by dap | Sep 9, 2024 | Fox News
On Tuesday, September 10,
will be testifying publicly before Congress for the first time regarding his COVID-19 nursing home policies and the March 25, 2020, directive that brought in over 9,000 coronavirus patients into care facilities across the state. Many of us will be very interested in the subcommittee’s findings and their report, which will be made public in the next few weeks.
Our families have been waiting years for this moment, and it’s hard to put into words what it will be like to finally be in the same room as the person who many of us believe had a hand in the deaths of our loved ones. I’ve said many times that had Gov. Cuomo expressed any kind of remorse for his actions, met with families or wrote condolence cards instead of chasing a $5 million dollar book deal while tens of thousands of New Yorkers were dying alone, we wouldn’t be where we are today: still waiting for answers and accountability.
When I told close friends that I would be heading to D.C., to watch Andrew Cuomo be
, some asked how I was feeling. To be honest, I don’t know that I’ve truly processed those emotions. Over the last four years, I’ve been a very loud advocate, turning grief into action, writing essays, doing interviews and meeting with lawmakers to ask them to please conduct a fair bipartisan investigation into how our government handled this once and a lifetime pandemic.
Sadly, here in New York, it has never happened. But in
, there is an interest in finding answers, and I’m grateful to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic for taking on an issue that New York has long tried to bury.
I have gotten to know many other grieving families over the years. Our shared tragedies have brought us together, and we’ll be watching our former governor on Tuesday together.
I asked my sister-in-law Donna Johnson and my friends Vivian Zayas and Peter Arbeeny to share their feelings before we head to D.C. on Tuesday about finally being there, just a few feet away from the former governor who seemed to never care about our families or what we went through in the spring of 2020.
Here are their responses:
“Being in the same room with the son of the great Mario Cuomo, who personally met with my mother long ago and was person she admired. Mario inspired me to become a Democrat and when given the chance, I voted for his son Andrew Cuomo. Andrew should have accepted our family’s invitation to meet at our father’s house and apologize.
This congressional public hearing, brings me one step closer to my promise that I made my dad after his passing 4-1/2 years ago. I promised him that I would not visit the cemetery till we had an investigation into why we were lied to by the Cuomo administration.”
“Nearly five years have passed since my mother’s death, and I never imagined this day would come. I’ve fought tirelessly for this moment, through pain, through grief, and through countless setbacks. And now, to be just feet away from him—this man whose decisions took so much from me and so many others—fills me with a mix of emotions I can hardly describe. The anger I’ve carried, the sadness that never leaves, the determination that has fueled me, all collide in this one moment. But my resolve has never been stronger. I will look him in the eye, and he will know that I am still here, unyielding, fighting for the justice that my mother—and so many others—deserved.
My mother’s life mattered. Her death, like the thousands of other elderly who perished, could have been prevented. His mother was not more important than mine, and his decisions will not be buried with them. We, the families left behind, are just as defiant as he is—determined to seek justice for those who deserved far better. The elderly needed protection, and instead, they were left exposed and vulnerable. He failed them, and in doing so, he failed us.
Holding him accountable is necessary, as is holding everyone else accountable who took part in these decisions.”
“Although I am quite anxious since finding out we are going to be at the testimony of Andrew Cuomo in person, I have the horror of what my family lived through fresh in the front my mind. Don’t misunderstand me, it has always been in my mind. I just try to store it a little further back. I am also feeling discouraged because I have never heard the disgraced ex-governor tell the truth.
What I would like to see during this testimony is accountability, and truth for once. It is something we need to know.
As a senior myself, there are no guarantees I won’t end up in an
or Rehabilitation Facility someday, and I need to know what decisions Andrew Cuomo made to be certain that history will never repeat itself.
It’s been 4 years of no accountability. The truth is long overdue.”
As for me, I think I will have to wait to share my feelings. Part of me wants to forgive Andrew Cuomo, because those who talk about forgiveness say it’s for the person who has been hurt more than the one that hurt them. But I’m not there yet. And I don’t think Andrew Cuomo is all of a sudden going to pretend he’s remorseful or empathetic.
Instead, I believe Andrew Cuomo will do as he always does: deflect, blame everyone else and lie to protect himself instead of what he should have done from the beginning: protecting our loved ones, which he pledged he would do through a once in a lifetime pandemic.
by dap | Sep 9, 2024 | Fox News
As a former DIA intelligence officer specializing in Russian war-fighting strategy and
, I recently had the honor to brief one of the U.S. combatant commands on major security threats to our homeland. This briefing and my interaction with high-ranking officers and their staff prompted me to pen this piece.
As the world has become increasingly unstable under the Biden-Harris presidency, the risk of the U.S. military having to fight a three-theater war has never been higher. The United States is already involved in two conflicts – the Russia-Ukraine one, by proxy, in Europe and another one in the Middle East, as Israel is defending itself against the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance. A war with China over Taiwan also may erupt as early as next year, according to a high-ranking U.S. military officer who heads up U.S. Air Mobility Command.
But how can America win three simultaneous wars if it has struggled to win one single war in a quarter of a century? Think Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya. No decisive meaningful military victory has been achieved by U.S. forces in these conflicts, despite the fact that it has faced much smaller opponents who lack advanced weaponry and some don’t even have a regular army. That is despite the fact that, tactically, our military is the best war-fighting force in military history.
Here are the top three actions
and the national security apparatus must take in order to deter wars or start winning them.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” This guidance comes from the renowned ancient Chinese strategist and general Sun Tzu. In his seminal work, “The Art of War,” the earliest known treatise on war and military science dating back to the fifth century B.C., Sun Tzu stressed the paramount importance of knowing your opponent when engaging in warfare.
To this day, contemporary Chinese and Russian military planners religiously adhere to Sun Tzu’s precepts. Their entire warfare philosophy centers on the elements of deception and surprise. To win means to deceive your enemy. But to outplay your opponent, you must first understand how he thinks and how he fights.
It’s my view that our military and intelligence lacks such understanding. Instead, the Pentagon relies on a one-size-fits-all approach, erroneously believing that superior weapons, advanced technology and masterful tactics will prevail in any war over any opposing force. Nowhere was this misguided belief more vividly disproven than in
.
In December 2019, the so-called Afghanistan Papers, a trove of confidential government documents containing two thousand pages of impressions by four hundred direct participants in the war, ranging from generals to diplomats, revealed stunning facts. The Pentagon did not have the faintest idea about Afghanistan before invading it 2001 — the culture, mindset, and warfighting style of its adversary. And that is the simple reason for Washington’s abysmal performance in Afghanistan. “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan—we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015, “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”
After 20 years, the result of this was more than 2 trillion dollars spent on the war, and 7,000 deaths of American and allied servicemen and women. The Biden administration withdrew our forces and the same murderous regime, the Taliban, is ruling the country. Except now, these barbarians have billions of dollars worth of our top secret military hardware.
Because our military is the best in the world in conventional warfare, no foreign power would dare challenge it in a head-to-head kinetic fight. Instead, our adversaries have developed asymmetric strategies to win a war against our military. These strategies seek to exploit vulnerabilities, such as over-reliance on technology. Indeed, we are dependent on satellites and access to the internet for every aspect of war-fighting and in our civilian life. Satellites are used for global navigation, water management, power grid monitoring, weather forecasting, broadband access and telecommunications for applications ranging from banking to education to telemedicine, among other things.
Russia and China’s military strategies include cyber strikes and anti-satellite attacks targeting our critical infrastructure, government networks and military systems. The Pentagon has known about the possibility of attacks on U.S. space systems since January 2001, when a commission led by the then Defense Secretary-designate Donald Rumsfeld issued a report warning about a space Pearl Harbor.
Similarly, the Pentagon has been aware of gaps in our cybersecurity since 1999, when the Russians breached multiple U.S. government and military agencies, including weapons labs, and exfiltrated massive amounts of sensitive data.
Yet, our satellites remain unprotected. Even our weapons arsenal, including major advanced systems such as the Patriot missile system, are vulnerable to cyberattacks, according to a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office audit.
Consequently, winning against China or Russia, both of whom have plans to inflict a Cyber Armageddon or a Space Pearl Harbor on our homeland, if we deploy forces into the theater to defend Taiwan or a
, would be highly problematic.
“No plan survives contact with the enemy” is one of the most misquoted military wisdoms, which belongs to Prussian Chief of General Staff Helmut von Moltke the Elder. He is known for serving as the architect of Prussian military supremacy in mid-19th century Europe.
What von Moltke actually said was far more nuanced. “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.” A diligent and skillful planner, he stressed the importance of having an adaptable plan, which can be modified in rapidly-changing conditions. The proper plan, in his view, must include multiple options, factoring in various possible outcomes. And that can only be achieved through thorough preparation.
Regretfully, I don’t believe such preparation exists in the Defense Department. In 2001, prior to the invasion of Afghanistan, the Pentagon had no pre-existing plan. Operation Enduring Freedom, seeking to destroy
and remove the Taliban from power, was therefore, based on reused elements of the CIA’s previous contingency plans for collaboration with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and some options hastily prepared by the U.S. military, including the Joint Special Operations Command.
The Pentagon’s lack of preparation and culturally ignorant approach to war has resulted in the failure to anticipate how the insurgents in Afghanistan (and subsequently in Iraq) would adapt, fight and stymie the world’s most sophisticated and technologically advanced military. The insurgents’ employment of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) enabled them, the weaker side, to gain advantage over U.S. forces. IEDs – which were responsible for 60% of all American fatalities and half of American casualties in Afghanistan – mitigated U.S. advantages in resources, technology, and ground combat. These homemade gadgets mangled our military hardware and maimed our service members.
To defeat even low-tech adversaries, U.S. planners must learn to out-improvise them, rather than count on the technological crutch of advanced weaponry. Outsmarting your opponent requires doing your homework on him prior to deploying onto the battlefield.
Defining ahead of time what victory looks like will help avoid defaulting to nation-building, senseless fighting and loss of U.S. lives for twenty years in a country like Afghanistan. It is called “the graveyard of empires” for a reason.
by dap | Sep 9, 2024 | Fox News
The gut-wrenching loss of an Ukraine Air Force F-16 chasing
at low altitude last week is proof positive that Ukraine’s air force is becoming more aggressive and capable. But there’s a sober combat lesson here for the U.S. vs. China. The daily air battles against missiles and drones over Ukraine are only a taste of what U.S. bases and allies could experience in the event of Chinese attacks.
This I can tell you. Almost certainly, the pilot, identified as Col. Alexei “Moonfish” Mes, was being very aggressive in defense of his homeland. Russia had launched an
with 127 missiles and 109 one-way attack drones on Aug. 26. Mes had already taken out several, reported as three cruise missiles and a drone, expending four or more weapons from his jet.
“The loss of a pilot is incredibly painful to bear, especially as he was among those who fought for Ukraine’s right to have F-16 aircraft,” Anatolii Khrapchynskyi, a pilot and former Ukrainian Air Force officer, told the New York Times on Saturday.
Mes still had weapons available, and several hundred rounds in the F-16’s 20mm Gatling gun. The Shahed 136 drones, for example, fly at about 115 mph and relatively low, making them enticing, vulnerable targets for skilled fighter pilots. The risks go up for pilots as they continue to engage at lower altitudes. Target fixation can overtake caution in these intense moments; imagine the pressure when the missiles are heading for civilians, for your countrymen.
Tragic as it was, the loss of this F-16 fighting hard in Ukraine also shows it is Russia and China who should be worried. Here’s why.
First, with F-16s, Ukraine’s air force is becoming more aggressive and capable. Mes praised the F-16’s sophisticated avionics in an interview last November. “[The] F-16 is very maneuverable. It encourages you to pilot in an aggressive style,”
The insider view from long Air Force experience is that crashes like this are often a marker of growing combat prowess across the force, as top pilots push the F-16 to its limits. The U.S. Air Force lost 15-20 F-16s per year when the F-16 was new. And that was in training, not combat.
The
are committed to air power for Ukraine, finally, and past caring about Putin’s warnings about escalation. Note that this was a very capable F-16, tuned up by the U.S. Air Force’s elite 68th Electronic Warfare Squadron. Last month, the squadron said it reprogrammed the electronic warfare subsystems for Ukraine’s F-16s to counter the evolving Russian jamming and spoofing.
fired Ukraine’s air force commander after the incident. Again, not unusual. Firing the commander galvanizes accountability. The most professional air forces do it routinely.
Of course, it’s still shocking to me that dilatory decision-making by President Biden’s team delayed the arrival of the first handful of F-16s until August 2024. But now there’s no going back. Ultimately, Ukraine’s Air Force will have between 60-80 F-16s supplied via NATO partners who have decided to
.
“Providing those jets, we see it as important to protect Ukraine from further escalation from Russia,” Mes said last year. Ukraine’s willingness to use – and lose – F-16s in combat strengthens the country’s defenses. The specific combat lessons from Ukraine will apply to future tactics.
For China, it’s a matter of tactics and deterrence. China could put hundreds of drones and missiles in the air in waves of attacks around a Pacific island ally. As China grows more formidable, there’s a trend towards believing that the U.S. Air Force will only “stand off” with long-range weapons and bombers, leaving the close-in fight to drones. Don’t count on it.
In just one month of operations, Ukraine’s bare handful of F-16s have shown that the latest tactics call for getting in close to go after drones and missiles. The scenarios differ, but the U.S. and allies are getting a fair amount of tactical feedback from Ukraine. The reality is that Air Force planners in the Pacific are preparing for a hard fight with bases under heavy attacks, of a type not seen since World War II. In the imperative to
, every combat lesson from Ukraine will help.
Senior U.S. officials said earlier this month that they did not believe the F-16 was lost to “friendly fire” from
during the melee. Still, Ukraine’s air force will investigate.
Airmen don’t speculate before the full investigation is complete, and I guarantee you this is one mishap report that will be avidly followed by NATO airmen from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General C.Q. Brown, himself an F-16 pilot, on down to every jet pilot from Finland to Turkey and beyond.
