreme Court blocked Biden's signature student loan forgiveness plan, his administration has found alternative ways to provide relief to more than 3.7 million people.

The Republican Supreme Court has tried to block student loan relief, but the Biden administration hasn't stopped looking for legal ways around SCOTUS for specific groups of Americans burdened by such debt.

Since 1981 Republicans have serially backed enormous tax breaks for their filthy rich contributors, but they vehemently oppose loan forgiveness for middle class and poorer taxpayers.

House GOP advances bill to block Biden’s student loan repayment program

Supreme Court, Republicans to blame for lack of debt forgiveness, students say in poll

In general, Republicans oppose higher education. Their base is made up of dumbass morons who believe conspiracy theories and they need more voters like that who won't question the bullshit that comes out of the GOP.

The Republican jones for deregulation since the Reagan-Bush era has led student debt to spiral out of control. The vicious circle of more burdensome loans feeding ever-increasing tuition fits well into the GOP agenda. It's a system that discourages post-secondary education for anyone who isn't rich.

President Dwight Eisenhower was no radical. But he knew what made America strong. The highest federal income tax rate for the filthy rich during most of his administration was 91%. And it was universally regarded as a period of enormous economic growth and prosperity.

A portion of that tax revenue went into the National Defense Education Act which, among other features, provided for grants and loans for post-secondary education – particularly for STEM, teacher education, and foreign languages. That was the impressive start of the federal student loan program. It was never meant to be a permanent chain around the necks of college graduates.

National Defense depends on smart Americans. But certain Russia-friendly Republicans have no interest in standing in Putin's way.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Al Jazeera:

As elections in the United States draw closer, polls indicate that former President Donald Trump could be back in the Oval Office by early 2025. One possible indication of what a second Trump administration might look like is Project 2025, a transition plan spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank in Washington, DC. The 922-page doorstopper is essentially a how-to guide for a right-wing model of governance, proposing a dramatic overhaul of the federal government with plans to expand presidential power and purge the civil service of “liberals”. While largely focused on dismantling the “Deep State”, the document also offers pointers on foreign policy, striking a hawkish tone on China – “the most significant danger to Americans’ security, freedoms, and prosperity” – prioritising nuclear weapons production and curtailing international aid programmes.

How does Project 2025 see America’s place in the world?

On defence and foreign policy, Project 2025 aims for a definitive break with the administration of President Joe Biden. Christopher Miller, who served as defence secretary under Trump, slams Biden’s track record in the project’s hefty Mandate for Leadership section, speaking of “disturbing decay” and a “dangerous decline” in the “nation’s capabilities and will”. The signs are all there, Miller says, pointing to the “disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, our impossibly muddled China strategy, the growing involvement of senior military officers in the political arena, and deep confusion about the purpose of our military”. [...]

Taking on China

China is the project’s main defence concern. Miller fears the country is “undertaking a historic military buildup”, which “could result in a nuclear force that matches or exceeds America’s own nuclear arsenal”.

[...]

Targeting international aid

Max Primorac, senior research fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation, dislikes the “woke ideas” being pushed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). “The Biden Administration has deformed the agency by treating it as a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism,” he says in the project’s Mandate for Leadership. The project’s main bugbears appear to be “gender radicalism” and abortion rights.

Primorac argues that promoting “gender radicalism” goes against “traditional norms of many societies where USAID works”, causing “resentment” because recipients have to reject their own “firmly held fundamental values regarding sexuality” to receive “lifesaving assistance”. It has also, he says, created “outright bias against men”. He claims that abortion on demand is “aggressively” promoted under the guise of “sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights”, “gender equality” and “women’s empowerment”. To counter “woke ideas”, Project 2025 wants to “dismantle” all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which it views as “discriminatory”. Among other things, this would involve scrubbing from all USAID communications references to the terms “gender”, “gender equality”, “gender equity”, “gender diverse individuals”, “gender aware”, “gender sensitive”, “abortion”, “reproductive health” and “sexual and reproductive rights”.

What does Project 2025 propose on the domestic front?

Much of the manifesto bears a strong resemblance to Trump’s known policy proclivities with proposals to deport en masse more than 11 million undocumented immigrants and give states more control over education, limiting progressive initiatives on issues such as LGBTQ rights. But on some issues, it goes further than Trump’s campaign, calling on federal authorities to ban pornography and reverse approval of a pill used in abortions, mifepristone. It also calls for anyone providing or distributing abortion pills by mail to be prosecuted. Project 2025 pledges to restore “the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”. It recommends the authorities “proudly state that men and women are biological realities” and that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them”.

Project 2025 spells disaster from a foreign policy and a national defense standpoint.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

In the aftermath of the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court's potentially deadly rampage against federal regulators, its ruling in support of the criminalization of homelessness, and its decision to grant former President Donald Trump sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution, Sen. Bernie Sanders said late Monday that nation's highest judicial body is "out of control" and must be reined in before it can inflict even more damage.

"Over the years, among other disastrous rulings, this right-wing court has given us Citizens United, which created a corrupt, billionaire-dominated political system," Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement. "It overturned Roe v. Wade, removing women's constitutional right to control their own bodies. Last week, the court chose to criminalize poverty by banning homeless encampments in public spaces—forcing more poor people into the cycle of debt and poverty."

"With the Chevron case," the senator continued, "they have made it far more difficult for the government to address the enormous crises we face in terms of climate change, public health, workers' rights, and many other areas. And, today, the court ruled in favor of broad presidential immunity, making it easier for Trump and other politicians to break the law without accountability."

Such far-reaching and devastating decisions, Sanders argued, highlight the extent to which unelected Supreme Court justices—with the backing of right-wing billionaires and corporations bent on sweeping away all regulatory constraints—have arrogated policymaking authority to themselves with disastrous consequences for U.S. society and the world.

"If these conservative justices want to make public policy, they should simply quit the Supreme Court and run for political office," said Sanders. "At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, billionaire control of our political system, and major threats to the foundations of American democracy, it is clear to me that we need real Supreme Court reform. A strong, enforceable code of ethics is a start, but just a start. We'll need much more than that."

Sanders did not make specific reform recommendations beyond an ethics code in his statement Monday, but he has previously suggested rotating judges off the Supreme Court—which would effectively end lifetime appointments.

The Vermont senator's progressive colleagues floated a range of possible actions following the high court's presidential immunity ruling on Monday, including adding seats to the Supreme Court and impeaching individual justices.

"Today's decision, along with the court's decision to overturn Chevron, is an assault on the separation of powers under the Constitution," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in response to the court's ruling in Corner Post Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

"An extremist Supreme Court stacked by Donald Trump has snatched power away from an elected Congress and handed lawmaking power over to a few far-right unelected judges," Warren added. "This Supreme Court is undermining the foundations of our democracy; Congress must restore balance by adding more justices to the court."

The Supreme Court's recent flurry of rulings has already thrown existing cases into chaos and opened the floodgates to new corporate-backed lawsuits against longstanding federal regulations.

The Washington Post reported Sunday that "mere hours after the Supreme Court sharply curbed the power of federal agencies" by scrapping the Chevron doctrine, "conservatives and corporate lobbyists began plotting how to harness the favorable ruling in a redoubled quest to whittle down climate, finance, health, labor, and technology regulations in Washington."

"The National Association of Manufacturers, a lobbying group whose board of directors includes top executives from Dow, Caterpillar, ExxonMobil, and Johnson & Johnson, specifically called attention to what it described as regulatory overreach at the [Securities and Exchange Commission] and the Environmental Protection Agency," the Post noted.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation's largest corporate lobbying organization, and the American Petroleum Institute were also among the big business groups applauding the fall of Chevron, fueling calls for Congress to codify the doctrine into federal law.

The American Prospect's Hassan Ali Kanu wrote Tuesday that the high court's latest term has "demonstrated how lacking our system is in terms of safeguards that can prevent or correct the Supreme Court when it oversteps its authority or engages in unjustified exercises of power."

"President Joe Biden's commission to explore Supreme Court reform produced a number of viable and sensible options," Kanu continued. "Congress could curtail or end judicial review, the power the court aggregated to itself to exclusively interpret the Constitution."

"Even more modest proposals could further democratize the Court and judiciary, like prohibiting them from declining to apply laws passed by Congress unless they have at least a supermajority vote; or implementing sortition, random assignment, and rotation into the process of appointing or assigning judges to the Supreme Court," he added. "At this point, when a six-member majority is literally declaring a former president who appointed three of them to be functionally above the law, against all prevailing opinion, scholarship, analysis, and experience, the case for court reform couldn't be clearer."

[an-onyx-void]

Israeli Supreme Court rules that ultra-Orthodox men must be drafted https://www.npr.org/2024/06/25/g-s1-6116/israeli-supreme-court-rules-that-the-military-must-begin-drafting-ultra-orthodox-men

[wartakes]

"What Should It Look Like?" Part V: The Air Force

This essay was originally published on January 27, 2023 and is a continuation of the "What Should It Look Like?" series.

In this entry, we go into the DANGER ZONE and I explain how drones aren't going to solve everything (I go into some other stuff too but that's a big part of it).

(Full essay below the cut).

Greetings, folks. We return once more to my “What Should It Look Like” series and oh boy, it’s time to go Up into the Wild Blue Yonder with the United States Air Force.

Air power is one of the most important aspects of modern warfare. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that, in a large-scale war between two state armies, air power is essential for victory. As we’ve seen in Ukraine, even if you can just deny your enemy’s control of the air and prevent either side from gaining dominance – as Ukraine has, you can buy yourself some serious breathing room and seriously frustrate their efforts. In that particular case, ground-based air defense assets also play a major role – but as Ukraine consistently asking for more combat aircraft (among other things) has shown, the planes themselves remain important. 

With the absolutely critical nature of airpower established early on in this essay, I’m going to give you all a warning: this is going to be another long one. Because of how important air power is in modern war and because of all the facets to it, it was hard for me to cut things out for this one because so much felt important. So, if you’re feeling a little drowsy, now is probably not the time to dive into this essay – unless you want to brew some coffee first. But if you’re ready, willing, and/or caffeinated, let’s dive right in.

Quality vs. Quantity (and vice versa)

In the scenario we’ve been using throughout this series (I won’t rehash it completely again, so you can go read the original essay to refresh your memory), aircraft play a crucial – if not, arguably, the most crucial role. In particular, tactical aircraft (“TACAIR”; i.e. “fighter” aircraft and other smaller combat aircraft) are essential due to the fact they can cross long distances quickly to get to the theater of war and immediately begin operations to slow and hopefully halt the enemy advance, by providing Combat Air Patrols (CAP) to contest enemy air superiority and Close Air Support (CAS) to friendly ground forces to hold back enemy forces, conducing Suppression of Enemy Air Defense (SEAD) missions to help secure air superiority by destroying enemy anti-air, and other missions. In the study that served as one of the sources of inspiration for this planning scenario we’re using, air power is flagged as absolutely critical (and the centerpiece of the study). Within the first week of conflict breaking out in this scenario, air power is arriving to take on all the missions I just described and more, and to set the stage for all other operations occurring and to follow. Without air power in general and TACAIR in particular, nothing else we’ve discussed or will further discuss can really happen.

In order for a country like the United States to be able to do what I just describe in support of our scenario, they need to generate something we call “mass.” Simply put, you need to be able to muster up enough of something to do the job – or in military terms, “create the effect” – that you want them to do, successfully. This is all being done while keeping in mind that you’re doing that while being opposed by a peer or near-peer adversary military. This probably won’t come as a surprise, but in that kind of scenario, you’re going to need to generate a lot of mass in terms of TACAIR given the amount they’ll have to do – and also factoring in the unfortunate reality of combat losses and other forms of attrition that inevitably occur in warfare.

Now, you’d think that probably wouldn’t be an issue for the United States, as it possesses one of the largest air forces on the planet (technically, it has four of them – in terms of total aircraft numbers – if you count the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps as well). But that’s increasingly becoming a problem for them for a variety of reasons – with two major ones standing out: a shortage of pilots, and an issue we call “gold plating.”

The USAF has been struggling with a persistent shortage of pilots, so much so that it’s had to force higher ranking officers to fly in more junior positions or even bring pilots back from retirement. A key driver for this has been an issue with retaining pilots, as many simply get tired of the poor quality of life and culture that the USAF imposes on them, turning to much more attractive offers from private sector airlines. The USAF has already attempted some changes here in terms of increasing that quality of life and doing more to support service members and their families in general.

My only real input or suggestion here would be to go further and not bite around the edges and half-ass it as the services are want to do. Like I said regarding the Navy and its toxic Surface Warfare culture, and with military culture in general, “if you build it, they will come.” Maybe if the Air Force follows that maxim, they’ll find themselves hemorrhaging less pilots. Also, I’m going to beat my usual drum here that “maybe if we weren’t a sprawling empire trying to be everywhere at once that the strain on the services would not be near as high – nor would the resulting demands on personnel.” Finally, I do (begrudgingly) have to admit there’s some areas where the Air Force could benefit from utilizing more drones in place of crewed aircraft (more on that later), but that still require skilled service members, so the retention and quality of life issue continues to take center stage. Just make it suck less for them. Easy.

Now that we got the boring “human” dimension out of the way, we can talk more about what we are really nerds for: hardware. Specifically, the over-designing of it, something we call in the biz “gold plating.” It’s a tale as old as time in my field, but since the end of the Cold War it’s gotten particularly bad. When designing new platforms and systems, the United States has had a tendency to give in to “scope creep” and try and make these new weapons do anything and everything under the sun – and do it the best they possibly can. The result is you get weapon systems that are insanely expensive to produce and maintain (if they even make it to production without being cancelled) and often come with a host of various technical issues to boot. You also are likely to end up with far fewer of what you need – as well as with expensive weapons that commanders may be risk averse in putting in dangerous situations because they don’t want to lose them. In addition to costing more, it also tends to take longer these days to develop and field a new weapon than it traditionally has, for a variety of reasons. All of these factors fly directly in the face (ha ha, flying pun) in the imperative of generating sufficient mass for TACAIR.

As an example of this gold plating issue, I’m going to bring up everyone’s favorite high-tech aviation punching bag: the F-35. I’ve already talked at length in a prior piece about the entire debacle of the F-35 Lighting II Joint Strike Fighter, so I’ll try not to just rehash that whole piece here and give you some highlights. One of my major takeaways in that piece is that, while a 5th generation multirole combat aircraft is by no means a dumb idea – and in fact, a necessary one in a future fight against a peer adversary, the USAF made a crucial mistake by going “all in” on the F-35 making up the vast majority of its TACAIR fleet of the future.

Why was this a mistake? Two main reasons: first, because the F-35 in particular is essentially a gold-plated camel (a camel, the old joke goes, being a “horse designed by committee”). While it is not completely useless (the original concept of a 5th generation multi-role fighter was and remains valid) and some of its issues have been fixed, the F-35 is still plagued with issues that are often surrounded by DoD obfuscation. It also remains incredibly expensive and finicky to maintain and sustain even when operating correctly and even as some costs have been brought down over time. The F-35 has been made to do try and do too many things all at once, turning it into a flying complex of software bugs that loves to try and kill its pilots.

Second, while stealth combat aircraft are absolutely crucial in a peer-on-peer conflict, they are by no means infallible. Stealth has never been invincible, even when the United States had a monopoly on the technology back when it was first introduced. This was evidenced by the shoot-down of a stealth F-117 Nighthawk over Serbia during NATO’s Operation Allied Force in 1999 – with another F-117 being hit as well (though that one managed to make it back to base without crashing). These attacks were undertaken with 1960s-era Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles and radars – which, when utilized correctly, could detect stealth aircraft. Technology has come a long way since the 1990s (or the 1960s for that matter). While some like to downplay the risk to U.S. stealth aircraft, it’s never as simple as they depict it. It’s not unreasonable to expect a technologically sophisticated peer adversary (like China) could develop tools enabling it to better find, fix, target, and attack stealth aircraft – if not now, in the near to mid future. Stealth absolutely has a use case but depending upon that as the sole advantage of a platform – or a fleet – at the expense of qualities like speed, range, maneuverability, payload, and more, is very risky.

Even without the risk, there are areas where you encounter situations where an expensive, high-end aircraft seems like overkill when it comes to the mission its undertaking. For example: why would you want to assign a high tech, penetrating stealth fighter to a mission like air defense of friendly territory? Why does it matter (outside of showing off) if the fighters you’re scrambling are stealthy or not when you know an enemy is on the way and they know you’ll scramble to meet them? In that case, what may matter more are sensors – either on board the aircraft or linked to it – and its ability to carry a lot of ordinance and fuel. The same could apply to stand-off strike or air defense missions where the aircraft doesn’t necessarily need to penetrate enemy air defenses to fire ordinance like long-range missiles. This is to say nothing of a fight against an adversary that isn’t as technologically advanced. A high-end stealth fighter isn’t required for every mission and there are efficiencies to be gained from an appropriate mix of high-end, more exquisite platforms, and less advanced platforms that you can get more of and do the job “alright” and may actually have advantages over high-end platforms in key areas like range or payload. We call that sort of thing a “high-low” mix in the biz and its nothing new.

The USAF also seems poised to potentially make this mistake again with its bomber fleet as it prepares to introduce the new B-21 Raider bomber that has been developed as a replacement for its B-1B Lancer and eventually for the B-2 Spirit bomber. In the B-21’s defense, while it is a high-end stealth bomber like the infamously expensive B-2 Spirit, it is (on paper) supposed to be far cheaper than that aircraft was (though it will also be smaller and thus have a smaller payload capacity). But the key question is, why does the majority of the USAF’s bomber fleet need to be made up of penetrating stealth bombers, when the enemy we plan on fighting against has a large air-defense network that is only growing larger and more sophisticated? Maybe having some of the bomber fleet be aircraft like B-21s makes sense, but is the juice really worth the squeeze in terms of having the majority of the fleet be made up of them?

This is one of those areas where the USAF may be doing the right thing at the same time its doing (maybe) the wrong thing, as at the same time its introducing the B-21 it is also preparing to keep the B-52 Stratofortress in service into the 2050s. With new engines giving it renewed life, the B-52 could be assigned to the role of primarily being a bus to carry long-range missiles it can fire at stand-off distance (though oddly enough it still can drop ‘dumb’ bombs and still practices how to do that which is kinda cool). While some instance sin war may call for a bomber that will attempt to penetrate enemy air defenses, do you really need every bomber to do that when what you may need more of is a big, dumb, missile bus that has a long range and long-range ordinance that can launch its ordinance and go home? Hell, we even thought about doing this with 747s back in the day (among other, crazier ideas) and I’m starting to wonder if we shouldn’t bring that idea back. Sometimes you need something expensive and stealthy, but sometimes you just need something big to carry stuff.

This is an area where we may be able to learn something from China’s approach to a high-low mix in combat aircraft, as they’ve been doing a lot of things that I think we should be doing. Even as they’ve designed and are now producing 5th generation fighters like the J-20 – and soon the smaller J-31/FC-31, an analogue to the F-35 that is also intended for export as well as domestic military use – they’ve continued to produce 4.5 generation fighters like the J-16 (a Chinese analogue to the Russian Su-35 “Flanker”) and the smaller and cheaper J-10 – another tactical aircraft that is also directed at the export market as well as the People’s Liberation Army. Even as they work to develop their own stealth bomber, they’re still actually producing new versions of the 1950s vintage H-6 “Badger” bomber that are capable of firing cruise missiles – and even air-launched ballistic missiles – in a role similar to that of the “missile bus” B-52 or 747 described prior. While appreciating the value of high end, low-observable aircraft, China seemed to hedge their bets in adopting that technology and now it may very well put them in a better position to generate mass in terms of airpower in a potential high-end conflict.

Ultimately, I don’t know what the right “high-low” mix is if you’re looking for an exact number – whether it be for bombers or fighters or whatever. That’s something that would need more careful study and examination than I can provide here. What I can say with some degree of confidence is that while high-end stealth aircraft definitely have a role, they probably should not make up the majority of a combat aircraft fleet. This is yet another area where the services – and the air force in particular – have either bit around the edges or danced back and forth on making the right choice. While the Air Force was planning on buying more of the 4.5 generation F-15EX, those buys are now being curtailed. And while the Chief of Staff of the Air Force identified a potential need for a “budget conscious” 4.5 generation fighter a couple years ago to replace aging F-16s, he then had the gall to claim in the same breadth to suggest that we need to do a “clean sheet” (i.e. brand new) design from scratch, taking up time, money, and my sanity in the process. This was despite the fact that, in addition to the F-15EX, we have other 4.5 generation fighters in production now in the form of the F/A-18E and the F-16V. Thankfully, it seems that the Air Force has now walked back this “clean sheet” idea and is instead looking at the more sensible plan of upgrading around 600 of its F-16s to this new model, but I swear to God sometimes the military makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills with how they act.

I’m going to try desperately to wrap this section up now so I can move on to the next one by giving you a very high-level idea of what we should do regarding combat aircraft in general – both for TACAIR and for bombers (keeping in mind I don’t have exact numbers for you). First, buy fewer exquisite, gold-plated systems like the F-35 (while acknowledging you’re still going to need a fair amount of them). Second, buy more modernized versions of proven systems or upgrade packages to bring existing systems up to that standard. Third, and finally, for the love of God try not to make the same mistakes we’ve made with things like the F-35 and more when it comes to the new 6th Generation of TACAIR that is currently under development – in the form of Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) for the USAF and F/A-XX for the Navy. We literally cannot afford it – both in terms of money and resources, but also in terms of the potential consequences if we screw up yet again and create another gold-plated camel. Yes, systems like that are going to be expensive no matter what, but we can still do more to make it so they can be a bit more cost effective and at least be good value for money in doing their jobs well (and maybe not trying to actively kill their pilots in the course of doing their duties).

Droning on and on

Before I start off this section, I want to make something clear: I am not inherently anti-UAV (UAVs of course being Unmanned or Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles – commonly referred to as “drones”). As I will explain in this section, I think there are plenty of uses for drones in modern military operations and I would be pretty dumb and shortsighted to argue against their use whole-cloth. My issues with drones are with the idea of them taking on every role, replacing most – if not all – crewed aircraft. I am very firmly against this for both legal, ethical, and moral reasons, as well as concerns about the actual military risk involved from a variety of vectors. But I’ll got into that more shortly. I just wanted to put that disclaimer right up front.

Drones have already been a hot topic in every sense of the term since they came more into the public eye during the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), but they’ve become even more of a topic du jure in recent years due to their prominence in conflicts occurring in places like that between Yemen and the Saudi-led coalition on the Arabian Peninsula, between Armenia and Azerbaijan, within Ethiopia, and – of course, by both sides in Ukraine. Drones of various types have played key roles in those conflicts, and have been highly publicized in that regard, which has led a number of self-proclaimed “experts” to extrapolate from those conflicts to make sweeping generalizations and wild predictions about the future utility of drones in combat and the “obsolescence” of crewed aircraft and various other legacy military platforms.

The first thing you need to realize about drones in order to come to a more sensible understanding of their strengths and limitations, is that they are just aircraft that don’t have a person on board. That’s it. The first advantage they gain by not having a crew on board is that its more space you can add for other things like more fuel, sensors and optics, weapons, and more. The second obvious advantage of a drone is you can send it into dangerous situations without putting a human air crew in danger – which is good both in the sense that its nice when people don’t have to die, but also in that you’re not having to spend time, money, and energy to replace that air crew. You also have to realized that a lot of the footage we’ve seen of drones in combat on social media places like Ukraine – or really, combat footage we see in general – are brief snapshots in time of a particular aspects or moment in a war. You’re rarely seeing the whole picture, but it can be all too easy to make sweeping judgements based off of a series of these snapshots without additional context. This is something that all analysts can fall prey to.

Ok, so we’ve established that drones are a hot topic these days. We’ve established that a lot of big brains on the internet have very strong opinions about how great they are. While I could spend a whole essay writing about how they are dumb and wrong (and I probably will at some point – I’m surprised I haven’t already), now I’m going to jump to telling you why – in my opinion – it’s a bad idea for you to have an air force that is almost entirely drones, even if they should be used in some capacity for some roles.

First, it’s a bad idea because of the ethical, legal, and moral implications. I should clarify here that, when I’m talking about this, I’m talking specifically about full or partial automation of a drone and its decision-making process on using force, not just some guy piloting it from a shipping container in Arizona. Obviously, human beings are not infallible, and the United States has had more than its share of black stains on its soul for unpunished war crimes that occurred due to incompetence, malice, or what have you, when it comes to undertaking aerial warfare. That being said, a human – especially if they are properly trained and are coming out of an environment that doesn’t encourage them being a psychopath – is very likely to make decisions or judgement calls that an AI automated drone would not, like potentially showing mercy.

Second, having an entirely drone based air force is a bad idea due to the fact that drones – just like any aircraft or any military platform in general – have inherent weaknesses and shortcomings that a peer enemy will actively be trying to exploit. If you want a drone to fly more than a couple hundred kilometers away from the ground station that is controlling it by line-of-sight data-link, than you need satellites. With that in mind, the U.S. military has already made it abundantly clear that in a war against a peer adversary it is expecting all of its command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) capabilities to be disrupted by the adversary – especially space-based assets like satellites. This could make operating drones at long or short distances varying degrees of challenging to impossible.

This is to say nothing of the ways you can disrupt an individual drone aside from going after the broader C3I network enabling it. We’ve already seen insurgents hack  U.S. reconnaissance drone feeds in the past, with Iran claiming to have done the same thing – and also claiming to have brought down a drone through hacking. Drones, just like any other computerized system reliant on outside data, are going to vulnerable to disruption, be it by hacking, or by electronic warfare (i.e. EW or “jamming”) disrupting its sensors, its datalink back to its command, or its link to the global positioning system so it doesn’t even know where it is, where it’s going or what time it is (yeah, GPS helps coordinate time; did you know that? Well now you do). Drones are not only just as vulnerable to these disruptions as any crewed platform, in some ways you could argue they are actually more vulnerable to them. A pilot in an aircraft should – if said pilot is properly trained and equipped – be able to respond to these disruptions in a way a drone is unable to. Putting all your eggs in one basket by not having any crewed aircraft that could do the same job seems like a huge liability to me.

A final subset of my second point here that I wanted to call out, is also the fact that true artificial intelligence (i.e., “AI”), still hasn’t been achieved and its arguable if it is even real or technically feasible or capable of making certain decisions. A lot of what passes for “AI” these days isn’t actually truly “AI” in the science-fiction case. What it usually amounts to is something “dumber” than an AI, or – as one of my favorite podcasts, Trashfuture, loves to point out: often is “just a guy” (in that it’s just a human doing the things you think AI is doing or faking that an AI is doing it). Additionally, what passes for AI today (and is arguably not actually AI) is also surprisingly easy to trick or fool or lull into patterns that may not be helpful, even without hitting it with hacking or jamming. Just look at how we’ve made “AI” sexist and racist just by interacting with them. Suffice to say, full automation may not even be possible, or at least may not be possible for decades or generations, which is just another reason not to go all-in on drones as the backbone of an air force as they may not even be capable of doing the things that “Drone Bros” think they are (or at least won’t be able to do them worth a damn)

There are absolutely areas in which drones could take over a large amount of the work – if not all – from humans, that are primarily in combat support areas that don’t necessarily involve being a “trigger puller.” We’ve already seen this to a large extent with UAVs becoming the primary intelligence gathering aircraft for the US military – though we still retain a number of Cold War-era platforms like the famous U-2 “Dragon Lady” spy plane.

But intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) aren’t the only areas where drones can either lighten the load or take it over. Take airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) aircraft that help direct fighter aircraft at incoming threats. Those are typically converted airliners that require a large number of skilled personnel to man, and in a wartime scenario would be in high demand with a lot of strain placed on them. Those traditional AEW&C platforms could be supplemented by drones equipped to do the same role. You could also purpose task AEW&C drones to be on the lookout for certain threats over others, like missiles and stealth aircraft. As early as 2015, China had already built a prototype UAV that could fulfill an AEW&C role. The same idea has been mooted in the US – though it’s been met with some degree of skepticism by traditionalists (I should be one to talk though I suppose). The bigger point here though, is even if AEW&C UAVs can’t do the job quite as well as a legacy platform and don’t replace them entirely, they could be assigned to lower risk areas to monitor for aerial threats to allow the more capable crewed platforms to operate in higher-priority areas. And remember how I was talking about drones being vulnerable to EW? Well, turns out they could actually be used to dish it out as well as take it – another thing that China has been working on.

This is the logic I extend to drones in combat too – in the limited capacity that I would accept them as such. When it comes to combat, the main contribution that drones could make is not replacing crewed aircraft, but by supplementing and supporting them. This is the idea of the “loyal wingman” Uncrewed Combat Aerial Vehicle (UCAV), which is where you take several UCAVs and link them under the control of a pilot or aircrew in a crewed aircraft as they proceed on a mission. This is sort of the happy medium between letting drones do whatever they want, and not using them in combat roles at all. The drones have some amount of autonomy, but ultimately follow the orders of the crewed aircraft and don’t use lethal force without the crewed aircraft’s permission. Their role here is to supplement and augment the crewed aircraft to add that additional mass we talked about earlier that is necessary for a successful air campaign (especially if pilot shortages continue to persist). Losing a UCAV that is (ideally) cheaper to build than a plane and doesn’t result in the death or grievous injury of a pilot is also a more acceptable loss – especially when you’re going into a contested area.

This isn’t just about satisfying LME concerns or dealing with pilot shortages and losses, however. It’s also about hedging your bets and preventing yourself from being vulnerable. I already mentioned how drones and the C3I networks supporting them can be vulnerable to electronic warfare and hacking among other things, and that the U.S. military is preparing to fight a peer conflict with severe disruptions to C3I. By having a pilot flying with UCAVs and still being in the loop, that can mitigate some of these disruptions. If you can’t connect to a communications satellite to give a drone orders, it won’t matter as much because it’s not trying to contact a distant ground station, it’s trying to reach the fighter jet flying right next to it. Same applies if GPS is disrupted. A properly trained and equipped pilot can still use a compass and a map to get to their target, and the drones just need to tag along and follow them. It’s not foolproof, of course. Drones could still be disrupted in other ways that we’ve already covered earlier, but it reduces the degree to which drones could be disrupted. In a worst-case scenario, if the “loyal wingmen” fail completely, you still have one or two crewed aircraft that can respond to a developing situation more dynamically and make a judgement call on whether to continue on mission or not. It’s about making sure you have redundancy and haven’t gone “all in” on something that is more vulnerable.

“…and The Rest!”

There’s only so much I can write about in these essays before they start to become a thesis or a book (though maybe I should write one someday). A good portion of this essay so far has been taken up by me discussing the high-low mix and drones. This was a conscious but difficult choice on my part to focus on these areas because I think these are two that are going to be highly consequential, but I didn’t want to allow you to talk away thinking those were the only main issues to consider when thinking about what an effective air force should look like in the future for the type of scenario we’ve been using as our benchmark.

For our scenario, strategic airlift (i.e., long-range cargo planes) will play a key role. While most of the troops, equipment, and materiel will get to a warzone by ship, airlift will play a key role in quickly transporting the first wave of combat troops into a theater, as well as other high-priority logistics. Airlift is an area in which the United States still is the undisputed champion, but while facing persistent issues. Like with many areas of the military, the airlift fleet has been operating at a high tempo as aircraft available have decreased. I feel the easy answer here is to reduce the strain put on the airlift fleet day today by the demand of constant global operations. This ties back to our overall philosophy of not being an imperial power and trying to enable allies and partners across the globe to provide for their own defenses as much as possible on a day-to-day basis so we don’t have to try and be everywhere at once and can reduce the demand on key assets like airlift – leaving more available for when a major war pops up.

I also find it kind of interesting now that strategic airlifters like the C-5 and C-17 are out of production that the United States is producing no heavy airlifters and there hasn’t yet been a serious discussion by the USAF of what comes after the C-5 and C-17. That’s definitely something to be thinking about, given how important airlift is and will remain – and perhaps an opportunity to incorporate nascent technologies allowing for fuel efficiency – which not only may ease financial and resource strain but could ease the strain on the environment.

Another key capability for this scenario are tanker aircraft. Capable of refueling other aircraft in mid-flight, tankers are essential to being able to fight across the globe. Without tankers, you’d have to rely on leapfrogging between various airfields to refuel and reach your destination – something that is neither efficient, nor would you be guaranteed access to. Again, this is an area where my main suggestion is to reduce the strain by trying to reduce our global footprint so we have more forces available for a major contingency, but this also an area where the main problem is not just imperialism but capitalism and the military industrial complex. Also, much like with airlifters, the USAF has had some issues here.

Trying to procure new tanker aircraft has been something of a white whale for the USAF for years. Its newest tanker – the Boeing KC-46 A Pegasus – has been plagued with technical issues with key refueling systems (as well as just generally shoddy production practices). Meanwhile, a decade’s long quest to try and procure an off-the-shelf “bridge” tanker before it designs a clean sheet tanker of the future has also faced an uphill climb and now may not even happen, with the possibly opting to buy more troubled KC-46As. This speaks to wider issues with both procurement and the state of the industrial base (both of which deserve essays in their own right – I’m deciding if they’ll occur in this series or not). One way or another though, given how critical tanker aircraft are to our scenario, its something that will need to be unscrewed and quickly if it is to be at all viable. We need tankers, and specifically we need tankers that actually work most of the time. Additionally, in regards to future tankers, much like with stealth bombers and “missile trucks” we’ll need to think about how many tankers need to be stealthy and fancy and how many just need to be big flying fuel tanks. Likewise, this is another area where drones can play a role to add additional mass – and already are, in fact.

Likewise, I think strategic forces (i.e., nuclear weapons) will need to be an essay in their own right due to the interdependent nature of the nuclear triad of land-based missiles, aircraft, and submarines. I actually suddenly realized as I was thinking about the USAF’s fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles and aircraft-deployed nuclear bombs that I completely forgot to talk about this in my essay on the Navy and I mostly overlooked their ballistic missile submarines. I’m still figuring out the best way to broach my thoughts on nuclear weapons in general too, so that’s another reason I’m going to punt talking about them until a later date and stick to the conventional forces for now. Rest assured, however, that they will be addressed. Same with special operations forces, which I’m also going to be dealing with in a separate essay dealing with them as a whole across the joint force. So, stay tuned on that front.

I’m sure there are other things I’m missing, but as I repeatedly say, I’m trying to avoid writing a book here so I’m trying to limit myself to the most important concepts and capabilities – which are purely subjective opinions on my part. For example: I was reminded the other night that I haven’t really covered the culture issues within the USAF – in particular, its history with Evangelicalism and religion in general. I already touched on culture a bit in a more general sense in my recruitment essay that I linked earlier in this essay (what was that a thousand y ears ago?), but forgive me for not diving into it here in detail with how much this thing keeps growing. Very briefly: I think it’s a problem and that it needs to be dealt with – along with many other cultural issues in the Air Force and elsewhere (yet another thing to deal with in another essay).

At any rate, if I haven’t talked about whatever your area of expertise or hyper-fixation is in, I apologize. Rest assured, I probably think it’s important and something that we should have in the future, but there’s just only so much ground I can cover in one of these before both peoples’ eyes – including my own – start to glaze over. Sorry.

Finishing this up before I pass the hell out

I’ve been rambling on for what has to be an all-time War Takes record, so I’m going to keep this conclusion short and sweet.

I’ve already said it multiple times in the body of this essay: air power is essential to success in a modern war. While air power alone does not guarantee victory (something we’ve seen in wars past where one side tried to win almost solely through air power and found out the hard way that’s not possible), it cannot be achieved without it either. Control of the air is vital, and you need a large and robust mix of capabilities and competencies to do that – not just one “silver bullet” that happens to be the flavor of the week on Twitter.

If we’re at all serious in this fantasy better world I’m imagining of being able to reach across the globe to help like-minded allies and partners who come under attack in the spirit of democratic socialist internationalism, if we don’t build the proper air force for it there’s no point in bothering. Air power will be the first wave that will blunt the enemy attack and then set the conditions for a counterattack that will push them out of friendly territory and neutralize them as a threat for the immediate future. Air power is absolutely critical to the success of any campaign and I’m going to leave it at that before I repeat myself further.

That’s all for now. I know this one was a slog to write, but I hope it’s useful in some way to those of you who made it all the way to the end. After two years or so of writing this “What Should It Look Like” series, we’re (maybe) getting close to the end, so let’s hang in there and see if we can make. I’m gonna go turn my brain off for a bit after writing this, but as always, all of you stay safe out there until next time.