Lanes, Lies, Power, and Politics - Biden's NatSec Problem
what, exactly, do you do here?
The United States' Secretary of State, Tony Blinken - again the Secretary of State - is so out of his lane right here it is hard to tell if he even knows what his lane is as our chief diplomat.
This opinion of his - which in this venue is now American policy because he said it - is so firmly in the Secretary of Defense's lane that it almost defines it.
Once again, where is Secretary of Defense Austin? His ongoing silence and supine posture as the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor continue to steal his lunch money and girlfriends out in the open is not just professionally embarrassing - it endangers the nation and our allies.
Give it a listen. In essence he states the United States wouldn’t be able to support Ukraine if we were still in Afghanistan and that we cannot support two allies at once.
Either Blinken is speaking with authority on something he knows nothing about, he is simply lying in order to cover yet another policy disaster, or the American public has been fooled in to supporting a military industrial complex that exists for fun and profit - and ready for not much more than imperial policing.
I'll let you decide.
Our footprint in AFG, before our negotiated surrender on par with the Confederate surrender of Vicksburg to the Union Army, was incredibly small. We did not need to expend Javelin nor Stinger nor Harpoon missiles nor tens of thousands of 105mm and 155mm artillery rounds a month in Afghanistan.
Nope.
We have the largest defense budget in the world. AFG was an economy of force operation at the extreme and almost none of what UKR needs - besides a few helicopters - was needed by the ANSF to keep the Taliban at bay.
We have global alliances where we have obliged our nation to go to war to defend dozens of nations.
So, we finally admit to imperial overreach? We are admitting that our defense budget is laden with waste, fraud, and bloated workforce not ready to do the absolute minimum?
Is that what he is admitting?
If we are unable to support two allies in small to medium wars, then how in the hell will we be prepared to fight against the People's Republic of China in the Western Pacific?
DC exists for DC.
Austin is getting paid by Raytheon et al while SECDEF.
Blinken is probably just making a gaffe, that is he told the truth.
The worlds biggest Defense budget did budget $421 million for land artillery in FY22, just under 80,000 shells. 4 days of RuAF expenditure. It is estimated it could double production to 160K shells= 8 days. OTOH Austin is rich, everyone in DC is rich, and the military is humbled- a consistent policy of DoS since Korean war. Oh its not said, it’s Done .
Blinken is being honest.
It's almost certainly a combination of all three. He knows nothing about defense capabilities (other than what he hears at Cabinet meetings), so far Ukraine policy *has* been a policy disaster -- see the European economy, inflation, global bifurcation, etc. -- (so, yes, he is obfuscating), and we very much have sold our industrial base overseas since 1992 (in which he played a part along with the rest of the smart people [TM]), so we clearly aren't ready for anything other than imperial policing with expensive, boutique weapon systems.