Projecting Weakness

The NYT is worried that the Biden administration is projecting weakness on Ukraine and elsewhere. That's true, although I find their description of the causes a little wild-eyed.

If you were a foreign leader hostile to the United States — sitting in, say, Moscow or Beijing — how would you view the U.S. today?

You would know that it has conducted two largely failed wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, over the past 20 years and that many Americans have no interest in fighting another faraway conflict with a fuzzy connection to national security.

You would know that the U.S. itself can’t seem to decide how strongly it feels about democracy, with a former president and his allies around the country mimicking the playbook of autocrats willing to subvert election results.

And you would know that the U.S. is so politically polarized that many voters and members of Congress may not rally around a president even during a foreign crisis. Americans, after all, have reacted to the pandemic with division and anger, which has fueled widespread refusal to take lifesaving vaccines and continuing chaos in schools.

Given all of this, you might not be feeling especially intimidated by the U.S.

So, the weakness is coming from the military and the political right, is it? Not from the White House at all?

Well, as to 'can't seem to decide how strongly it feels about democracy,' a hearing in Wisconsin today is revealing that there are serious problems with the practice of democracy there -- problems that citizen journalists are bringing to your attention, because the news media (including the NYT) refuses to discuss it. Just exactly the Americans they are implying 'may not care about democracy' are the ones most personally and vigorously trying to bring about accountability to this system so that democracy might be restored. 

A handful of legislators in the affected states are beating themselves black and blue to try to fix the problems with our democracy. I've been writing about the problems with voting machines since 2018. There is every reason to believe that the system is being badly run on purpose, just because of a desire by the powerful to subvert election results -- and not by protesting them or even rioting about them, but by inserting fake votes into the system in large enough numbers to overturn the lawful results. 

The military, meanwhile, turns out to be very badly led. This is astonishing, in a way, because for so long it looked like the last functional organization in the Federal government. Yet in another way it is unsurprising: in 1998, The Pentagon Wars mocked the corrupt and broken military acquisition process. This has only worsened with time.

While China builds its fleet at a rapid pace, lead ships of new U.S. Navy classes have had lengthy delays. To provide perspective, from Pearl Harbor to the surrender of Japan was 1,375 days. As of Nov. 29, 2021, it has been 1,885 days since Zumwalt was commissioned and 1,601 days since Ford was commissioned and neither has deployed.

Partly that lack of deployability comes from the fact that the Navy continues to tinker with the mission, exactly the way that the Bradly Fighting Vehicle became... well, something very different from what it was supposed to be.

Nevertheless the military is made of of very fine fighting men and women, who have carried out every mission they were asked to execute even with poorly designed fighting vehicles or ships that have no ammunition for their main gun. Oh, didn't I mention that aspect of the Zumwalt class? Yeah, there's no ammo for it. Actually there soon will be no guns, either; the Navy is ripping them out, even though they were the original design feature the destroyer was built around.

These fine fighting men and women won every conflict at or above the squad level in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The disastrous withdrawals from both places -- the Afghan one more spectacularly disastrous, but the Iraq withdrawal also badly managed and leading to the rise of ISIS -- were the fault of higher headquarters, the White House, and the State Department. (Particularly in Iraq's case, State failures were at the core of why that withdrawal was mismanaged, precipitous, and led to instability.) The actual boys on the ground performed extremely well for two decades, but looking at their leadership has to be emboldening for Beijing and Moscow.

It's going to be a tough few years for American allies like Taiwan, or even Japan or South Korea. If we do want to help Taiwan, we should begin by convincing Taiwan to pass a Second Amendment -- and then start shipping them rifles. If every man and woman were armed, it would be a lot less digestible for a hungry China.  Ukraine is on its own, in spite of American promises to the contrary. There's no way that this leadership is going to bail them out, or even could if it wanted to try.

UPDATE: That Wisconsin hearing produced smoking gun evidence of a cash-for-get-out-the-vote scheme; 157,000 voters have the same voter registration number.