The School of War Reader: The Historical Case for Trump’s Riviera
The Historical Case for Trump’s Riviera
Andrew Roberts, Washington Free Beacon
Trump's Gaza plan has historical precedents: if you lose a war of aggression, bad things tend to happen to you:
In fact, historical precedent suggests that Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel that day, and its condign punishment by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), have severe implications for whether the Gazans still have the right to decide their own destiny, and who governs them. For again and again in the past, peoples who unleash unprovoked aggressive wars against their neighbors and are then defeated—as the Gazans have been on any conceivable metric—lose either their government or their sovereignty, or both. It would be strange were Hamas somehow to buck this historical trend.
Factors Shaping the Future of China's Military
Mark Cozad, Jennie W. Wenger, RAND
A must-read report on how China’s demographic challenges may affect its military strategy, readiness, and lethality:
China’s demographic trends do not portend a crisis for the PLA; there will be plenty of future recruits to fill the ranks. The PLA’s primary demographic challenge will be whether it can build and develop the type of military that Xi envisions. Thus, the problem is not solely a demographic challenge; it includes cultural, social, and political components. China’s future operational model requires access to talent that it has struggled to obtain, in part, because of the PLA’s culture and role in society. The elite force that the PLA has envisioned may be out of reach based on its ability to attract talent, which appears to be a problem it cannot overcome despite repeated attempts.
High-Tech Friendly Fire: America’s Technological Self-Sabotage in its Cold War with Beijing
Michael Sobolik
Former show guest Michael Sobolik identifies the troubling ways Beijing threatens our critical infrastructure and key technologies:
American complicity in PRC technological dominance has both enriched and strengthened Beijing. The acme of sound strategy is crafting asymmetric policies that force adversaries to compete on weak terrain. Washington could do this easily by targeting the very capability it helped build decades ago: China’s “Great Firewall.” Beijing’s censorship and surveillance apparatus is not a sign of strength, but an indicator of insecurity. Complicating the CCP’s ability to control information within the PRC’s borders would also serve as a sort of redemption for America, targeting the very threat it helped construct so many years ago.
Required to Fail, Beyond Documents: Accelerating Joint Advantage through Direct Resourcing and Experimentation
Bill Greenwalt and Dan Patt
A case for getting rid of the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS):
JCIDS has failed too completely, too systematically, to be rescued by another committee’s review or a fresh coat of bureaucratic paint. The DoD needs to burn it down to its smoldering foundations and let it vanish into history, not quietly retired but deliberately, decisively erased. In this new era of strategic competition—when speed, agility, and bold conceptual leaps are the lifeblood of national security—the US military can’t afford even the illusion of potential JCIDS reform. No new KPP, no revised membership, no inspired PowerPoint deck or new formatting appendix can salvage it. JCIDS is beyond redemption, and the only responsible course is to put it out of its misery, carve it from the DoD’s body, bury it, and salt the ground so that nothing resembling it ever grows back. Now is the time for courage, not to fix JCIDS but to kill it.
Trump Outsmarts China on Green Energy
Walter Russell Mead, The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
How the Trump administration's climate approach will make China’s life difficult:
China today is a combination of extraordinary economic and industrial success and monumental failure. The ruinous demographic consequences of its one-child policy, the explosive mix of financial and social pressures wrapped up in the real-estate bubble, and the excess industrial capacity resulting from decades of aggressive state planning loom ever larger over China’s future. Mr. Trump’s proposed upending of global climate policy would transform China’s drive to dominate the energy transition from a major win to an expensive misfire for Beijing. … In times like ours especially, with one technological revolution after another reshaping the economic, social and political landscapes, the world is radically unpredictable. Neither Chinese nor net-zero technocrats have the skills needed for effective navigation in the storms ahead.
China Investment Fund Disclosures Probed by State Attorneys
Daniel Flatley, Bloomberg (paywall)
Great to see state-level scrutiny our financial institutions’ risky ties to China:
The Republican attorneys general of more than a dozen states are probing some of the US’s largest asset managers and financial institutions for what they characterize as their misrepresentations about the risks of investing in China. … “Many of the largest asset managers in the world appear to make misrepresentations and omit essential disclosures for funds that include Chinese investments,” the attorneys general wrote. These omissions may make it “impossible” for state pension plans and other investment vehicles to “invest in funds with China exposure without violating their fiduciary duty.”
Thank you for these essays, there's a lot to chew through here