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Stratcom Commander Admiral Richard Strikes Again, Sees Ukraine as a ‘Warmup’ for the Big One—China

Nov. 5, 2022 (EIRNS)—The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal heartily endorses the latest, enthusiastic “let’s all gear up for nuclear war!” cheerleading uttered by the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, Adm. Charles Richard. In the middle of a strategic crisis now more dangerous than that of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Richard argued in his Nov. 3 speech to the Naval Submarine League’s 2022 Annual Symposium & Industry Update, that the United States today needs to mobilize to produce new nuclear warfare capabilities the way “we got to the Moon by 1969.”

As if Kennedy’s mobilization of the nation to take the first steps in leaving Earth and start exploring our Solar System could be equated with mobilizing to better carry out “nuclear coercion” against Russia and China!

According to the Defense Department report on his speech, in Richard’s view:

“This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup. The big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested [for] a long time. We have to do some rapid, fundamental change in the way we approach the defense of this nation....

“As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking. It is sinking slowly, but it is sinking, as fundamentally they are putting capability in the field faster than we are. As those curves keep going, it isn’t going to matter how good our [operating plan] is or how good our commanders are, or how good our forces are—we’re not going to have enough of them. And that is a very near-term problem.”

Wall Street’s journal highlighted his use of the word “near-term” in its editorial the next day, pointing to its message that “this is a more urgent vulnerability than most of the political class cares to recognize.” The editorial board lobbied for building three Virginia-class fast-attack submarines a year, as a good start, “educating the public” about the need for a war production mobilization.

To get an idea of how he “thinks” (if it can be called “thinking”), Richard hearkened back to the days when the U.S. military “used to know how to move fast,” in getting maintenance problems fixed and new construction going. He cited the example of the development of the AGM-28 Hound Dog nuclear cruise missile by 1960 as how things “used to be,” enthusiastically describing that nuclear weapon as “so cool.”

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