Wednesday, November 13, 2024

Pentagon Has Two Years to Prevent World War III

 

Xi Jinping has ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to seize Taiwan by 2027. Whether he launches an invasion may depend on President Trump’s defense secretary. If confirmed by the Senate, Army National Guard veteran and Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s nominee, will have to confront the collapse of deterrence in Europe and the Middle East, resource constraints on Capitol Hill, recruitment challenges, and a deteriorating balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. The only way to promote peace is to go to war on day one—not with China, Russia or Iran but with the Pentagon bureaucracy.

The first task is to fix the U.S. Navy. America needs a maritime industrial base that can counter China’s. Pentagon requirements for building maritime assets involve too many uncoordinated stakeholders. The Pentagon establishes war-fighting requirements—such as the number of missiles on a ship—without regard to interdependent technical specifications such as that ship’s center of gravity. When those technical specifications aren’t tightly linked to war-fighting requirements, the mismatch can cause underperformance or unplanned costs and time. The Defense Department should return to the board model that served the Navy well until the 1960s. The Navy would have a forum of senior stakeholders with a chairman empowered to decide both requirements and specifications, ensuring that these work in harmony.

The Navy should also create an office focused on expediting the development and deployment of certain war-fighting technologies, similar to the Rapid Capabilities Office at the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force. The next secretary should insist on more flexible processes to deliver unmanned surface, aerial and underwater vehicles with speed and at scale. He must also work with Congress to help shipyards attract and retain talent.

Rebuilding the maritime industrial base can also help save Aukus—the security partnership between Australia, the U.K. and the U.S.—which is in danger of stalling. Under the Aukus agreement, the U.S. Navy intends to sell Australia at least three Virginia-class attack submarines by the early 2030s. To realize this goal, the Navy needs to build more than today’s 1.2 hulls a year and shrink maintenance backlogs that have sidelined nearly 40% of the fleet. Addressing these challenges will demand consistent funding, which will come only if t

World War III Warning Issued by Retired General

 etired four-star General Jack Keane has said "World War III is in the future" while discussing the U.S. election's impact on global stability.

Donald Trump won last week's election at a time when the western world is grappling with a war in the Middle East, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and tensions with North Korea and China.

General Keane has said that while Trump's victory will force U.S. adversaries to "reassess," the world is headed for "global war."

He told Fox News' Life, Liberty & Levin that the global security challenges that we are facing, "are the most serious, the most dangerous and the most challenging we have had since World War II.

He added: "And I do believe that we're in a pre-war era leading to global war - that is the status that we're facing."

General Keane went on to add that "all of these adversaries - China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, who are cooperating, collaborating coordinating together in a degree that exceeded the expectations of all of our intelligence agencies, by the way, and they have been honest about that appraisal" will have to "reassess, based on this election that's taken place."

"Because they have been acting so aggressively, so assertively, because they believe that our leadership in the United States is weak, that we've lost the political will to confront them, much less go and fight them," he added.

Later on in the interview, General Keane said: "This election has been a seminal event. And I'm convinced that President Trump knows that World War III is in the future.

"And we have got to take action to restore deterrence in dealing with our adversaries. And one of those is rebuilding a military - it has to be done. And we have to fix how the Pentagon does its business, or we're going to be throwing taxpayers' money away."

General Keane went on to say: "And we absolutely have to support our allies who are fighting these adversaries. Israel is fighting a major adversary - give them everything they need to finish it as soon as possible.

He added: "Ukraine is fighting Russia - give them everything they need and finish it as soon as possible. These are investments in our security when our allies are fighting our adversaries."

A major theme in Trump's campaign message was his promise to end wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, often claiming that they would never have started if he was in office.

The President-elect has reportedly spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a post-election phone call, according to The Washington Post, which said Trump reminded Putin about "Washington's sizeable military presence in Europe" and said he would look for a follow-up conversation to discuss a "resolution of Ukraine's war."

Steven Cheung, Trump's communications director, told Newsweek in an emailed response to a request for comment that "we do not comment on private calls between President Trump and other world leaders."

Meanwhile, a senior Hamas official has called for an immediate end to Israel's war against the group in the Gaza Strip in a statement shared with Newsweek in the wake of Trump's victory.

In regards to North Korea, Pyongyang responded to Donald Trump's claim that the nation's leader Kim Jong Un misses him, saying it does "not care" about his re-election.

Chinese President Xi Jinping called President-elect Donald Trump to congratulate him on his win, in a statement that also said he hopes China and the U.S. will strengthen communication, "properly manage differences" and "find a correct way for China and the United States to get along in the new era, so as to benefit both countries and the world."

Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said that "Iran respects (the American people's) right to elect the President of their choice" and called for "respect," insisting that Iran is "NOT after nuclear weapons" and denying accusations that an Iranian man was involved in a murder-for-hire scheme to kill Trump.

Melania Trump Sets the Record Straight About Not Meeting With Jill Biden

 

Future First Lady Melania Trump did not join her husband, President-elect Donald Trump, at a White House meeting on Wednesday with President Joe Biden. 

In a statement, the Office of Melania Trump wished her husband “great success” in the transition process, but slammed “several unnamed sources in the media” for providing “false, misleading, and inaccurate information” about the ordeal. 

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“Be discerning with your source of news,” the statement, shared on X, said.

This week, the Daily Mail reported that Trump was “snubbing” Jill Biden by skipping the visit to the White House (via Daily Mail):

Traditionally, when the outgoing president hosts the incoming president-elect in the Oval Office, the first lady hosts her successor for tea in the residence. 

Michelle Obama hosted Melania Trump for tea in the Yellow Room after the 2016 election. However, Melania Trump did not meet with Jill Biden after the contentious 2020 race as Donald Trump falsely and repeatedly claimed he was the true win

A source told Daily Mail that the two women have not spoken since Donald Trump defeated Harris in the election.

Daily Mail claimed that Jill Biden’s office “extended congratulations and a joint invite to the Trumps to meet at the White House.”

Reportedly, the Trumps have not been back to the White House since they left the morning of Biden’s inauguration in 2021.

Thanks to Tim Walz, Kamala Lost This Key State

 

Vice President Kamala Harris’ first significant campaign decision backfired almost immediately, costing her and the Democratic Party the keys to the White House. 

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Harris’s choice to pick Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) over Jewish Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) had a lasting effect that, according to a report, is among the top reasons she lost to President-elect Donald Trump. Exit polls reveal that in addition to Harris struggling to unify the Democratic base, her running mate, Walz, also had trouble rounding up Americans from a critical group: Jewish voters. 

Although the Harris-Walz ticked won Pennsylvania  Jewish voters 48 to 41 percent against Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance, leaving Shapiro off the ticket was a significant failure for Democrats. A survey conducted by Honan Strategy Group for the Teach Coalition, a branch of the Jewish Orthodox Union, found that 53 percent of Jewish voters would have preferred Shapiro as vice president over Walz.

If 53 percent had voted for Harris and had Shapiro been her running mate, support for Trump would have decreased to 38 percent.  

Ultimately, Trump and Vance won Pennsylvania by securing the state’s 19 electoral votes, 50.4 percent to Harris’ 48.6 percent.

Meanwhile, 43 percent of Pennsylvania voters suggested that the increase in antisemitism influenced how they voted in the 2024 election. Ironically, Shapiro was reportedly targeted by an “ugly, antisemitic campaign.” As a result, Harris failed to secure the majority among a group traditionally favored by Democrats. 

“The far-left has made anti-Israel activity a cornerstone. They have sway in the Democratic Party,” the founder and CEO of the Teach Coalition, Maury Litwack, said. “This is a wake-up call for the Democratic Party in New York.”

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) accused the Democratic Party of being antisemitic. 

“You oughta ask yourself why didn’t she pick Josh Shapiro as her VP?" Texas Cruz said during an interview on Fox News. “The answer is, in today’s Democrat Party, they could not stomach a candidate who was Jewish."

Kamala Harris Was Always Doomed


The presidential race was not unpredictable, as the now once again discredited polls swore to us.

The Republicans had made massive gains in voter registration since 2020, when Donald Trump lost the Electoral College by only a few thousand strategically placed votes.

Republicans began to master the transition to non-Election Day balloting—first engineered by the Left in 2020 under the pretext of COVID-19.Republicans not only vastly exceeded their early or mail-in voting totals of 2020, but by Election Day they often outpaced Democrats.

For months, it was widely reported, albeit grudgingly, that there were large defections in Hispanic and African American voters from Vice President Kamala Harris.

The betting odds over the past three weeks usually favored Trump.

Harris simply could not run on anything she had so emphatically promoted in the past—given these left-wing, unpopular, and failed policies had no majority support.

So, the chameleon Harris renounced her prior 30 years of earlier radical advocacy that, along with her race and gender, had forced Joe Biden in 2020 to select her as vice president.

There was no way Harris could still support banning fracking, defunding police, opposing border security and the wall, or calling for mass amnesties and an end to the Border Patrol.

Nor could Harris still promote racial reparations, ending private health care insurance, or advocating higher income and capital gains taxes as well as a wealth tax.

Much less could Harris still boast of wanting mandatory “buyback” or confiscation of some semi-automatic weapons—including entering private homes to seize them.

So given all that, Harris simply flipped—and serially lied about who she was, renouncing her entire political career.

Indeed, Harris began to copycat Trump’s own positions. And so, she never convinced the electorate that she would not flip back to her earlier radicalism once elected or even in defeat finishing out her vice-presidential term.

There were three damning realities that even if Harris had been a gifted politician and an adept speaker, she could never have changed.

One, Harris was preposterously running as a turn-the-page, new-generation candidate.

But why had she not sought to implement such a “new chapter” for the prior 45 months as an incumbent vice president, especially while in office during the campaign itself?

Voters knew the answer: The entire Biden-Harris tenure was an utter, far left-wing disaster, one for which the radical Harris 1.0 had for three-plus years claimed co-ownership.

Two, why did Harris avoid all impromptu interviews and the media for most of the campaign—only to reverse course and seek out reporters when her polls eroded?

Did it hurt Harris more to avoid the media—or meet with reporters and thus confirm her inanity to millions of viewers and listeners?

Three, why did Harris serially lie to America that Biden was hale and vigorous as president—until hours before his senility prompted leftist donors and party insiders to force him off the ticket?

And why could she not declare her independence from the historically unpopular Biden?

Harris instead chose to terrify voters to vote against a demonized and “fascist” Trump rather than to vote for Harris and her make-believe agendas.

But even in demonizing Trump, the maladroit Harris hit a wall.

By campaign’s end, Trump’s favorables were often higher than her own.

His prior four years as president polled higher than the current Biden-Harris train wreck.

Trump, the purported “racist,” won more Hispanic and black voters than past “moderate” Republicans such as Bob Dole, John McCain, or Mitt Romney.

It was hard to damn Trump as a crazy fascist when iconic liberal figures, like Robert Kennedy Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard, were campaigning for him.

Trump had reinvented the Republican Party by substituting ecumenical, middle-class solidarity for polarizing racial tribalism. Elitist Democrats were left to cater to the interests of their well-off and very rich donors as well as the subsidized poor.

Finally, workaholic Trump campaigned nonstop for two years, won all the Republican primaries, and was endorsed by his two chief primary rivals.

In contrast, the Harris “nomination” was the product of a coup that, in 48 hours, removed from the ticket an incumbent president, nullified the will of his 14 million primary voters, and coronated Harris, who had neither won nor ever entered a primary.

That late July forced abdication of Biden lent an air of illegitimacy to Harris’s candidacy, as well as truncating the time available to campaign.

Finally, Harris’ first major decision was to nominate as her vice president the buffoonish and inept Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. His radicalism, serial lying, and herky-jerky “weirdness” proved a force multiplier of her own mediocrity.

In contrast, the calm, empathetic, and astute Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, eviscerated Walz in their sole debate and did the same to the media.

Add it all up—and Harris and her star-crossed candidacy were simply and rightly doomed.