“The US Navy has been battling the Houthis and some of Iran’s best weaponry in the Red Sea and changing some of the ways it fights to defeat them, America’s top naval officer said this week.
Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the chief of naval operations, said this week that the Navy is taking away many lessons from its almost yearlong fight against the Houthis, including the fact that drones are fundamentally changing warfare.
The Houthis, a Yemen-based rebel group that Iran has armed and supported for years, have used aerial and surface drones to attack key merchant shipping lanes in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden and threaten US Navy ships since last fall. The militants have also fired anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles at vessels.
US warships and aircraft, in partnership with allies, have been intercepting these threats. Just last week, American forces engaged a number of Houthi drones and missiles.
“We’re continuing to learn,” Franchetti responded to questions at a Wednesday Defense Writers Group event. “And again, I’ll just go back to the changing tactics, techniques and procedures based on adversaries.”
“The Houthis are using the best Iranian technology, and we know that we need to be able to defeat that,” she added. “And again, our ships are doing an amazing job. And our aircraft.””
…
“In this fight, the Navy has fired well over $1.1 billion worth of munitions fighting the Houthis, a figure that covers hundreds of air-launched weapons and ship-fired missiles that have been used to take out rebel weaponry, both missiles and drones.
The increasing use of unmanned systems, such as aerial strike platforms and naval drones, has been seen in other conflicts, most notably the war in Ukraine.
Ukraine, for instance, has built up a formidable arsenal of domestically produced naval drones and has used these systems to target Russian warships and ports around the Black Sea. Even though Kyiv lacks a proper navy, it has demonstrated it can still cause problems through this asymmetrical style of warfare.
“I think Ukraine has shown us that you can innovate on the battlefield,” Franchetti said. “I want to innovate before the battlefield so we can stay ahead of any adversary any time.””
Iran, Russia, and China have illegitimate systems and their government’s fear that their own people will want a system more like America’s. They can never live in full harmony with the United States because the U.S. represents an internal threat to their regimes even when the U.S. does nothing other than stand as another possibility for their people. Therefore, they try to undermine the U.S. and democracy in general in whatever way they can.
“For Washington, the question that really matters is Ishiba’s approach to the military relationship with America.
Here Ishiba has sounded more disruptive than either the Japanese or U.S. establishment would like. He approached one third rail by calling for the revision of the agreement on the deployment of U.S. forces here. He went for another in wanting to amend the constitutional provisions on Japanese pacifism. He has talked about an Asian version of NATO, which would take Japan from a security vassal of the U.S. to a peer, though still a close ally.
“He could be a problem for the U.S.,” says Gerry Curtis, the retired Columbia scholar of Japan who lives much of the year here. “He thinks the deal with the U.S. is outdated, has an occupation stink to it.” Ishiba is, as one of the preeminent Japan watchers in Washington Ken Weinstein texted me, “hardest for Americans to read of the major candidates.”
So what’s going on? A Japanese official who knows Ishiba offered the 60/40 theory over lunch the day after Ishiba’s victory. Every other similar status of forces agreement with the U.S., from Germany to South Korea to Italy, was revised in the last half century. Japan’s dates to 1960. Ishiba wants a deal to allow Japanese forces to base and train in the U.S. — in effect to become even more like a normal army than a self defense force. Abe took Japan down this road, and Kishida continued by boosting spending (Japan’s defense budget is the third-biggest in the world). But neither of Ishiba’s predecessors put the status agreement explicitly on the table the way Ishiba has. So 60 percent of Ishiba’s motivation is “to enhance deterrence and strengthen the alliance,” this official said. The other 40 percent? That’s about “restoring Japanese sovereignty,” and that’s the bit that makes Washington nervous.
Speaking after this victory, Ishiba said the time wasn’t right to raise any of these security questions. This will be a topic of discussion with the next U.S. president and shouldn’t even be mentioned before Election Day in November.
The other topic that will test bilateral relations is America’s more protectionist trade policies under both Trump and Biden administrations and the high cost to Japanese manufacturers of enforcing the U.S.-inspired restrictions on technology transfers to China. “Japan is hurting right now because of American policies,” says Koll.
The new Japanese prime minister is “a realist,” says Hiro Akita, the Japanese business daily Nikkei’s foreign affairs specialist, who knows him. Ishiba thinks that Japan has to adjust to a changing world, he says. The next prime minister is no Japanese Charles de Gaulle who’ll seek to push America back as the old French leader did there half a century ago, he adds.
But still, this at first undramatic leadership change in Tokyo does potentially bring chop to the waters of the Japanese-American relationship that have been especially placid of late.”
The U.S. trade deficit is a problem, and the best way to solve it is by a weaker dollar. Free trade is good, broad tariffs are bad, and the trade deficit is best dealt with by a weaker dollar.
“”Former President Donald Trump’s proposals to impose a universal tariff of 20 percent and an additional tariff on Chinese imports of at least 60 percent would spike the average tariff rate on all imports to highs not seen since the Great Depression,” warns Erica York of the Tax Foundation.
Trump has actually been a little vague on the size of his universal tariff, first floating it at 10 percent while allowing “it may be more than that,” and then upping the ante to 20 percent. Either way, it’s a cost that ends up being largely paid by Americans in terms of higher retail prices and more expensive imported parts and materials for domestic manufacturing.
The Trump administration’s 2018 “tariffs resulted in higher prices for a wide variety of goods that U.S. consumers and businesses purchase,” the Tax Foundation’s Alex Durante and Alex Muresianu concluded.
Even when tariffs don’t directly affect the cost of imported goods purchased by consumers, they still drive up the prices of many things made in the U.S. The Cato Institute’s Pierre Lemieux points out that “a tariff on an input (say, steel) is paid by the American importer who will typically pass it down the supply chain to his customers and eventually to the consumers of the final good (say, a car).” Instead of boosting domestic production, that can do harm, instead.
“For manufacturing employment, a small boost from the import protection effect of tariffs is more than offset by larger drags from the effects of rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs,” Federal Reserve Board economists found when they researched the 2018 tariffs.”
“Check the U.S. Constitution, and you’ll see that Article 1, Section 8 clearly gives Congress sole authority over “Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises.” Unfortunately, Congress traded away much of that power during the 20th century, beginning in the aftermath of the Great Depression—which was considerably worsened by a series of tariffs passed by Congress—and continuing with various laws passed in the 1960s and 1970s, as the Cato report details.
In theory, handing over those powers made sense. Lawmakers were more likely to be influenced by parochial interests and would favor protectionism that benefited some local industry, even if it came at the expense of the nation’s economy as a whole. Presidents, it was assumed, would take a more expansive view of the benefits of trade and would use those powers to reduce barriers like tariffs.
For a long time, that was true. It no longer is. Both Trump and President Joe Biden have favored protectionism, and have faced scant opposition from Congress or the courts.
If Trump returns to the White House in 2025, he would assume huge power over the flow of goods into the United States “without substantial procedural or institutional safeguards” due to the “broad and ambiguous language” included in many of those trade laws passed decades ago, Packard and Lincicome write.
The tariffs that Trump imposed during his term in office took advantage of many of those same powers.”