Category: Born again Cynic!
A U.S. M109 Paladin howitzer drives off the vessel Liberty Peace during offloading operations at the port of Koper, Slovenia on December 28, 2024. This Reception, Staging, and Onward Movement (RSOM) operation in the port of Koper is bringing in 1-3ID, the next Regionally Aligned Force (RAF), into the European Theater. These forces will be then transported by the 21st Theater Sustainment Command to their forward operating sites across NATO where they will conduct interoperability training with Allies and partners. The intent of these RAFs is to assure our allies and deter all adversaries.
NATO’s June summit in The Hague will present a critical opportunity for America’s allies to reaffirm their commitment to collective security. The worsening security environment in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific can only be met by increased burden-sharing from all NATO members.
NATO: An Alliance Ripe for Change
Longstanding imbalances in defense expenditures and strategic responsibilities within the alliance have culminated in a vital need to undertake four reforms.
Reinforce Article 3: Commitment to Self-Defense
Article 3 of the North Atlantic Treaty requires NATO members to “maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.” There are legitimate concerns that many nations may not be fully capable of defending themselves, let alone aiding the collective capacity to support one another in conflict.
According to a recent analysis by the Heritage Foundation, America’s NATO allies have collectively underfunded their defense commitments by more than $827 billion. Notable shortfalls include Germany ($249 billion), Italy ($150 billion), and Spain ($150 billion). These shortfalls represent a decade of underinvestment in capabilities and maintenance. The end result is less-capable militaries
During this period, the U.S. averaged defense spending equivalent to 3.42 percent of GDP, while the average NATO member spent 1.59 percent—less than half as much as the U.S. spent and well below NATO’s 2 percent benchmark first articulated in 2006 and reaffirmed by all members at the 2014 Wales Summit.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 exposed the consequences of decades of underinvestment. European nations have struggled to deliver on promised military support to Ukraine, with depleted stockpiles and limited industrial capacity—especially in munitions—undermining their ability to take the lead on military aid to Ukraine.
The 2 percent minimum has become a political bellwether in Washington, and fulfilling these obligations will strengthen transatlantic relations.
Raise NATO Spending Targets to at Least 3 percent
NATO’s current defense-spending target of 2 percent has proven insufficient to deter aggression. There are now growing calls for a 3 percent threshold—not as a new obligation, but as a necessary correction for more than a decade of underinvestment. In fact, most countries that have a deficit in spending will likely take until 2030 to 2035 just to reach the original 2-percent minimum target agreed upon in 2014.
This higher minimum threshold would accelerate rearmament in munitions production, military mobility infrastructure, and training. It would signal strategic resolve.
Reform the 20 Percent Equipment and R&D Requirement
The 2014 Wales Summit also set a target for NATO members to allocate at least 20 percent of their defense budgets “on major equipment, including related Research & Development.” However, many nations only met this metric by spending below the 2 percent minimum target, undercutting the policy’s intent.
For example, Spain has consistently met the 20 percent equipment requirement, but only spent 1 percent of overall GDP on defense. When looking only at the equipment expenditure target, Spain could claim to have overspent the minimum target by $1.3 billion since 2014. However, when considering that the target is to spend 0.4 percent of GDP on equipment—20 percent of 2 percent of GDP—Spain is down $28.4 billion on equipment since 2014.
Therefore, NATO could explore reforming its guideline by setting a floor on equipment spending that uses GDP as a reference. For example, a new standard could be to spend 0.6 percent of GDP for equipment—20 percent of a revised 3 percent GDP minimum. Given Europe’s travails in delivering military equipment to Ukraine on promised timelines, these conversations are both timely and germane. Further, implementing such a policy is prudent for any individual nation, whether or not it is formally codified in a declaration.
Address the Fiscal Realities of the United States
After decades of overspending, the United States is approaching its fiscal limits. Interest payments on U.S. national debt are set to exceed annual defense spending. Washington cannot afford to subsidize allies while bearing an outsized share of global security burdens. As China adopts an increasingly bellicose posture toward Taiwan, deepens ties with Iran, and provides support for Russia’s actions in Ukraine, NATO must grapple with global instability and embrace genuine burden-sharing . The most significant thing European NATO members can do to help America deter China is to provide the bulk of conventional deterrence in Europe so that U.S. forces can shift to the Indo-Pacific.
An F-35A Lighting II takes off for a Red Flag-Nellis 24-2 night mission at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, March 18, 2024. The presence of the F-35s offers the U.S., Allies, and partners a versatile and highly capable system, enhancing collective defense measures while reinforcing the NATO Alliance’s commitment to leveraging top-tier military capabilities for regional security and deterrence. (U.S. Air Force photo by 1st Lt. Jimmy Cummings)
NATO must use the Hague summit to recommit to Article 3; adopt a robust 3-percent-of-GDP defense-spending target; consider setting equipment-spending standards to 0.6 percent of GDP; and recognize the fiscal limitations facing the United States.
Failure to act now, individually and collectively, will increase the likelihood of future conflict. Decisive reform, however, will ensure NATO remains a credible force for peace and deterrence well into the 21st century.
About the Authors:
Miles Pollard is an economic policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis. Kyle Mendelson was a member of Heritage’s Young Leaders Program.
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How far we have come huh?
Four years ago, when the country was still reeling in the aftermath of the 2020 election and the Capitol protest of Jan. 6, 2021, every loudmouth liberal — politicians, editorial writers, opinion columnists and barstool boors — was mouthing the same thing about people on the losing side: They were all branded “election deniers.”
It was nothing new, really. Back in 2017 and for the next couple of years, Hillary Clinton was travelling around the country and even around the world, blaming everyone and everything other than herself for losing in November 2016. She simply couldn’t acknowledge she was a lousy candidate and her campaign people weren’t very good at counting Electoral College votes.
Same Old Same
And so it goes with gun prohibitionists. Whether they are federal court judges, state-level politicians, members of Congress or members of the media, there are legions of people who stubbornly refuse to recognize U.S. Supreme Court rulings in 2008 (Heller), 2010 (McDonald) and 2022 (Bruen), all of which affirmed the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects a fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms. The definition of this problem is DENIAL.
Even today, with all of the evidence and settled law running against them, gun control zealots continue insisting the high court was wrong. They claim the bearing of arms applies only to members of the militia, whom they define as members of the National Guard. If they get tripped up on that argument, they zero in on the term “well-regulated,” insisting it refers to strict gun control, which it certainly does not.
Long story short, the gun prohibition movement — a label which they will vehemently reject — is fresh out of rational arguments and truth left them in the dust a long time ago.
Some months ago, I had an exchange of emails with a liberal newspaper columnist who didn’t think people should be upset about having to jump through bureaucratic hoops in order to purchase a firearm. It became obvious this fellow wasn’t concerned about infringing on someone else’s rights, especially rights with which he did not agree. Background check? No big deal. Waiting period? No great inconvenience. It wasn’t his ox getting gored, and besides, I was reminded, guns can be used to kill people.
Yeah, and so can knives, scissors, golf clubs, baseball bats, tire irons, claw hammers, hatchets, axes, bricks, rocks, screwdrivers, shovels, jack handles, ropes, table lamps, skateboards and a host of other objects which all have one thing in common: None of these things require a background check at time and point of purchase. There are no waiting periods. You don’t have to provide identification, proof of citizenship or anything but cash or a credit card.
The right to keep and bear arms, which is protected by the Second Amendment, is the only constitutionally enumerated right subjected to this degree of prior restraint. No other tenet in the Bill of Rights is so encumbered with prerequisites as the Second Amendment.
“But guns need to be regulated,” is the stock argument from the gun ban crowd.
Our answer should be, “We’re not talking about guns; we’re talking about rights!”
Talking point — What other right do anti-gunners think should require getting a permit from police before exercising it?
Talking point — Nobody would tolerate having to wait three, seven or 10 days to speak with an attorney if they were arrested and charged with a crime.
Talking point — “Mandatory buyback” is gun confiscation with compensation, and is tantamount to committing sexual assault but then tossing $20 to the victim.
Talking point — Saying nobody is coming after anyone’s guns in one breath, and then immediately saying so-called “assault weapons” should be banned is absolutely contradictory. Banning an entire class of firearms translates to taking someone’s gun(s). Insisting otherwise is delusional.
The Next Big Thing
If the Supreme Court hasn’t already done so by the time you read this, sometime this spring the nine justices will hand down a ruling in the case known as Garland v. VanDerStok which will either affirm or reject the ability of the government (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) to regulate so-called “ghost guns.” These are firearms built by home gunsmiths using parts kits that are not serialized.
If the Court says unserialized guns are protected by the Second Amendment, listen for shrieks of agony and predictions of the downfall of modern civilization from the same people who insist there really is no individual right to keep and bear arms. This, too, would be an exhibition of denial from a crowd who believes constitutional protections only apply to rights they favor.
On the other hand, if the Court says homemade firearms must have serial numbers, it may not alter the social/political landscape all that much unless there is an effort to build a registry of those firearms. Then watch for a flood of litigation based on Second and Fourth Amendment grounds.
Such a scenario would put liberals in a very tough spot because they would be immediately faced with a challenging dilemma: How will this be enforced? Police simply cannot just walk into someone’s home and start searching for unserialized firearms, same as they cannot just walk into someone’s home and search through private papers, or look for other items. Civil rights attorneys will get rich because more than one right would be trampled on, and at that point, we’re talking about constitutionally protected rights liberals do value and will zealously protect.
Which brings us back around to rights, and denial. Rights are special, they are all equal in importance and are therefore entitled to the same ferocious defense. Gun owners are already well aware of this principle, while anti-gunners are behind the learning curve.
So long as we keep in perspective this conflict is not about guns, but about rights, the Second Amendment community will continue to hold the high ground. We cannot afford to give it up without a fight.
GUNCRANK DIARIES
Love. It’s the glue that binds humanity together. True love is selfless. True love is sacrificial. True love overlooks faults. One chaotic evening in the emergency department, I saw for real the indomitable power of true love.
Our heroine was 29 years old. She arrived by POV (Personally Owned Vehicle) attended by her boyfriend. He was doting and attentive. The fact she was conscious and conversational shocked me. She had been shot in the head.
She was sitting up when we met, a scant dribble of dark blood tracking down the side of her face. Her left eye bulged monstrously. Bullet wounds are almost mystically sinister up close, like the blackness of an evil man’s soul. This one seemed about the diameter of a pencil and was centered on her left temple.
Miracle Of Misfortune?
I don’t know why, but we always asked what happened. It’s not that it really much matters. The type of firearm is germane to a degree, but the psychosocial events leading up to the shooting not so much. However, I just never could resist. I always wanted to hear the story.
It was the boyfriend who provided the details. He said he had come in from whatever it was he did and was unloading his daily gear — a trim little .380ACP pocket pistol part of his daily loadout. He told me he slipped the little gun out of his pocket and set it down sideways on the top of the dresser.
He had no idea how it happened. He strongly suspected the gun was defective and explained he might have a lawyer review the issue. Somehow, when he set the gun down, it went off.
Bullets are the very embodiment of physics. They describe a path based predominantly upon their orientation and initial velocity. Projectiles fall to earth driven by the constant acceleration due to gravity. Like everything else in the universe, they continue in motion until affected by outside forces. The boyfriend explained the evening’s sordid outcome was pure unvarnished random.
His girlfriend had been standing across the room inquiring as to the nature of his day. When the gun went off the little bullet had traversed the bedroom and, as foul luck might have it, struck the hapless women in the temple. After quite a lot of frenetic chaos as well as a trip screaming across town to the ER here we were.
The Truth Hurts
It was indeed a compelling tale. However, this was not my first gunshot wound. When I examined the thing closely, I noticed charred flesh with ample powder stippling fanned out from the point of impact. There was even a little tearing of the skin around the wound.
As anyone who has ever watched one of those criminal forensics TV shows might attest, you can ascertain a great deal from an entrance wound. A bullet fired at a distance just punches a hole. The same thing at contact range will tattoo the surrounding skin with unburned powder and carboniferous ick. This was definitely the latter sort. Compelling story notwithstanding, this guy had clearly put his gun to this young woman’s temple and stroked the trigger.
The lady in question was doing shockingly well, considering. The anemic little bullet had transected her left optic nerve, deflected downward through her maxillary sinuses, and come to rest behind her rearmost right upper molar. I cleaned her up and found a maxillofacial surgeon who popped the spent projectile right out.
I waited until the moment was right and got a pal to remove the boyfriend for a while. Once it was just her and me, I explained my concerns regarding the nature of the wound and how it didn’t seem to jive with the boyfriend’s story. I assured her we could keep her safe, and if he had indeed shot her intentionally, then we would need to deal with that.
Throughout it all she stuck religiously to the tale. The gun went off when he set it down. He loved her, and she loved him. There’s nothing he would ever do to harm her intentionally. I pushed as much as I was comfortable, but then let it drop.
The cops did the same, but when the victim swears it was an accident, there’s just not a lot left with which to work. They had likely rehearsed their stories en route to the hospital. I discharged her the following day, now irrevocably half blind, in the company of her boyfriend. He was as attentive and affectionate as ever.
The year was 1985, and I still remember it like it was yesterday. I was tired, sweaty, and filthy. I stood in formation with a large number of my peers in a similar state, the summer sun beating down equally upon us all. We gripped rubber ducks, our derogatory term for our indestructible fake M16A1 training rifles. Our rubber ducks consisted of a real M16A1 upper receiver somehow grafted onto a cast rubber lower assembly. Mounted on the end of my dummy rifle was a very real M7 bayonet. We had our scabbards secured in place over the cold steel blades to keep us from inadvertently stabbing each other.
Table of contents
Our instructor was a grizzled Vietnam veteran who had logged three combat tours as a grunt. He was the hardest man I have ever known. In quiet moments we would hit him up for war stories. One of the more compelling involved the time he killed an NVA soldier in a trench on Hamburger Hill with a Ka-Bar knife. He said that took longer than he had expected.
Training With Cold Steel
On this day this chain-smoking beast of a man stood before us and shouted, “What is the spirit of the bayonet?”
We responded in thunderous unison, “To kill, Sergeant Major!”
The Smadge just stood there and stared at us, the glint in his eye looking plenty lethal from my point of view as an impressionable young teenager. Normally leading bayonet training would be beneath a soldier of this man’s station, but he enjoyed it.
Once we had mastered the details we lost our sheaths and took out our frustrations on the bayonet dummies. The superb comedy film Stripes has a genuinely funny sequence that orbits around this fundamental aspect of infantry combat training. At the end of the day, I was exhausted but fairly good at it. I could parry, smash, and stab quickly and with authority. I was eighteen years old. It would be another three years before society would trust me to drink a beer or buy a handgun, but Uncle Sam had already taught me how to kill a man efficiently and effectively with a bayonet.
The Dark Reality of Soldiering
Soldiers have the coolest toys on the planet. Whether we admit it or not, it still really is all about the toys.
However, the nitty gritty reality of soldiering is unspeakably horrible. As we can see on the newsfeeds coming out of Ukraine, war is young men–and now women–voluntarily ripping the very lives out of each other for a cause. War is the very embodiment of inhumanity. Even in the Information Age, the most inhuman aspect of this most inhuman pursuit has got to be the bayonet.
We have all become so adroit at it. This is to be expected given our astronomical investment in the enterprise. During World War 2, the combined combatant nations produced enough small arms ammunition to shoot every human being on the planet forty times. If you took every dollar spent on national defense in America from the end of WW2 through the end of the Cold War you could raze and rebuild every manmade structure in the country. Ours is such a lamentably self-destructive species. However, despite truly extraordinary advances in killing technology, there yet remains something viscerally motivational about the prospect of having one’s entrails rearranged by cold steel affixed to the end of a combat rifle.
Old Blood and Guts Loved Cold Steel Bayonets
George Patton, arguably the most audacious general officer the United States has ever produced, had this to say about the bayonet, “Let’s keep our boots polished, bayonets sharpened, and present a picture of force and strength to the Red Army. This is the only language they understand and respect.” 
George Patton was a lifelong professional soldier. Soldiering was the only thing he had ever done; it was the only thing he was ever good at. Patton wanted so desperately to take the fight to the Russians once the Nazis were beaten. He had dispensed death many times and narrowly avoided it himself. George Patton seems a reliable source of wisdom on the subject of intimate killing.
He once opined, “Few men are killed by the bayonet; many are scared of it. Bayonets should be fixed when the firefight starts. Bayonets must be sharpened by the individual soldier. The German hates the bayonet and is inferior to our men with it. Our men should know this.”
A Hard Day in Afghanistan…
In October of 2011, British Corporal Sean Jones of the 1st Battalion, The Princess of Wales’s Regiment, was second in command of a combat patrol operating in the vicinity of Kakaran Village, Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Their mission was to locate and engage insurgents who had been emplacing IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices). These cheap infernal contraptions are the bane of modern counterinsurgency warfare. Corporal Jones’ enemies were little more than cavemen with Kalashnikovs, but they were driven, hard, and cunning.
As Jones’ small patrol made its way across a broad open field they were engaged with heavy and effective small-arms fire from nearby concealed positions. Jones, a professional soldier with two small children at home, later said, “We were about to wrap up the operation and head back to the checkpoint. We were crossing a ditch when the shooting started. I was just coming out of the ditch and most of the fire was coming at me. I hit the deck immediately…I have been shot at quite a few times and could tell the enemy was close. Gravel and dirt were flying up all around me from the bullets.”
Dire Circumstances Require Cold Steel
Jones and his mates were caught in the open in a near-ambush, one of the most dire circumstances in which a modern grunt might find himself. Initially unable to advance into the withering fire, the Brits dropped into the water-filled ditch and began throwing bullets. However, this was Helmand Province, and these were seasoned Taliban fighters. The insurgents began to fire and maneuver to overrun their position.
With heavy fire coming in from three directions and unwashed Taliban maniacs moving ever closer, Corporal Jones executed some of that insane military leadership everybody talks about all the time. He unlimbered an M72 LAW rocket to set the tone and then directed three of his nearest mates to fix bayonets. Snapping his steel blade in place on the muzzle of his L85 bullpup assault rifle, Jones leapt to his feet and shouted those timeless words, “Follow me!”
When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going…
Jones and his motley mob of maniacs screamed across eighty meters of bullet-swept open ground, charging directly into the face of the Taliban ambush. Amidst the chaos, Jones outpaced his troops and had to pause once they reached a nearby structure to let them catch up. Once out of the immediate kill zone, Jones directed his men to put accurate fire on the Taliban positions. Jones prepped a grenade but then changed his mind when he realized there might be noncombatants in the building as well. In the face of such an audacious response, the Taliban insurgents abandoned their positions and fell back.
The Afghan people know nothing but war. The last time an invading army marched across my hometown was 1864. By contrast, every Afghan citizen in the country was born, raised, and lives amidst unfettered violence. That is adequate to make people skeptical. As a result, firm and decisive action is the only thing they respect. The locals were watching this horrible little engagement. Corporal Jones and his mates earned their respect that fateful day in Helmand.
Goodwill from Chaos
In the aftermath, the locals came to appreciate that the Brits were hard soldiers who could give just as well as they took. Corporal Jones’ restraint with his grenade and use of the bayonet proved that, unlike most of the foreign armies that had ravaged their land in years past, the British could be counted upon to respect the lives of noncombatants even at the peril of their own. For his efforts, Corporal Jones was awarded the Military Cross, the third-highest decoration for valor in British military service.
Of their subsequent interactions with the locals, Jones had this to say, “We built good relationships, chatting to them on patrols, kicking balls around with the children. They knew the Taliban could no longer enforce curfews on them and things got much better with their way of life.”
A Point of Personal Privilege —
What were we thinking when we elected this guy?
And then it was gone. Of all the egregious affronts to logic that we have seen flow forth from the White House in recent years, none is so horrific as our insane route from Afghanistan. The United States lost 2,462 lives defeating the Taliban. In the year before our chaotic flight from that accursed place, there had been precious little violence directed at coalition troops. With a stabilizing force of some 13,000 American troops in-country, the Taliban seemed to be behaving themselves.
Afghans voted in elections, girls went to school, and terrorists had to find other places to call home. And then on the 20th anniversary of our involvement in Afghanistan, Joe Biden precipitously pulled American forces out just so he could say he shut the door on a nice round number. This resulted in countless loyal allies being abandoned and desperate people falling to their deaths off of fleeing airplanes. American citizens remained trapped there some two years later. I am sickened to think of it.