April 23 2024
I have not yet begun to fight!
1 OPINION US spending unsustainable
2 Niger evicts US special forces, creating blind spot for counterterrorism net
3 $60B Ukraine aid package unlikely to improve battlefield position
4 Population growth in America is slowing, with wide reaching consequences
5 China establishes information warfare department
4/23/1778 John Paul Jones leads American raid on Whitehaven, England
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1 OPINION US spending unsustainable
Debt interest payments to exceed defense spending this year
US fiscal policy is on a completely unsustainable path. To run a 7% deficit at a time of full employment is, to put it mildly, not what the macroeconomics textbooks recommend. More importantly, as the Congressional Budget Office has just pointed out, the relentless growth of the federal debt in public hands relative to gross domestic product — from 99% this year to a projected 166% by 2054 — will inevitably constrain future administrations, for the simple reason that an inexorably rising share of revenues will have to go on servicing the debt. My sole contribution to the statute book of historiography — what I call Ferguson’s Law — states that any great power that spends more on debt service (interest payments on the national debt) than on defense will not stay great for very long. True of Hapsburg Spain, true of ancien régime France, true of the Ottoman Empire, true of the British Empire, this law is about to be put to the test by the US beginning this very year, when (according to the CBO) net interest outlays will be 3.1% of GDP, defense spending 3.0%. Extrapolating defense spending on the assumption that it remains consistently 48% of total discretionary spending (the average of 2014-23), the gap between debt service and defense is going to widen rapidly in the coming years. By 2041, the CBO projections suggest, interest payments (4.6% of GDP) will be double the defense budget (2.3%). Between 1962 and 1989, by way of comparison, interest payments averaged 1.8% of GDP; defense 6.4%.
2 Niger evicts US special forces, creating blind spot for counterterrorism net
Niger has formally ordered the U.S. to withdraw counterterrorism troops and aerial drones from the country, driving the final nail in the coffin of American strategy to defeat a violent Islamist insurgency overrunning the heart of western Africa. The decision to expel American forces will likely accelerate contingency plans that would pivot U.S. strategy from trying to defeat al Qaeda and Islamic State where they are strongest to trying to keep militants from infiltrating neighboring countries along the West African coast.
3 $60B Ukraine aid package unlikely to improve battlefield position
The House vote to approve $60 billion in funding for Ukraine comes at a desperate moment for the country’s beleaguered defenders and holds the prospect of helping them stave off a Russian onslaught at the last possible moment. If approved by the Senate, as is widely expected, and then signed into law by President Biden as soon as Tuesday, the bill will unleash a flood of American military equipment that U.S. forces have positioned for quick deployment. But given Ukraine’s dire battlefield position and advances Moscow’s forces have made over recent months—during which they reinforced the roughly 20% of Ukrainian territory they held—the new help is unlikely to dramatically reverse Kyiv’s fortunes. Ukraine faces severe manpower shortages on the front, and President Volodymyr Zelensky said this month that Russian troops are firing 10 artillery shells for every one that his soldiers fire.
4 Population growth in America is slowing, with wide reaching consequences
Between 2010 and 2020 over half of the country’s counties, home to a quarter of Americans, lost population (see map). Over the coming decades still more will, because America’s population is growing more slowly. The change will be wrenching, because of America’s demographic and administrative peculiarities. Between 2010 and 2020 the number of people in the country grew by around 7.4%. That was the slowest decade of growth since the Great Depression (when the population grew by 7.3%). In the 1990s the growth rate was 13%. The main culprit is falling birth rates. The total fertility rate—a measure of how many children a typical woman will have in her lifetime—was steady or rising for 30 years from the mid-1970s. In 2008, however, it fell below 2.1, the level needed to keep the population stable, and has since declined to 1.67 (see chart 1). If it remains below 2.1, only immigration can keep the population growing in the long run. Yet net immigration, too, has been falling since the 1990s. The pandemic almost stopped the population growing altogether. In 2020 over 500,000 more people died than in 2019, even as the birth rate also fell. With borders closed and American diplomatic outposts shuttered, net immigration dropped precipitously. In 2021 the Census Bureau estimated that the population expanded by just 0.2%, the lowest showing in the country’s history. As covid-19 has receded, deaths have fallen back. And in the past year or so, according to estimates published in January by the Congressional Budget Office, immigration has increased, largely owing to people crossing the southern border illegally. But demographers do not think this surge will alter the long-term trend. This decade, according to William Frey, of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington, dc, the population will probably grow by around 4%. Even if you assume immigration stays high, Mr Frey notes, America “would still show slower growth in coming decades than in any decade in the nation’s history”.
5 China establishes information warfare department
China has established a new information warfare department under the direct command of its top military body as it begins its largest restructuring of the armed forces in more than eight years. The shift of information warfare to the direct command of the Central Military Commission — the top Communist party and state organ that controls the People’s Liberation Army — would hand Chinese leader Xi Jinping even more direct control over the military, analysts said.
The space and cyber forces would also be brought under a new command structure, it said, de facto abolishing the Strategic Support Force. Under the SSF, the information forces had been in charge of collecting technical intelligence and providing intelligence support to regional military chiefs.
4/23/1778 John Paul Jones leads American raid on Whitehaven, England
At 3 a.m. on April 23, 1778, Commander John Paul Jones leads a small detachment of two boats from his ship, the USS Ranger, to raid the shallow port at Whitehaven, England, where, by his own account, 400 British merchant ships are anchored. Jones was hoping to reach the port at midnight when ebb tide would leave the ships at their most vulnerable. Jones and his 30 volunteers had greater difficulty than anticipated rowing to the port, which was protected by two forts. They did not arrive until dawn. Jones’ boat successfully took the southern fort, disabling its cannon, but the other boat returned without attempting an attack on the northern fort after the sailors claimed to have been frightened away by a noise. To compensate, Jones set fire to the southern fort, which subsequently engulfed the entire town.
After the raid on Whitehaven, Jones continued to his home territory of Kirkcudbright Bay, where he intended to abduct the earl of Selkirk, then exchange him for American sailors held captive by Britain. Although he did not find the earl at home, Jones’ crew was able to steal all his silver, including his wife’s teapot, still containing her breakfast tea. From Scotland, Jones sailed across the Irish Sea to Carrickfergus, where the Ranger captured the HMS Drake after delivering fatal wounds to the British ship’s captain and lieutenant. In September 1779, Jones fought one of the fiercest battles in naval history when he led the USS Bonhomme Richard frigate, named for Benjamin Franklin, in an engagement with the 50-gun British warship HMS Serapis. The USS Bonhomme Richard was struck; it began taking on water and caught fire. When the British captain of the Serapis ordered Jones to surrender, Jones famously replied, I have not yet begun to fight! A few hours later, the captain and crew of the Serapis admitted defeat and Jones took command of the British ship. Jones went on to establish himself as one of the great naval commanders in history; he is remembered, along with John Barry, as a Father of the American Navy. He is buried in a crypt in the U.S. Naval Academy Chapel at Annapolis, Maryland, where a Marine honor guard stands at attention in his honor whenever the crypt is open to the public.
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