A recently published book begins with the sobering premise that if the United States were to go to war with China today, the biggest, best-trained, best-equipped military force in the history of the world, one fielded by a country that spends more on defense than the next 10 countries combined, would lose.

And most national security experts agree.

The book, which sparked debate inside and outside the Pentagon, is The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare, by Christian Brose, a former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee and senior policy adviser to the late Sen. John McCain.

In his introductory chapter, Brose lays out how China follows a strategy aimed at denying the U.S. the ability to project power in the way it traditionally has, essentially checkmating America’s greatest strength.

And he describes in chilling detail how the U.S. military as currently configured is uniquely unsuited to go toe-to-toe with China in a conventional force-on-force war.

“Many of the US ships, submarines, fighter jets, bomber aircraft, additional munitions, and other systems that are needed to fight would not be near the war when it started but would be thousands of miles away in the United States. They would come under immediate attack once they began their multiweek mobilization across the planet,” he writes.

“Cyberattacks would grind down the logistical movement of US forces into combat. The defenseless cargo ships and aircraft that would ferry much of that force across the Pacific would be attacked every step of the way. Satellites on which U.S. forces depend for intelligence, communications, and global positioning would be blinded by lasers, shut down by high-energy jammers, or shot out of orbit altogether by antisatellite missiles,” leaving many U.S. forces “deaf, dumb, and blind.”

China’s massive arsenals of advanced precision strike weapons, such as cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons, would hit U.S. planes in the region before they could take off, and U.S. aircraft carriers would have to steam away from China to stay out of range of China’s carrier-killer missiles.

In short, all signs point to an ignominious defeat.

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A reality check on electric cars: Arithmetic required

During the Obama Administration a regulation was passed requiring all automobile manufacturers to achieve an average efficiency for all their vehicles of 54 miles per gallon by the year 2025. President Trump recently canceled the ordinance recognizing such a requirement could never be reached without sacrificing the safety of the drivers which we will attempt to explain. A simple tutorial requiring a little arithmetic follows, and the fallacy of the benefits of electric cars will slowly dissolve.

The energy in gasoline is not appreciated. An automobile that gets 40 miles per gallon uses only six tablespoons of gasoline traveling each mile. As good as that sounds, cars cannot be perfectly efficient. There must be friction resistance just to get them going and there is no avoidance of aerodynamic resistance.  Sports cars tend to have smoother machined parts that does reduce friction and account for the greater cost. This is true in bicycles as well. On a bicycle your body will feel the difference between a $500 bicycle and a $2500 bicycle.

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The Century of Bioweapons

The coronavirus’s disruptive effects will inevitably inspire evil minds to action

Over time, the danger will grow as humanity develops better and more efficient ways to hack the genetic code and create organisms on demand. Biological laboratories, even sophisticated ones, are cheaper to build and easier to hide than the factories necessary to enrich uranium and develop nuclear weapons.

Covid-19 does not appear to be a genetically engineered plague unleashed on the world by supervillains—but its massive global impact shows how effective such a weapon could be. That will have consequences.

The current pandemic, we may hope, won’t live up to its full hype. It may be less destructive and even less costly than many feared. Reliable treatments may soon become available, and societies will figure out ways to protect the most vulnerable while allowing the normal business of life to resume. Covid-19 will presumably at some point become through antiviral therapies a manageable hazard, like HIV/AIDS before it, or be conquered by a vaccine.

Big Oil to the Coronavirus Rescue

Look whose products are crucial for fighting off Covid-19.

Trump has few alternatives to Yucca

The Trump administration bailing on Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as the nation’s long-delayed nuclear waste storage site has exposed the reality that the United States does not have viable alternative solutions.

“It’s clear we don’t have a way forward for a repository of nuclear waste at the moment,” said Rodney Ewing, a professor of nuclear security and geological sciences at Stanford University.

Until recently, the Trump administration had proposed funding to restart the licensing of Yucca Mountain despite a political onslaught from Nevada’s political delegation fighting against the site ever being completed.

President Trump, due to face voters this year in politically important Nevada, flipped the script with a tweet this month that seemed to take Yucca Mountain off the table. He said previous administrations “failed to find lasting solutions,” and he committed to exploring other “innovative approaches.”

His subsequent budget proposal vaguely pledged to initiate “processes to develop alternative solutions” by working with states and other stakeholders.

The administration plans to form an interagency working group to determine more precise next steps. In the few details described in the budget, the White House indicated that Trump supports the implementation of an interim storage program and research on “alternative technologies” to handle nuclear waste.

Democrats running for president also uniformly oppose Yucca Mountain, but they have not clearly articulated an alternative.

Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, the federal government promised nuclear power plants that it would handle the waste. The law, amended five years later, directed the Energy Department to take possession of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel and dispose of it in a deep geological repository at Yucca Mountain.

“We have seen every kind of ‘other than Yucca’ proposal,” said Jordan Haverly, director of energy and environmental policy for Republican Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois, a longtime Yucca supporter. “All of them talk about these great new ideas, but eventually get to a point where Yucca is still the law as mandated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act.”

Indeed, alternatives to handle the nation’s 80,000 metric tons of radioactive spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants have not yet borne fruit.

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