We’re looking at that big bow wave and wondering how the heck we’re going to pay for it, and probably thanking our stars we won’t be here to have to answer the question. — Brian McKeon, Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy [2016] The most dangerous concern is [the use] of military force against […]
Much of what I have written about Taiwan defense issues assumes that the primary challenge facing Taiwanese forces and their allies is defeating (and thus deterring) a proper amphibious invasion. Two recent reports argue—convincingly, I think—that this assumption is wrong. In his testimony to Congress a few weeks ago, former DIA analyst Lonnie Henley asks […]
Photo by Katelynn & Jordan Hewlett (15 August 2020). Source. It inevitably will be asked why advanced industrial America has so violent a history, but this is not, I think, either as difficult or as interesting as another question: How could America have combined such a substantial degree of popular domestic violence with such a high […]
Hat tip to Paul Huang for finding this comic. Two years back I wrote an article for Foreign Policy with the title “Taiwan Can Win a War With China.” In a recent interview with Jordan Schneider (for his podcast ChinaTalk) I stated that I can no longer endorse the declaration in that title.[1] While I […]
Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War is aptly titled for a memoir that narrates the waves of death that washed over Iraq and Afghanistan in this new century. Readers today might be surprised to learn that the book was published in 2006. Filkins worked as a conflict journalist for the Los Angeles Times and the New […]
Buy this decal on Etsy Over at Foreign Policy, I have a new piece out that asks a few tough questions for the Marine Corps. The USMC is smack-dab in the middle of a transformational institutional revolution. It has decided to redefine itself as anti-China force, and is making some radical changes to its force […]
Let us say you are a man inclined towards riot. Perhaps breaking stuff gives you joy. Maybe the chemical cocktail that courses through your blood as you go about burning this and pummeling that provides a high that cannot be beat. Perhaps you feel pent up and pushed down in normal times; perhaps you glory […]
Infographic from the International Gas Union. Two months ago I wrote a post with the title “Losing Taiwan Means Losing Japan.” It described how the loss of Taiwan to the PRC would put Japan in a geopolitically untenable position, as the PLA Navy would then be capable of choking Japan into submission if conflict ever […]
image Source How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniencies. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the […]
Image source I have a new piece out in Foreign Policy. It takes a look at the changing balance of power between Pacific Command and the PLA, with a special focus on the vulnerabilities of US Forces Japan. This section describes the problem: The threat posed by China to forces stationed in Japan is real: […]
