Proactively “From the Sea”; an agent of change leveraging the littoral best practices for a paradigm breaking six-sigma best business case to synergize a consistent design in the global commons, rightsizing the core values supporting our mission statement via the 5-vector model through cultural diversity.
For everyone with their eyes on China, this news from Vietnam is nothing but good.
On August 5, the European Union’s (EU) chief diplomat Federica Mogherini will sign a new defense agreement with Vietnam, the first such security deal Brussels will have with a Southeast Asian nation.
It is the latest indication that the EU is trying to forge a closer defense relationship with the region and Vietnam in particular, which is at the heart of disputes with China in the South China Sea.
After taking part in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum and an EU-ASEAN Post-Ministerial Conference in Bangkok between August 1 and 2, Mogherini will head to Hanoi to sign “an agreement on Vietnam’s participation in our European military and civilian missions”, she told regional media earlier this week.
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It will be the fourth FPA the EU has signed with an Asia-Pacific nation, after Australia, New Zealand and South Korea.
The deal comes as the EU’s relations with Vietnam are flourishing.
With the USA growing closer each year as well, this is solid stuff.
So, you think you have friends? If you say "1,000 Ship Navy" - what does that actually mean? Which nations do you expect to punt, and which will stand? So much clarity in the latest Strait of Hormuz crisis. I'm pondering over at USNIBlog. Come on by.
China has a plan. It isn't a secret. She isn't hiding anything. She is persistent, steady, focused, and driven. Like a slow rising tide, she is moving on to the global stage more and more and more. In just Africa, you can see it. All clear. All for you to see. Take time to read the superb report from CSIS - but the graphics should be enough to get your attention.
It is helpful to keep in mind that as difficult as it is to understand why your neighbors and family members make the decisions they do in the course of their lives, realize it can be equally opaque to understand why nations do the things they do. History is, on balance, not just a story of struggle and progress – it is also the story of nations and leaders making decisions that both at the time and in hindsight, are reckless. With too much hope and too little appreciation of risk, nations can start down paths that lead places no one wants to go. The ‘ole planner in me can’t help but take strange little articles in open source and play them out four more turns – about three different ways, flipping one or the other assumption/variable to see where they can lead. From Most Likely COA to most Dangerous COA – the exercise can be … a bit maddening. The Austro-Hungarians could have used a better run of this exercise early last century – and we sure didn’t do all that great of a job of it in 2003. Along those lines, last night I simply could not get this little bit out of my head;
Iran has reportedly asked China for its support in the Gulf, as Royal Navy Type 45 Destroyer HMS Duncan arrived in the region.
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Rezaei made the remarks on Sunday in a meeting with head of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Song Tao, who who arrived in Tehran on Sunday, reports Iranian news agency Mehr news.
"We live in the energy region of the world. Any kind of insecurity and conflict in this region would carry harm to global peace and security,” Rezaei is quoted as telling Song Tao.
I don’t think the time is quite ripe for China to make its military statement on the global stage, but there is a non-zero chance that smart Chinese planners are doing the math right now on what a tottering former empire a bit over extended and with few friends might provide to a nation looking to make a point. Weakness is not a good play for Britain right now. I really hope her European friends start to back her play, but I have my doubts. When that fails, I’m sure C5F has the plans in place to backfill and form up with the Royal Navy. That is something I hope the Chinese will see. Not only is the time not ripe for them to take the stage, we will not let the Royal Navy stand alone against anyone. China should smile and say polite things to Iran, and then do nothing. They have that luxury, for now, they should continue to enjoy it.
From Baltic air policing, through the Russian border areas, to Afghanistan and curling back to the Strait of Hormuz, NATO alliance members are being tested not just by external powers, but by domestic politics and the slow churn of history. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO members continue to grapple with their larger mission - and what alliance members mean and owe to each other. From purpose to public support, returning to Midrats for a thorough review Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern of NATO near the end of the 2nd decade of the 21st Century will be our guest Dr. Jorge Benitez. Jorge is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Marine Command and Staff College in Quantico, Virginia. He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He specializes in NATO and transatlantic relations, European politics, and US national security. He previousy served as assistant for Alliance issues to the Director of NATO Affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He has also served as a specialist in international security for the Department of State and the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. Dr. Benitez received his BA from the University of Florida, his MPP from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and his PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
Join us live if you can, but if you miss the show you can always listen to the archive at Spreaker. If you use iTunes, you can add Midrats to your podcast list simply by clicking the iTunes button at the main showpage - or you can just click here.
As this topic came up this week again on twitter, I thought I would repost this FbF from 2013. As those who follow what I am reading on the right side of the page, I am a catching up on someone I have considered a hero for most of my adult life once I found out who he was in my early 20s; Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I cannot recommend more highly to those interested in the Germans who tried to get rid of Hitler, the book Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.
In the course of my reading of the plots to kill Hitler, I heard of Bonheoffer in the context of those in the background supporting the uniformed Germans in the plot; he was so much more. I wish I had read about Bonheoffer earlier, and I intend to get the English translations of his theological work later this year. One of the reason I found the plot so interesting as the more I learned of it, the more I found more of the lies that I was told growing up about all the brave "anti-fascists" of the Left and that, natuurlijk, the fasists were a bunch of right-wing Christian conservatives. What a load of BS I used to believe.
The Nazis were not "right wing" in our political context - fascism was all an outgrowth of socialism. The Left did nothing serious inside Germany to resist or eliminate Hitler, they either joined him, ran to the communists, or surrendered. No, the only serious effort against Hitler was what in our political context would be considered the "right" side of the spectrum; the landed aristocracy, classical liberals, and relatively fundamentalist Christians both Protestant like Bonheoffer and Catholics. Well, one of the last of them has now passed - a man I read about a few times. He served his nation well his entire life. He showed more bravery as a young man than legions do collectively their entire life. Like many of the plotters and patriots, he was a Prussian from Pomerania ... in lands that are now Polish. A life in many ways, all lost. Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist; congrats on a life well lived. Via The Economist;
NO ONE could doubt that, from head to toe, Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist was a military man. Generations of training, from the 12th century, had given him that straight Prussian spine and that cool, unswerving look. His ancestors, on the cold, undulating family estates on the Gulf of Riga and in Pomerania, had been Rittmeister, masters of cavalry. The good old days, it seemed to him, were when German men had been proud to wear their uniforms in the street. In person he was rarely off the defensive, civil but unexpansive, returning questions with a simple “You know the answer to that.”
In 1940, at 18, he abandoned his architectural studies and joined the Wehrmacht.
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Amid the Russian snows as a very young company commander, Ewald-Heinrich found that he never got used to the deaths of his men. Increasingly, he wondered what they were dying for, in a war that was “pointless” and “wrong”. He was a proud German, devoted to the Fatherland, perhaps the more so because his family lands were so close to the edge that they were swallowed into post-war Latvia and Poland. But the words dulce et decorum est pro patria mori meant nothing to him now, when the state itself was murderous.
The one thing that seemed worth dying for was the erasing of Hitler from the scene. When Claus von Stauffenberg, leader of the anti-Nazi plotters, asked him to become a suicide-bomber early in 1944, he still hesitated, hoping that his father would object and save him. But his father paused for only a moment before he told him he must do it: “A man who doesn’t take such a chance will never again be happy in life.”
The path not taken
In the event, he never quite put his courage to the test. He agreed to wear two hand grenades under his uniform and to detonate them as he stood to attention before Hitler, but the Führer cancelled their meeting. Similarly, in the plot of July 20th 1944 to kill Hitler in the “Wolf’s Lair” in east Prussia, he agreed to carry the suitcase of explosives into the conference room but, in the end, was told to stay in Berlin. For a few hours, feeling history “bend on the edge of a knife”, he believed Hitler had been killed. In fact, he had survived. Five thousand were killed to avenge him; but Mr von Kleist, after brief imprisonment, was dismissed as a callow, apolitical soldier and sent to the front again. He was the last of the plotters to die, their youngest recruit.
He served his nation exceptionally well.
After the war he was left homeless when most of Pomerania was transferred to Poland and all Germans expelled. Kleist went into the publishing business, founding his own publishing house, the Ewald-von-Kleist-Verlag. He joined the Protestant Order of Saint John (Bailiwick of Brandenburg), to which his executed father had belonged, admitted as a Knight of Honour in 1957 and promoted to Knight of Justice in 1975.[6] In 1962, Kleist founded the Wehrkundetagung in Munich, later called, in English, the Munich Conference on Security Policy; he moderated it until 1998.
Of note, his father was also part of the plot and was executed one month prior to the end of the war. That whole family is Fullbore. Go to the 9-minute mark. It is a good and great thing that such a German patriot lived to see this scene on a day such as this. Germany as he wished it was as a young man, that he now sees as he helped build.
History likes to laugh at our plans. What if we are so focused on present assumptions for a path to 355 ships that we are ignoring a few uncomfortable terrain issues? Do you like the idea of facing China with 6 CVN and 44 total submarines? No? Head on over to USNIBlog and check my math for me.
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later this year. 
