What Happened Today: May 8, 2023
"Normalizing mass shootings in Texas"; New Disinfo kid on the block; Biden trails Trump by 7 points in 2024 match up; EU spat with Netanyahu's gov't
The Big Story
On Sunday, President Biden ordered that the flags at the White House and all public buildings be flown at half-staff in honor of the eight people massacred on Saturday by a gunman armed with an AR-15-style rifle at an outlet mall in Allen, Texas. It was the nation’s 199th mass shooting this year.
“This is no longer unimaginable,” said Texas Rep. Jarvis Johnson on Sunday. “We are almost to the point of normalizing mass shootings in Texas, and that is the most disturbing thing.” Since 2021, Texas alone has seen more than a dozen mass killings with four or more victims. Family members of those killed in the Uvalde school shooting last year have joined the effort by some state lawmakers to increase the minimum age to purchase an AR-15 rifle from 18 to 21, though the bill wasn’t expected to receive enough votes on the floor of the Texas House despite unexpectedly passing a committee vote on Monday. Speaking to the press before a vigil for the victims, who ranged in ages from 5 to 61, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he would not seek to tighten gun laws because they would not stem the rising number of shootings. Rather, the governor sought to focus on the “root cause, which is addressing the mental health problems behind” these shootings.
Avoiding conversations about both gun laws and the nation’s fraying mental health, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went instead for an anti-immigrant sentiment on Twitter, writing that in videos of the massacre circulating online the shooter, who had been shot to death by police at the scene, “appears Hispanic,” before noting that “Title 42 ends on Thursday and CBP says 700,000+ migrants are going to rush the border.” Allen Police Chief Brian Harvey said investigators “don’t have a lot” of information on the motive of the shooter, who was identified on Monday by authorities without confirming further details about his background. However, federal agents have linked him to social media posts espousing neo-Nazi ideas and at the time of the shooting he was reportedly wearing a chest patch that read “RWDS,” an acronym for “Right Wing Death Squad,” a term popular among white supremacy groups.
Read More: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/05/07/allen-shooting-guns-mental-health/
In The Back Pages: Can the Military Rebuild Itself?
The Rest
→ Following a security threat that prompted a Michigan high school to shut down for two days, and citing increased worries about keeping students safe amid the rising number of shootings across the country, Flint school district officials will ban the use of backpacks on school grounds at least until the end of the academic calendar. “In my 15 years of service here in Flint Community Schools, I’ve never felt the way I do now,” director of student services, Ernest Steward, said at a meeting announcing the district’s decision. In 2021 at a high school about 30 miles from Flint, one 15-year-old student shot 11 people and killed four students, though several parents in the Flint district were skeptical that the backpack ban could effectively deter a student determined to attempt a shooting. A Bureau of Justice Statistics report counted a total of 93 school shootings during the 2020-21 school year, the highest in more than two decades.
→ With four offices within the Department of Homeland Security dedicated to combating the influence of foreign disinformation, as well as the nascent Influence and Perception Management Office inside the Pentagon, and similar efforts at both the State Department and FBI, the director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that the sprawling disinformation campaigns will now all fall under the aegis of the Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC). Formed last September after new funding was approved by Congress, FMIC has received minimal acknowledgment publicly since first reported on by The Intercept, though Haines offered something of an overview to the panel of senators: “It encompasses our election threat work, essentially looking at foreign influence and interference in elections, but it also deals with disinformation more generally.” According to the legislation behind the FMIC’s formation, its concern with more general disinformation includes even “the public opinion within the United States”—a mandate so vaguely Orwellian to ensure both the rampant abuse of power across the intelligence community while also creating redundant government jobs by the thousands.
Read More: https://theintercept.com/2023/05/05/foreign-malign-influence-center-disinformation/
And if you’re still unclear about just how toxic these moves are, bookmark this: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation
→ A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that President Biden is trailing Donald Trump by a full 7 points in the general election matchup. Only 32% of those surveyed believed Biden had the “mental sharpness” to effectively serve as president, compared to 54% who felt the same of Trump, though age and acuity could become an election subplot as sentiment over the economy begins to dominate voter opinion. With the possibility of a recession still looming on the horizon, 54% of survey respondents said that, compared to Biden, Trump did a better job handling the economy.
→ The House Foreign Affairs Committee says it needs more detail from the State Department about the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan in 2021, threatening Secretary of State Antony Blinken with contempt of Congress if he doesn’t turn over classified documents in response to a subpoena. Committee Chair Rep. Michael McCaul wrote in a letter to Blinken on Friday that the material provided so far to the committee, including a dissent channel cabal written by State Department officials warning senior officials that Kabul could collapse quickly after troops withdrew, was not enough. With the support of both fellow Republicans as well as a number of Democrats, Rep. McCaul launched the probe into the botched withdrawal that left 13 U.S. military dead at the Kabul airport. “We never got a full accounting ... of what happened, why it happened the way it did,” McCaul said at the beginning of the investigation.
→ Tensions continue to flare between Brussels and Tel Aviv as the European Union’s delegation to Israel called off Tuesday’s diplomatic reception in Israel for Europe Day, an annual celebration of peace in Europe, citing concern that Benjamin Netanyahu had chosen Itamar Ben-Gvir, the hard-right national security minister, as Israel’s representative. “We do not want to offer a platform to someone whose views contradict the values the EU stands for,” the delegation said in a statement, referring to the settlements in Israel that the EU opposes and which Ben-Gvir has been a vocal proponent of expanding. “Even if EU representatives ‘do not endorse [his] political views,’ as they said in their statement,” Ben-Gvir’s office wrote in response, “they understand very well that Israel is a democracy, and in a democracy one can hear different views.”
→ The 34-year-old man who drove his Range Rover into a group outside a migrant shelter in Brownsville, Texas, on Sunday, killing eight and injuring 10 others, was charged with manslaughter and aggravated assault on Monday. Waiting on a toxicology report for the driver, who Brownsville Police Chief Felix Sauceda said had an “extensive rap sheet” and tried to flee the scene after the incident, authorities had not yet ruled out the possibility that the crash was intentional. Located about five miles from migrant camps across the border with Mexico, all of the victims outside the Brownsville migrant center were male and many of them had traveled to the United States from Venezuela.
→ On Monday, Columbia University announced the winners of the 107th Pulitzer prize, giving the nod for the best biography to Beverly Gage for her excellent G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, and the prize for top feature writing to Eli Saslow, for his narratives about homelessness and the drug overdose crisis. Likely less known to most readers, New York’s Andrea Long Chu took home the top prize for literary criticism. In April, Tablet contributing writer Blake Smith offered a portrait of Chu’s evolution as a critic, noting that “Chu ascribes to all women a rather particular condition of wanting to escape an absolutized, and inescapable, symbolic universe of maleness...by no means a condition that should be seen as paradigmatically female."
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/the-long-goodbye-andrea-long-chu
→ Smith College joins several other universities in abandoning the utterance of the term “field” (as in “field work,” or “going out into the field”) as it’s used by Smith’s graduate school for social work because the phrases “may hold negative associations,” administrators said in a statement last week. Students previously working on a “field team” will now participate in a “practicum learning team,” and those who were once “field instructors” are now called “clinical supervisors.” Earlier this year, University of Southern California’s social work program made essentially the same move, scrubbing the phrase “field work” from its operating lexicon because the words “may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.” Notably, the new policy at Smith was not a response to any complaints from students or staff or even alumni with lots of time on their hands. Rather, it was an entirely “proactive decision to bring the language of our program more in line with our goals and intentions,” according to a Smith College representative.
→ We are saddened to share the news of the passing of Fred Siegel, father to Tablet writer (and Scroll founder and editor) Jacob Siegel. Fred’s 1997 book The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities was a major contribution to the understanding of how postwar leaders of American urban centers struggled to combat crime in their jurisdictions. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and professor of history and humanities at Cooper Union, Siegel was also a longtime contributing editor to City Journal, which has collected several of his pieces below. Baruch dayan ha-emet.
Read More: https://www.city-journal.org/article/in-memoriam-fred-siegel
TODAY IN TABLET:
You Are Not Destined to Live in Quiet Times by Walter Russell Mead
Humanity’s third major technological revolution is leading us into a future more promising and also more dangerous than any since the dawn of history. It’s coming faster than you think.
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Can the Military Rebuild Itself?
As armed conflicts cover the globe, the United States struggles to gear up
By Mike Watson
As the second year of the war in Ukraine gets underway, American defense planners are growing worried. To supply the Ukrainians, the US, its partners, and its allies are exhausting their stockpiles of missiles and munitions and potentially leaving themselves vulnerable. The documents recently leaked on Discord only reveal what everyone already knows: Ukraine is low on ammo. The Ukrainians are using to good effect the artillery shells, surface-to-surface missiles, and man-portable Javelin and Stinger missiles they are receiving, but every shell and missile that goes to Ukraine is one less in the U.S. arsenal.
This problem is growing more acute as China’s military buildup tilts the balance of power in the Western Pacific and makes a major war there more likely, and some are calling for the United States to cut off support for Ukraine and focus on China. Ignoring that nine NATO allies have sent more aid to Ukraine as a share of their GDP than the U.S. has, Senator Josh Hawley demanded in February that “we should cut off U.S. military aid to Ukraine, until our European allies step up.”
The China-vs.-Russia debate obscures a bigger set of issues that affect our national security. Many of the weapons and munitions on their way to Ukraine would have limited utility in a fight in the Pacific Ocean, but there are some, such as Javelin and Stinger missiles, that both the Ukrainians and the Taiwanese need. The United States is sending Ukraine some of its own supplies of Javelins and Stingers, both of which it also sold to Taiwan in 2015 but still has not delivered. The very long delay is part of a larger problem for Americans, their partners and their allies: the United States cannot produce needed weapons quickly, and it has little ability to ramp up production in an emergency.
The Javelin missile debacle reveals many of the problems that impair America’s ability to arm and equip the U.S. military and its partners. After eight years of delays, Taiwan will finally begin receiving Javelins in the second half of 2023. However, they are far from the only weapons that the Taiwanese are waiting for, and some may take more than eight years to arrive. The United States announced in 2020 that it will sell Harpoon anti-ship missiles to Taiwan, but they may not arrive until 2029. In December, the total backlog to Taiwan approached $19 billion, greater than Taiwan’s total purchases during the Trump and Biden presidencies.
Ramping up production for even relatively uncomplicated weapons like the Javelin takes quite a bit of time. Some of its components, such as the rocket motors that power the missile, are made by only one company. Lockheed Martin is doubling its production of Javelins, but CEO Jim Taiclet warned “that will take a number of months, maybe even a couple of years to get there because we have to get our supply chain to also crank up.” As he put it in December, the problem is that “the U.S. defense industrial base is scoped for maximum efficiency at peacetime production rates,” not for fighting a major war.
This problem affects nearly every important weapon made in the USA. At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. enjoyed a “peace dividend” as it cut defense spending from six percent of America’s GDP to three percent, freeing up $1.7 trillion from 1989 to 2000. The Navy dwindled from 592 ships in 1989 to 318 in 2000, the Air Force lost one-third of its aircraft during the same time period, and the Army shrank from 18 active duty divisions to ten. Some of these cuts seemed to make sense at the time—after the Soviet Union collapsed, a large defense budget was difficult to justify—but as the international situation has grown more threatening, undoing that scale-back has been hard.
The US, its partners, and its allies are exhausting their stockpiles of missiles and munitions and potentially leaving themselves vulnerable.
The defense industrial base, the companies that arm and equip the U.S. military and its partners, took a haircut to pay for the peace dividend. At the end of the Cold War, there were 51 so-called prime contractors, and after a wave of cuts and consolidations only five were left standing. This shift initially appeared to mostly benefit the military and its suppliers. As other countries cut their defense budgets faster and deeper than the United States did, the primes had fewer customers and needed to focus on meeting the Pentagon’s requirements. The Pentagon could only squeeze the primes so hard though, since even the most penny-pinching program managers wanted to avoid ending up with only one supplier of advanced weapons systems.
However, the wave of consolidation has made some projects, particularly big-ticket items that defense contractors build their futures on, too big to fail. Late Senator John McCain denounced the F-35 fighter jet as “a scandal and a tragedy with respect to cost, schedule and performance,” but there was little he could do about it. Lockheed Martin would be in jeopardy if the F-35 were cancelled, and the Air Force, Marines and Navy had no other options waiting in the wings. Big companies like Raytheon and Boeing attract a lot of media attention and a fair share of critical coverage for filling their corporate boards with retired admirals and generals and for habitual cost overruns, but there are other problems that the media often overlooks.
The Post-Cold War squeeze impacted smaller contractors, “the little guys,” as well. Ryan Boone, a director at the Telemus Group and former Senior Analytic Advisor in the Pentagon’s Office of the Secretary of Defense, says there has also been significant “consolidation in the second and third tiers” of the defense industrial base. These more obscure companies make highly specialized products for, ultimately, one customer: Uncle Sam. According to Boone, many of these companies are small businesses, niche shops, or, in the most extreme cases, just “one guy” making critical components. If these often-overlooked specialists get sick, retire, or find more lucrative work, some advanced weapons cannot be repaired or produced until an alternative solution is found.
These companies often make components for multiple weapon systems. In an emergency, they would be challenged to increase production sufficiently to satisfy all demands that may arise. For example, there are two American companies that produce rocket motors for the US military. One of them, Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings, has a backlog of orders “approximately three times our annual sales,” according to CEO Eileen P. Drake. Williams International makes the turbofan for every cruise missile the Pentagon orders. A 2018 DOD report found that 98 percent of “critical components” for “key munitions” had only one source.
“This is an enormous problem. It’s not just specific to munitions, it applies across the board” according to a Congressional aide. In some cases, “at the secondary and tertiary level, there is no competition,” which can drive up prices. A single act of sabotage, industrial accident or hacking attack can also take out entire production lines: in 1996, one contractor decided to stop making the only source of a military rocket propellant rather than repair damage from a fire, and a Louisiana factory that makes critical components of over 300 munitions has yet to reopen after an accidental explosion two years ago. Presumably the Chinese, among others, have noticed this vulnerability.
These are not good problems to have as the global balance of power teeters precariously. Xi Jinping has said that “the world faces great changes unseen in a century,” and Rush Doshi, the National Security Council’s China director, warnsthat slogan “helps mark a new phase in PRC grand strategy - a global one.” As if to reveal what changes he has in mind, Xi said to Vladimir Putin on his most recent Moscow trip, “now there are changes that haven’t happened in 100 years. When we are together, we drive these changes.” When they were together in February 2022, Xi and Putin announced a “no limits” partnership. Putin attacked Ukraine that month. Xi has his own target list, and Taiwan is at the top.
The need to defend Taiwan is growing more urgent as the Chinese military prepares for 2027, the date that Xi Jinping has ordered it to be ready to conquer Taiwan. Rep. Mike Gallagher has called for Taiwan to move to the front of the line for weapons such as Harpoon missiles. Others caution that the Saudis have already signed a contract and paid for the ones in production, and a legal challenge could ensnarl the entire missile production line. Moreover, relations between Riyadh and Washington are rocky right now, and publicly downgrading our defense partnership with Saudi Arabia could cause greater strategic headaches.
As the congressional aide I spoke to noted, “there is no way to fix this in the near term.” However, if Congress and the Defense Department incentivize long-term investments, defense companies should build the capacity the US would need in a major war and thus demonstrate to China that a sneak attack will not succeed.
To make this happen, Congress will need to do one of its most basic jobs: write and pass a budget. The National Defense Industrial Association laments “in 13 of the last 14 years, the federal government has operated under a continuing resolution (CR) for part of the year,” which has frozen funding and discouraged defense companies from making needed investments. Arthur Herman, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute who wrote Freedom’s Forge, a history of the defense industrial base during World War Two, said CRs “do incalculable damage to the industrial base, by making it almost impossible to enter new orders for equipment, etc., except with emergency orders.” Air Force Chief of Staff CQ Brown, Jr., who is likely to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warns that another CR would “give our adversaries a year to move forward” while the military loses the ability to change course. “You can’t buy back time.”
As a stopgap, the military can also offer longer contracts. Nadia Schadlow, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a co-chair of the Hamilton Commission, says that the Biden administration’s decision to procure some munitions for multiple years at a time is helpful, but “these steps don't address the need to modernize facilities.” This is a problem because some naval shipbuilding and repair centers, and some munitions factories, “date back to World War Two.”
Congress can also make it easier to sell weapons to other countries so American companies have more customers, and so that those countries can share some of the US military’s burdens. Boone pointed out that the Foreign Military Sales process has a lot of hurdles: the purchasing country, the State Department, the Defense Department, and Congress all have to agree on what weapons to sell, and “the process can be much slower if the country is a strategic priority,” because more people want to add their input. To Schadlow, because no single organization is responsible for making FMS work, “it is the worst of what whole-of-government can produce.” Moreover, the regulations governing FMS were written during the Cold War when the distinction between civilian and military technologies was clearer. As dual-use technologies have proliferated, the process has proven “stubbornly resistant to modernization.”
But will it? There are some indications that Congress is rising to meet the China challenge, such as the China commission that is investigating Chinese belligerence and ways to defend against it, and the bipartisan push to prevent Biden from letting inflation cut the defense budget. However, “over the last decade and a half Congress has managed to come up with the two budget processes that do the most damage to our national security, CR’s and sequestration,” Herman noted. “That’s an astonishing record.”
America’s political leadership misjudged the Chinese Communist Party as China undertook one of the largest peacetime military buildups in history and destroyed millions of American jobs through predatory trade practices. A second failure, to respond adequately to a stronger and emboldened China, will be even costlier.
Mike Watson is the associate director of Hudson Institute’s Center for the Future of Liberal Society. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, Tablet, National Interest, National Review, The Hill, American Purpose, Providence, and National Affairs.
"A Bureau of Justice Statistics report counted a total of 93 school shootings during the 2020-21 school year, the highest in more than two decades."
Surely you mean "the highest ever" or "the highest since record keeping began," right? I don't think there were more than 93 school shooting in a single year more than two decades ago. The Columbine shooting was just over two decades ago, and that's the first school shooting I remember.