Tag Archive for national security

Downgrade

August 9, 2011 Editorials Comments Off
National Security
Joe Boyles – Guest Columnist

Last week’s downgrade of United States Treasury bonds by Standard and Poor’s is historic.  S&P has been rating our government bonds since World War I; this is the first downgrade.  The other two international rating agencies, Moody’s and Fitch, have not followed suit … yet — but can similar action be that far behind?

The fundamental reason behind the downgrade is our public debt, now approaching $14.5 trillion.  This level of debt is about 70 percent of our gross domestic product.  That’s bad, but the future looks even bleaker as the Obama Administration projects annual deficits in excess of a trillion dollars for as far as the eye can see.  This is unsustainable … which the S&P recognized when they downgraded our bonds from AAA to AA+.

The battle over the debt ceiling which concluded (temporarily) before the August 2nd deadline was a precursor to the downgrade.  The president and his party wanted a balanced approach which would include raising taxes on “millionaires and billionaires.”  (Jargon rhetoric like this makes my head explode.)  The Republicans countered with spending cuts and no tax increases.  I’m not certain who “won” the debate, but I am certain that we’ve turned the corner on the debt ceiling – no longer will Congress blindly raise our “credit card” limit as they have done dozens of times without some sort of debate on the prudence and what must give.  The days of blank check spending are over.

If that message needed reinforcement, then S&P delivered the coup de grace with Friday’s action.

Meanwhile, the president appears feckless in his response.  No president can control the economy, but he gets credit for times when things go well and blame when they don’t.  Right now, he’s getting a lot of criticism.  Will this hold true 14 months from now when the course of the next election is set.  Who knows what will happen between now and then, but economies are like aircraft carriers at flank speed – it takes time and space to slow and turn them around.

Let me give you a formula for getting this economy rolling again.  First, let’s decrease federal spending.  That means tackling entitlements and reforming them for the 21st Century, not the New Deal and Great Society they were created for.  Second, let’s reform the tax code and make it flatter.  Remove a bunch of silly loopholes that accumulate through lobbying by special interests.  Third, let’s pull the shackles off business in the form of health care mandates, environmental rules based on poor science and general regulation.  Fourth, let’s begin domestic energy (oil and gas) exploration and production and watch tens of thousands of jobs be added to the economy.  Then, let’s stand back and watch the American economy grow impressively and lead the world as it should.

Do I believe that Barack Obama can provide the leadership to make these things happen?  In a word, no.  He is ideologically incapable of closing the gap between the possible and the likely.  His quiver is empty.  The revolver is spent – no bullets, silver or otherwise.

While the American economy is headed downhill in a hurry, the president is out raising obscene amounts of money to finance his billion dollar reelection bid.  Seems out of touch, doesn’t it?  Who’s to blame for the economic morass?  According to Obama, everyone and everything but him.  More signs of unreality.  What solutions does he offer?  More spending on unemployment insurance, investment in green technology, blah, blah, blah.  You know Mr. President, if you keep digging the debt hole, sooner or later you’ll end up in China … where most of our dollars are headed anyway.

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Rumsfeld’s Rules

August 2, 2011 Editorials Comments Off
National Security
Joe Boyles – Guest Columnist

I just finished reading Donald R. Rumsfeld’s Known and Unknown, his extensive 2010 autobiography.  Next year, Don Rumsfeld turns 80.  He had led a remarkable life and apparently, saw fit to set his career down on paper.  Part of this was to explain his tumultuous six year stint as George Bush’s Secretary of Defense.

Don Rumsfeld hailed from the North Chicago suburb of Winnetka.  After schooling at Princeton and a stint as a naval aviator, he entered public life as a Congressional staffer.  In 1962, he was elected to Congress and served three terms before Richard Nixon selected him for a series of cabinet posts, including NATO ambassador.  During this time, Rumsfeld hired a young graduate student from Wyoming named Richard Cheney.  Their career paths would intersect repeatedly over four decades.

In August 1974, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency rather than face impeachment hearings over the Watergate Scandal.  His appointed Vice President Gerald R. Ford became the 38th president.  Immediately he sent for Don Rumsfeld to become White House chief of staff.  He was just 42.  The next year, Ford appointed Rumsfeld the youngest secretary of defense in our history.

After Ford lost the 1976 election, Rumsfeld left public life for private business, becoming CEO of the G. D. Searle, a worldwide pharmaceutical company which developed the artificial sweetener Aspartame under his tutelage.  Over the next quarter century, Rumsfeld would lead several large business organizations and serve both Republican and Democrat presidents as special envoy.

Following the contentious 2000 presidential election, George Bush asked Don Rumsfeld to unretire and return the Pentagon for a second stint as secretary of defense.  He held that position until after the 2006 mid-term elections when he retired to his New Mexico ranch.  Close to half of the book is devoted to his service in the Bush Administration.

Having led such an interesting and challenging life, Don Rumsfeld is known for having penned “Rumsfeld’s Rules.”  There are dozens of these rules and I’ve selected a few to give you a flavor of their wisdom as well as my take on them.

(Public money drives out private money.)  You can chisel this in stone.  Wealth is created in the private sector.  Government confiscates some of that wealth in the form of taxes to provide services.  In so doing, it removes wealth from the economic engine.

(Treat each federal dollar spent as hard earned.  It was … by the taxpayer.  The federal government should be the last resort, not the first.)   These are corollaries to the previous rule.  All too often, we expect the government to do something that we can do ourselves much more efficiently.  No one wastes money more than the government.  Never forget, it is easier to spend (and waste) someone else’s money than your own.

(Watch the growth of the middle management level.  Reduce the layers of management.  They put distance between the top of the organization and customers.  Find ways to decentralize.  Push authority down and out in the organization.)  I’ve combined three of the rules into one because they are related.  Bureaucracies grow in the middle.  It’s sort of like putting on pounds around the waistline.  If you want to improve an organization, trim the administrators that make up “middle management.”  When one of these folks retires, don’t replace him and see how the organization handles the vacancy.

(People do better in staff jobs if they have operational experience.)  Oh yeah.  Nothing can substitute for experience; they have walked in the other man’s shoes.

(Watch for the “not invented here” syndrome.)  This is how good ideas are killed in a bureaucracy – we didn’t invent it so it must be a bad idea.

(Develop a few key themes.  Repetition is necessary.)  This is the genius of someone like Ronald Reagan.  Develop a few key objectives (deregulate, lower taxes, defeat the USSR), hire good people, and focus their efforts on achieving the goals.

To me, one of the most interesting sections of Rumsfeld’s autobiography is his description of work in the private sector.  His success in business was indicative that the leadership and skills he developed in public life would translate to the business sector.

Normally, I’m not a fan of biographies, and even less of autobiographies which often are self-serving, but “Known and Unknown” is different.  It is well researched and supported by documentation, footnotes, and source material.  If you are interested in the foreign affairs of the first half of the Bush Administration, I recommend Rumsfeld’s memoirs.

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Bin “Gone” Laden

May 3, 2011 Editorials Comments Off

National Security
Joe Boyles Guest Columnist

Osama bin Laden is dead … room temperature … toes up. He’s also apparently fish food having been off-loaded into the North Arabian Sea. So ends the 10-year hunt for the al-Qaeda leader following the horrific attack of 9/11.
The raid on his compound in Abbottabad, about 40 miles north of Pakistan’s capital, was a joint CIA/Special Operations attack. It was apparently months in the planning. Friday morning, the President signed off on the operation which was delayed at least one day until weather conditions presented the best low-light level for a night attack.
The Special Ops Blackhawk helicopters appeared above the one acre compound at about 3:30 a.m. local time on Monday morning. The assault force rappelled down ropes onto the ground. One chopper lost power and the pilots crash landed the ailing bird inside the compound’s 10 foot walls, a neat piece of airmanship using night vision goggles. No one was hurt in the landing.
Most of our attackers were members of Seal Team Six, a very elite counter terrorism squadron based at Coronado Island near San Diego. These fellows are just about the toughest snake-eaters you can imagine. Just be glad they’re on our side. After their calls for surrender were met with small arms fire, our boys waded in and spilled blood.
They were on the ground for just forty minutes. In that time, they killed all males who resisted, rounded up women and turned them over to Pakistani authorities, and gathered a significant amount of intelligence loot. They were unable to fly the disabled helicopter, blew it up, and departed with no American casualties. The chopper with bin Laden’s remains flew to the USS Vinson (CVN-70) where his body was prepared for burial and, to paraphrase The Godfather, fed to the fishes when the Saudis refused to accept the remains. Bye, bye, bin Laden.
As most of you know, I’m pretty critical of our young president but in this case, I tip my hat. In 2008, he campaigned that he would go after bin Laden with a vengeance and he did. Rather than drop a laser guided bomb on the place, he sent in the Seals … boots on the ground … and they finished the job. Good for him; good for us.
Where does this leave us? Bin Laden may be gone, but his organization al-Qaeda isn’t. I think they’re pretty scattered but dangerous nonetheless. Yemen appears to be the most active cell. The intelligence coup that led to this raid indicates that we can put every aspect of al-Qaeda at risk. But this much is clear – al-Qaeda has lost its charismatic leader and the soul of the movement. His demise is big, really big.
This raid took place well inside Pakistan, supposedly our ally. Bin Laden wasn’t living in a rural cave in the mountains but rather in a city not far from the capital. How much did Pakistan military, political and intelligence officials know about his presence and chose to look the other way. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
Our Special Ops are the best in the world. Headquartered at Tampa’s McDill Air Force Base, this unique command of air, sea and land elements works around the clock to put our enemies at risk. The bad guys lose sleep at night worrying over who will come knocking. That makes us safer.
Let’s give full credit to the Central Intelligence Agency who developed the leads over several years that led to this recent success. And let’s also tip our hat to former President George Bush. He put the infrastructure in place after 9/11 to dismantle, harass and destroy al-Qaeda. Candidate Obama roundly criticized Bush for all that he did, but President Obama has seen fit to keep that infrastructure in place and exploit it. To put it kindly, he was “mugged by reality.”
Ten years ago, we looked extremely vulnerable to the brand of terror practiced by al-Qaeda. Today, we don’t look nearly so vulnerable. We have been lucky in some cases, but mostly, we have been good. Our intelligence, particularly with communications and finances, is topnotch. Our military assets are second to none. If you’re in the life insurance business, you wouldn’t want to sell a policy to an al-Qaeda terrorist.

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Revolution

February 8, 2011 Editorials Comments Off

National Security

Joe Boyles , Guest Columnist

What is happening on the streets of Cairo is seismic.  The revolt which began in Tunisia has spread eastward and may soon engulf far more Muslim nations across North Africa and the Middle East.  It is hard to stay in front of fast-changing events like these.
Revolutions are sometimes like wildfires – once begun, they quickly spread and are difficult to contain.  It began with the American Revolution in the late 18th Century.  Actually, our revolution was really misnamed since there was never an intention to overthrow the English government but rather, to secede from its control.
On the heels of our revolt from English rule came a real revolution in France … and it was a mess.  The people took to the streets to protest their horrid living conditions, stormed the central jail (Bastille), and soon forced the monarchy to step down.  What ensued was bloody and out-of-control.  In the early 1790s, more than thirty thousand lost their heads in a bloody rampage that eventually consumed the revolution itself.  What emerged was military rule under Napoleon, twenty years of war across Europe, and a fallen empire.  The French Revolution was an ugly chapter in man’s yearn for liberty.
The Russian Revolution during World War I is a classic study in the danger of a popular revolution being hijacked.  The seeds of anarchy in Czarist Russia had been underway for more than three decades when the popular uprising overthrew Nicholas II.  The moderate Kerensky government was in control for nearly a year when the Communists under Lenin and Trotsky wrestled away control.  Lenin’s movement was small but well organized.  They used terror to restore order and quickly subverted the opposition.  In essence, Lenin hijacked the Russian Revolution and made it his own.  The result was tyrannical rule and the death of tens of millions over the next seventy years.
A few years after the rise of the Communists in Russia, the National Socialists under Adolf Hitler attempted an unsuccessful coup in Southern Germany.  Hitler learned his lesson and over the course of several elections, gradually took power by democratic means.  Once in control, he brutally crushed the opposition and consolidated his stranglehold on industrial Germany.  What followed was arguably the darkest chapter in the history of civilization.
Following World War II, the Soviet Union extended its control over Eastern Europe and installed friendly, puppet governments.  When first Hungarians and later Czechs revolted against their oppressors, the Soviets brutally suppressed the revolts.  But sooner or later, dictators tire and opposition can only be quelled for so long before the simmering pot again boils over.  In the late 1980s, when labor unrest in Poland led to the fires of liberty throughout Eastern Europe, Soviet backed governments and eventually, the Soviet Union itself broke apart.
In South Vietnam, the Kennedy Administration tired of President Diem and sanctioned his overthrow in late 1963.  What ensued was a revolving door of governments that never again established confidence or continuity with the Vietnamese people.  What passed for a government could not withstand the pressure from their northern communist cousins.
In the late 1970s, unrest against the regime of the Shah of Iran boiled over.  The Iranian Revolution turned out to be a theocracy that plagues the world to this day.  Many blame President Jimmy Carter for not properly handling the events that unfolded in Tehran.  Some of that criticism is hindsight.
In looking back over the history, it seems that revolutions turn out badly more often than not.  It is a dangerous period.  The people of Egypt and elsewhere have a legitimate gripe against the tyrannically governments which repress liberty and human rights.  The danger is when opportunists hijack the revolution and replace the hated regime with something that often proves worse and far more dangerous.
Follow-up: To those who weighed in both pro and con to madisonfloridavoice.com under the question, “Why does Joe Boyles hate teachers and women?” I would simply respond that my article in the Carrier on January 26 (Public Sector Unions) never mentioned education and was gender neutral.  Many members of my family are and have been teachers, and I have the greatest respect for their contributions to education including my own.  Those who truly know me appreciate that I hold women in the highest regard.  And thanks to everyone for reading and considering what I have to say.

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