On June 6, Tokyo announced it will join Australia and the United States in building a $95 million undersea cable to counter China, according to ABC News. This development follows a string of American actions extending influence in the Pacific…
To the End of the Earth: The US Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945 John C. McManus (Dutton Caliber, 448 pages, $35) The best historians use hindsight to place events in a clearer perspective than heretofore understood. Military historian…
For the fourth time in less than 10 days, U.S. fighters have shot down a balloon, at least one of which was a Chinese spy balloon. One traversed the entire country before being shot down. Another entered Alaskan air space…
America’s extended nuclear deterrent has always rested on credibility. Credibility is one of those intangible factors in international relations that can mean the difference between peace and war and victory or defeat. Credibility is sort of like obscenity — it…
Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay By Craig L. Symonds (Oxford University Press, 496 pages, $29.95) We have no dearth of Political Generals, that is, with a capital “P.” Gen. Mark Milley, for example, claimed…
It’s Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2023. It’s been raining like mad insanity for about a week now and this follows several weeks of occasional rain. It was predicted for years that we in Sunny Cal were in for a Thousand Year…
On Friday, Japan released its new national security strategy, which the Financial Times characterizes as overturning “six decades of postwar security policy and arm[ing] itself with one of the world’s largest defense budgets to counter ‘an unprecedented and the greatest…
Michael J. Green is what was once called a “China hand” who served in the George W. Bush administration as director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council. He is also the author of a very good book about…
The Biden administration has requested funding for nine additional ships for the U.S. Navy in the 2023 fiscal year budget, but it also plans to retire 24 ships. In the next five years, the Navy is projected to reduce its…
When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi floated the idea that she would visit Taiwan, a member of China’s Communist regime said that the country might shoot down the aircraft she’d ride in on. China, of course, regards Taiwan as a renegade…