In his book on maritime power To Rule the Waves, author Bruce Jones points out that, if the United States is to wage war with anyone other than Canada or Mexico, we need to do it with naval power. Ever since the invasions of Normandy and Okinawa where the Army provided significant amphibious landing forces, the leading edge of the projection of combat power ashore has been the United States Marine Corps. That is no longer the case. Since 2019, the Marine Corps has largely abandoned its amphibious capability in favor of a limited mission of deterring or fighting a war with China in the South China Sea, all to fulfill the vision of the former Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger. The concept is called Stand-in Forces. To buy the anti-ship missiles required to carry out his vision, Berger divested the Marine Corps of all of its tanks, much of its artillery, all of its heavy engineering and assault bridging and breaching capabilities as well as significant aviation assets, But as Jones points out we still need some way of projecting naval power ashore. The question now is who will do it? There are several possibilities. (READ MORE: Biden Has Allowed the Marine Corps to Become Irrelevant) One candidate would be our special operations forces. They certainly have the combat skills to attack a defended shore. But, there is a problem. If they are to obtain the tanks, engineers, and other heavy assets needed to assault a hostile beach, they will lose the agility that makes them “special” in the first place. Amphibious operations in today’s hostile littoral environment take constant skill and practice. The Marine Corps used to have this because it and the Navy kept amphibious forces deployed in the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and the Western Pacific. These Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs) practiced constantly for amphibious operations. If a crisis popped up, they could be brought together into a brigade-sized landing force and further reinforced quickly to the division or corps level if needed. For example, during Operation Desert Storm, the Marine Corps mustered two combined arms divisions for the ground assault and a brigade off the coast of Kuwait for an amphibious operation if needed. Since then, Gen. Berger has released the Navy from its commitment to maintain the number of ships needed to keep up the constant overseas MEU rotation because he believed that the capability was no longer needed. The army is a second option. Some army units could be targeted for amphibious assault missions, but the army considers itself the nation’s force for fighting big wars on land. It has traditionally left the “lesser contingency” missions such as embassy and civilian evacuations and pop-up humanitarian assistance to the forward-deployed MEUs. Retooling the army to take aboard amphibious operations is not impossible, but it would be painful for the organization and expensive for the country. A third option is to outsource amphibious operations to allies — after all, the British have recently shown interest in expanding their capabilities — however, economy of scale becomes a problem if large operations are needed. The British Army and Royal Marines combined would be hard-pressed to fill a good-sized soccer stadium. The Japanese have shown some interest in expanding their overseas expeditionary capability, but they would have some constitutional problems in developing a serious amphibious capability. In any case, we would have to build a consensus on what wars we would jointly fight. (READ MORE: Elon Musk and OpenAI Are at War. Your Data Is at Stake.) There is a fourth option. That is to rebuild the Marine Corps as a worldwide force constantly ready to take action. One of the mysteries of the Marine Corps’ decision to concentrate on an anti-ship mission in the South China Sea is whether or not the joint force combatant commander responsible for the region even wanted this Marine Corps contribution. The current Indo-Pacific commander has not yet weighed in on the subject. A recent war game conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found the Stand-in Force concept to be duplicative and less effective than capabilities already possessed by other services and unable to contribute “heavily” in most scenarios. (READ MORE: A War-Ravaged Sudan Teeters on the Edge of Crisis) There might even be some unanticipated goodness here. The capabilities that Gen. Berger discarded were Reagan-era legacy systems. The Marine Corps could experiment with newer and more capable tanks, artillery, and engineering systems and pick the best. In any case, we will have a dangerous gap in our national power projection capability for a number of years. In the future, we will have to be more careful in the power that we give a single service chief. Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who lectures on Alternative Analysis at the George Washington University’s Elliott Scholl of International Affairs. He served as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense from 2003-5. The post What Will Replace the Marine Corps? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

There is so much wrong with the conviction of Hunter Biden on three charges related to his perjuring himself on a federal form to buy a gun. Yes, he does belong in prison. Absolutely. And, just as the Soros district attorneys and Biden prosecutors pile charges upon charges against President Trump, they may as well throw stuff at Hunter for lying on that gun application, denying his drug addictions, and so much more. But the conviction is a sop aimed at Republican conservatives to fabricate a false narrative and fake equivalency posture. The game of perverted justice is to say “You see, MAGA people? Our system of justice is perfectly fair. Trump got convicted on all his counts, and Biden’s son got convicted on all his counts. So it is one tier of justice equal for everybody.” (READ MORE: Hunter Biden Is Guilty. But You Knew That.) Garbage. President Trump was prosecuted by a Soros DA who campaigned on a promise to destroy Trump. It was as if he said: “Vote for me as your district attorney, not because I know the law, am committed to truth and justice, will clean New York City’s crime hell, and clear the streets of every form of social miscreancy and deviancy. No, I won’t focus on that stuff. But, if you vote for me, I promise to get Trump convicted on something or other.” So the lout with a vendetta got elected in an anti-Trump county but could not find any indictable law Trump broke. So he made it up. He took a state misdemeanor whose limitations statutory period had long ago expired, attached it to a federal crime that federal prosecutors never charged, never spelled out the exact crime in the indictment or during the trial, got a biased anti-Trump judge who had donated to Democrats and whose daughter was making a fortune in cash off attacking Trump, used as his two-star witnesses a hooker who owed Trump half a million dollars she promised never to pay and a serial liar and perjurer (i.e., lying even under oath) who embezzled tens of thousands from Trump, got the biased judge to harass and limit Trump’s expert witnesses, and kept Trump on a gag order aimed at preventing him from campaigning fully and even from leaving the state to campaign. The Bragg-Merchan Trump trial will certainly be overturned on appeal. Maybe not by a similarly biased New York appellate court, where Trump may get the same justice that black people got in the 1950s Deep South. But the Supreme Court will throw out Bragg’s case, and both Merchan and Bragg know it. The only reason they teamed up for that charade was that it presumably ensured that Trump’s felony conviction would not be reversed before the November election. (READ MORE: Could Hunter’s Troubles Cause Biden to Rethink His Campaign?) That was not justice. Not even close to it. Justice will come, but only in time for Trump’s biography and his second State of the Union address as America’s 47th president. By then, Maybe Fani Willis will be pregnant with Nathan Wade’s child, maybe not, but that obscene Georgia case either will have been dropped before that, or it will be overturned. Joe Biden’s and Jack Smith’s “January 6” lawsuit will not make it to trial before the election and will be dismissed soon thereafter. Same with the Florida documents case. Justice delayed will not necessarily emerge as having been justice completely denied, but it will be justice perverted. None of this is comparable to Hunter Biden’s criminality. Of course he was a drug addict. He wrote about it in his book. It is on his laptop. Despite the fact that Biden and the “Intelligence Community” swore up and down until the 2020 election that the laptop was a Putin disinformation campaign, now even the federal government uses that laptop under oath as evidence of Hunter’s criminality. (After Hillary’s fake “Trump conspiracy” fraud — replete with a purchased dossier, government corruption, and a paid-off law firm — there was the claim that Hunter’s laptop was another Putin plot. Do you ever wonder what Putin must be thinking as he reads these claims in Pravda and Izvestia? Can you picture him steaming angry in the Kremlin, instituting an investigation of his KGB, asking why he always is the last person in Russia to find out every time he engages in a conspiracy with Trump? In America, heads would roll for botched orchestration. In Russia, windows would open for defenestration.) The troubling things about the three Hunter convictions include but are not limited to this: His criminality was so obvious that even a home-boy jury in Wilmington, Delaware needed just one day to find him guilty of whatever was charged. So how was it that the federal government attempted one year earlier to drop both the entire firearm case and the separate tax evasion case with one single all-encompassing obscene sweetheart deal that entailed no felony crime, but merely copping pleas to two misdemeanors, admitting he owned a firearm while a drug addict, and guaranteeing him complete immunity from prosecution for any and all of his business dealings between 2016-2019? The main paragraph of that obscene proposed plea deal: The United States agrees not to criminally prosecute Biden, outside of the terms of this Agreement, for any federal crimes encompassed by the attached State of Facts (Attachment A) and the Statement of Facts attached as Exhibit 1 to the Memorandum of Plea Agreement filed this same day. Exhibit 1 attached to that Agreement pertained to Hunter Biden’s salaried position at Burisma and his financial interests at a Chinese private equity fund. It goes on for pages and pages detailing the millions upon millions of dollars he was paid for his foreign dealings in a host of multi-national bodies. For example, in 2017 alone, he was paid just under $1 million in a company he formed with the CEO of a Chinese business conglomerate; $664,000 from a Chinese infrastructure investment company; $500,000 as a director at Burisma; $70,000 from a Roumanian company; and $48,000 from a multi-national law firm. That’s over $2 million from foreign sources in 2017. The next year, another $2.6 million from Burisma and the company he formed with the CEO of a Chinese business conglomerate. (READ MORE: Who Did It?) In other words, Biden almost completely evaded all justice as the firearms-while-drug-addicted case took center stage in the sweetheart plea bargain. There were real matters needing public investigation in the light of day and probably prosecution — namely, the millions upon millions he scooped up from Chinese, Ukrainian, and other foreign payoffs by leveraging his father’s position as Obama’s $1 billion bagman on Ukraine — that got buried in an “Exhibit 1 to an Attachment A.”  The plan was to sneak all of it past the judge and the American people, just as they had sweet-hearted Hillary Clinton out of any prosecution despite her having perpetrated the federal felony of spoliating evidence (e.g. destroyed 33,000 emails; bleached emails in computer back-up memory; hammered-to-smithereens hard drive) and probably worse (e.g., federal election interference by producing and paying for a mythical Putin-Trump conspiracy backed by a falsified Steele dossier arranged with a morally compromised Fusion GPS hired by a compromised Perkins Coie law firm that provided space for the FBI in their offices). Those are the heavy-duty Hunter Biden prosecutions that America awaits — not a rinky-dink mini-trial over a gun purchase with falsified attestations as to his drug use. Sure, those were crimes — things don’t always go better with coke — but they were peanuts. Honestly, no fair-minded person, no matter what he or she thinks about one Biden or another, really believes that Hunter would ever take his illegally purchased rifle and shoot up a schoolyard or concert. Honestly. Frankly, it is arguably a violation of the Second Amendment even to require a gun buyer to state whether he does drugs. If he is not such a narcissist as to write a book proclaiming to the world that he is a drug addict or was at the time of the sale, who is to say whether he was when he signed the form? His wife? Well, what if he treated his wife with dignity instead of consorting with hookers? How does one prove a person’s drug status beyond a reasonable doubt on the day he signs the form? Let’s say he vowed the night before or a month before to stay off drugs, really meant it, and then went back to drugs the day after buying the gun. Was he a drug addict on that day? Did you ever meet someone who went on a diet and swore to the heavens that he or she would stick to the diet permanently, and the person truly stuck to it for a whole month? If on the day the patient sees his doctor and is asked to fill out the 714 forms he has to fill out at every doctor visit, and says he is on a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet, is he lying when he had been so for a month and does not pig-out at Baskin-Robbins until the next day? If the right to bear arms shall not be infringed, is that the best case to bring against Hunter? Of course not. That case was a sop to “prove” America has one tier of justice: Identical for Hillary and Biden as it is for Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Allen Weisselberg, Peter Navarro, and President Donald Trump. Before Obama, we did have just one tier. We do not anymore. Trump’s current cases prove what they do; the Hillary sweetheart deal proves what it does; and the Hunter sweetheart deal that was stopped only at the last moment by an honest federal district court judge, the Hon. Maryellen Noreika, proves what it does. The prosecution for the gun buy, while evading investigation and prosecuting the foreign millions, proves what it does. These corruptions in justice paint a picture even more clear than would a $75,000 Hunter Biden original oil painting. To attend any or all of Rav Fischer’s weekly 60-minute live Zoom classes on the Weekly Torah Portion, the Biblical Prophets, the Mishnah, Rambam Mishneh Torah, or Advanced Judaic Texts, send an email to: shulstuff@yioc.org His 10-part exciting and fact-based series of one-hour classes on the Jewish Underground liberation movement (Irgun, Lechi, and Haganah) and the Rise of Modern Israel can be found here. In it, he uses historic video clips of Irgun, Lechi, and Haganah actions, decades of past Arab terrorist atrocities, as well as stirring musical selections from the Underground and video interviews of participants, to augment data, statistics, maps, and additional historical records to create a fascinating, often gripping, and scholarly enriching educational experience about issues that remain deeply relevant today as Israel engages in an existential war in Gaza against Hamas terrorism. His latest deeply moving weekly series of informational and inspirational programs on the Hamas-Gaza war may be found here. His 40-part Bible Study series covering all of I Samuel (First Samuel) intensively with Talmudic and Midrashic commentaries is now up here. The post We Should Throw Hunter in Prison — But for the Right Reasons appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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by Jack Montgomery, The National Pulse: Over the past week, new evidence has further validated Donald Trump’s description of migrant crime as a “new category of crime.” The National Pulse has uncovered numerous instances of illegal aliens committing crimes and sapping public resources, fraying America’s social fabric. GANGS MAP. On Friday, reporters published a map showing the explosion of transnational criminal organizations […]