According to Donald Trump Jr., the Taliban is handing newly acquired Apache (and Black Hawk) helicopters over to China who will reverse engineer the helicopters and “make them better” — for two cents on the dollar of the cost paid by the U.S. military to develop the technology. Raise your hand if you’re shocked.
Trump Jr. made the accusation on a “Louder with Crowder” podcast, as he discussed Joe Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan debacle with host Steven Crowder — a completely unnecessary disaster about which a high school kid with a modicum of intelligence could have predicted every tragic consequence.
Incidentally, Joe Biden was desperate to be the president who not only ended the war in Afghanistan — but ended it prior to the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Yet, in classic Biden fashion, he will instead be remembered as the president who walked away from Afghanistan, billions of dollars of advanced U.S. military technology, commitments to NATO allies, and most inexcusable, untold numbers of American citizens trapped behind enemy lines at the mercy of the Taliban. Good job, Joe.
Without coming up for air once, DJT Jr. launched into a diatribe of accusations, a bit reminiscent of another guy named Trump — but sounding as if he was on speed.
They have freakin’ Apaches. They’re selling them to the Chinese who are reverse-engineering them, and within about two weeks, they will have a helicopter that will destroy the Apache — after we spent billions and billions in R & D, and years developing it, the Chinese now will have that — they will reverse-engineer it to have a better piece of equipment for two cents on the dollar after we’ve spent trillions in development. That’s how the world works.
The Chinese are talking about taking over Bagram Air Force Base that we sunk billions in that would have been a nice place to maybe have a presence, essentially on the border with China. But our genius military is really focused on ‘white rage’ and critical race theory and teaching us that diversity will somehow make a stronger fighting force. No one who actually fights understands even remotely how that is possible but our generals do and they have told us distinctly. If you question that you will be thrown out of the military. We’ve seen that.
Now, if you’re a lunatic who’s preaching the leftist B.S. that they’re talking about on a daily basis, you will likely be promoted. You see the conservative purge in the military — I saw it — I have friends on the SEAL teams— literally operators. They have told me verbatim: They spend more time in diversity training than they do shooting—
At that point, the below clip was edited to Crowder promoting this Saturday night’s pay-per-view boxing match featuring 58-year-old former heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield, with Donald Trump scheduled to do ringside commentary and Trump Jr. also providing live commentary.
You can download the “Lowder with Crowder” podcast here.
In a Defense One article on Friday, Technology Editor Patrick Tucker addressed the troubling prospect that advanced U.S. military equipment now in the hands of the Taliban will yield troves of information about how the U.S. builds weapons and uses them. Even if rendered inoperable, according to Tucker.
Tucker’s opening sentence set the tone for the entire article.
The ultimate winner of two decades of war in Afghanistan is likely China. The aircraft and armored vehicles left behind when U.S. forces withdrew will give China—through their eager partners, the Taliban—a broad window into how the U.S. military builds and uses some of its most important tools of war.
Expect the Chinese military to use this windfall to create—and export to client states—a new generation of weapons and tactics tailored to U.S. vulnerabilities, said several experts who spent years building, acquiring, and testing some of the equipment that the Taliban now controls.
Pretty much everything that has come out of the mouths of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from the nanosecond the gravity of the Biden Afghanistan debacle first became clear, has been proven false. These two marionettes have repeatedly assured us that the equipment left behind was disabled and left inoperable — although we did see the Taliban flying what appeared to be a Black Hawk helicopter above a Taliban military parade of other U.S. military equipment within, oh, 17 minutes of the Americans blowing out of town.
And what does Patrick Tucker think about the claim? A complete crock of crap.
To understand how big a potential loss this is for the United States, look beyond the headlines […]
“The only reason we aren’t seeing more attacks is because of a veil of secrecy around these systems,” said Josh Lospinoso, CEO of cybersecurity company Shift5. “Once you pierce that veil of secrecy … it massively accelerates the timeline for being able to build cyber weapons” […]
Lospinoso spent ten years in the Army conducting penetration tests against radios, small computers, and other IT gear commonly deployed in Afghanistan, according to Tucker, referring to the radios and communications equipment aboard the Afghan Air Force C-130 transport plane captured by the Taliban, noting that the Pentagon has assured us that the equipment was disabled. Apparently, so what?
“But if any of it remains on the plane,” warned Lospinoso, “an adversary with time and will could pick those apart, one by one.”
You now have some or all of the electronic components on that system and it’s a representative laboratory; it’s a playground for building, testing, and iterating on cyber-attacks where maybe the adversary had a really hard time until he obtained actual copies of the gear. It is the playground for them to develop attacks against similar items.
And this, from Georgianna Shea, who spent five years at MITRE, helping the Pentagon research and test new technologies.
[The loss of key equipment to the Taliban] exposes everything we do in the U.S., DOD: our plans of action, how we configure things, how we protect things. It allows them unlimited time and access to go through and find vulnerabilities that we may not be aware of.
It’s not just a Humvee. It’s not just a vehicle that gets you from point A to point B. It’s a Humvee that’s full of radios, technologies, cryptosystems, things we don’t want our adversaries getting a hold of.
Of particular concern to Shea are the electronic countermeasures gear, or ECMs, used to detect improvised explosive devices.
Imagine the research and development effort that went into developing those ECM devices that were designed to counter IEDs,” said Peter Christensen, a former director of the U.S. Army’s National Cyber Range. “Now, our adversaries have them. They’re going to have the software and the hardware that goes with that system. But also develop capabilities to defeat or mitigate the effectiveness of those ECM devices
Gear that has been “demilitarized” or “rendered inoperable,” as U.S. officials described the planes and vehicles left behind, can still reveal secrets, Shea said.
In some cases, this equipment was fielded with the assumption we would have gates and guards to protect it. When it was developed, no one thought the Chinese would have it in their cyber lab, dissecting it, pulling it apart.
Donald Trump Jr. might have been a bit theatrical during his visit with Steven Crowder, but seems to me, he was pretty much spot-on.
Check out these recent articles that also illustrated the ‘brilliance” of the Biden Afghanistan debacle:
The Daggers Peter Doocy Shot at Jen Psaki Over Vaccine Mandate Answer Would Make Superman Proud
Who Knew? Pentagon Chief Lloyd Austin: Al-Qaeda? Yeah, They’ll Probably Be Back, Too
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