When Iran Buys Arms, Tanks and Air Defense Systems, Blame Europe

Posted on by

Primer: The 3rd Khordad system, which is based on the Russian S-300 and shot down a U.S. sophisticated large Global Hawk US drone in June 2019. Iran is the major supplier of weapons to Syria.

Iran’s foreign minister says the country will meet its strategic needs by purchasing weapons from Russia and China, and has no need for European weapons once the UN embargo is lifted in October.

Iran announces mass production of domestic main battle ...

(Bloomberg) — European governments that aren’t backing the U.S. re-imposition of United Nations sanctions on Iran are wedded to the “silly” 2015 nuclear deal and haven’t proposed an alternative for preventing new conventional arms sales to Iran, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said.

With European powers stressing their commitment to the accord on Sunday, Pompeo doubled down on the U.S. decision to invoke the “snapback” of sanctions in a dispute that’s helped estrange President Donald Trump’s administration and Europe.

“The Europeans who have not joined us in this, they know we’re right,” Pompeo said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” “They tell us privately they don’t want the arms sales to come back” and expressed this view in a letter “that they’re very concerned about these arms sales.” He didn’t elaborate on who sent the letter or when.

The U.S. on Saturday said that all of the UN resolutions on Iran that were in place before the 2015 deal — from a ban on arms deals to restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile activity and its nuclear enrichment — have now gone back into effect. But 13 of 15 Security Council members say they don’t consider the U.S. move valid.

Can’t Proceed

“It is illegitimate for the U.S. to demand the Security Council invoke the snapback mechanism” because it is no longer a participant of the deal, Chinese Ambassador Zhang Jun wrote in a letter to the Security Council on Saturday that was seen by Bloomberg News.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres also weighed in on the disagreement on Saturday, noting in a letter that he couldn’t proceed in acting upon the U.S. snapback because of the “uncertainty over whether or not the process” was “indeed initiated”.

Although Europeans have expressed private concern, “they haven’t lifted a finger, they haven’t done the work that needs to be done” or have outlined an option to the U.S. snapback, Pompeo said. “I hope they’ll join us. I hope they get to the right place. They’re still wedded to this silly nuclear deal that was signed now five years ago.”

Weapons Purchases

Absent the snapback, Iran would be able to resume buying arms, tanks and air defense systems, Pompeo said. “All of those in a couple of weeks, would have been permitted to have been sold,” he said.

European powers on Sunday stressed their commitment to the nuclear agreement.

“We have worked tirelessly to preserve the nuclear agreement and remain committed to do so,” the foreign ministers of France, Germany and the U.K. said in a statement. Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said the accord is “a key pillar” of nuclear non-proliferation that deserves support.

Since quitting the accord in 2018, the Trump administration has plowed ahead with efforts to undermine the deal, ratcheting up sanctions on Iran and threatening allies if they do business with the Islamic republic. Trump is expected to speak on Tuesday to the UN General Assembly, which is being held virtually this year.

The U.S. campaign has united partners such as the U.K., France and Germany with Russia and China, all of whom have sought to salvage the accord. Their support for the deal has left the U.S. isolated on the United Nations Security Council.

Why U.S., Other Powers Differ on Iran Nuclear Deal: QuickTake

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, at a cabinet meeting on Sunday shown on state television news, called the U.S. move a sign of “certain failure” which only demonstrates that President Donald Trump’s strategy has resulted in “maximum isolation” for Washington.

On Saturday, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threatened Iran would set U.S. military outposts in the Persian Gulf “on fire at once” if its adversary tried to start a war.

To enforce those measures, if countries like Russia and China disregard them, the U.S. could use tools such as secondary sanctions on shippers, insurers and banks. It could even threaten interdictions of ships at sea.

Read More: Iran Warns U.S. Against War Before UN Sanctions Showdown

“In the coming days, the United States will announce a range of additional measures to strengthen implementation of UN sanctions and hold violators accountable,” Pompeo said in his statement on Saturday. “Our maximum pressure campaign on the Iranian regime will continue until Iran reaches a comprehensive agreement with us to rein in its proliferation threats and stops spreading chaos, violence and bloodshed.”

Speaking Sunday at a church in Plano, Texas, Pompeo, said he prays that “the Iranian people that they will get a government that they deserve that respects the dignity of the lives of the Iranian people.”

The Iranian rial hit a low on the unregulated open market on Sunday, weakening 4.6% compared with last week and briefly breaching 280,000 per U.S. dollar, according to two currency trading channels on the Telegram messaging app.

Facts on BLM and the Chinese Progressive Association

Posted on by

A partial list of the Hall of Shame of corporations that gave financial support to BLM (burning and looting, conspiracy and now perhaps racketeering) includes Door Dash, Amazon, Gatorade, Microsoft, 23andMe, Airbnb, Unilever, Nabisco, Dropbox, Fitbit, Cisco and Atlantic Records.

Image

Add in that time in the 60’s when Senator Dianne Feinstein was Mayor Feinstein and her association with the Chinese Progressive Association.

Hat tip:

Imagine that far-right demonstrators were laying siege to American cities for months, led by activists explicitly calling for an “ethno-state,” and that one of their groups was funded by an outfit involved with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It would lead the news every day and there would be congressional hearings, right?

And rightly so. The threat of foreign interference in our domestic affairs is a serious matter, whether the suspects are rivals such as Russia or friendlies such as Mexico. This is especially the case if a foreign power were abetting unrest that aims to topple our constitutional order.

Well, the scenario described above is happening, though not with Russia or the far right, but with China and the leftist disturbances upending America and seeking to transform it.

Yet, there has not been a peep from the media or Congress about China’s support of the riots.

THE INTERACTION BETWEEN SERVICE AND ORGANIZING: TWO HOUSING CAMPAIGNS BY THE CHINESE PROGRESSIVE ASSOCIATION (95 page document)

Go to the website for the Black Futures Lab, a venture of Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza, and click on the “Donate” button. It will ask you to send your money to an obscure organization, the Chinese Progressive Association, explaining that “Black Futures Lab is a fiscally sponsored project of the Chinese Progressive Association.”

History of Chinese Progressive Association

The CPA was founded in San Francisco in 1972 during the heady days of the Marxist-oriented Asian American Movement, and today it also has a very active chapter in Boston. From its start, it has been a promoter of the People’s Republic of China.

According to an authoritative 2009 Stanford University paper tracing its early days to the present, and which can be found on Marxist.org, “The CPA began as a Leftist, pro-People’s Republic of China organization, promoting awareness of mainland China’s revolutionary thought and workers’ rights, and dedicated to self-determination, community control, and ‘serving the people.’”

The CPA, continued the paper, “worked with other pro-PRC groups within the U.S. and San Francisco Bay Area … Support for the PRC was based on the inspiration the members drew from what they saw as a successful grassroots model that presented a viable alternative to Western capitalism.”

One of the ways it did this was by holding “film screenings that were open to the public, sometimes showing Chinese films as well to facilitate understanding of the country’s revolutionary ideas. … CPA also took the lead with groups such as the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Organization to celebrate China’s National Day on Oct. 1”.

To this day, the CPA continues to be a partner of the PRC in the United States. Three years ago, the Boston chapter teamed up with China’s Consulate General in New York to offer Chinese nationals the opportunity to renew their passports, getting praise from China’s official mouthpiece, China Daily.

Last year, the CPA sponsored the raising of the PRC’s flag for the first time ever over Boston’s City Hall to honor the takeover of China by the Chinese Communist Party, just as the Stanford paper says has been its practice from the beginning, but this time drawing protesters. The event was organized, again, with the Chinese Consulate. Consul General Sun Guoxiang was on hand to say that, “The common interests are far more important than differences between U.S. and China.”

CPA co-founder Lydia Lowe also spoke at the event, reminding her audience that “McCarthyism is behind us. The Cold War is behind us.” In an essay she authored with other people on the Marxist revolutionary site LeftRoots last year, Lowe sounded as though she wanted to start another Cold War, writing that she wanted Asians to play a role in creating a “revolutionary strategy” that would achieve a “fundamentally different society.”

And CPA drew praise from China’s mouthpiece China Daily just a few weeks ago, for taking part again in Black Lives Matter demonstrations in San Francisco.

Black Lives Matter Opposes Capitalism

It is clear, then, that CPA works with China’s communist government, pushes its agenda here in the United States, and is regularly praised by China’s state-owned mouthpieces. It is clear, too, from, this perspective, why the CPA would sponsor a new enterprise by BLM founder Alicia Garza: they espouse the same desire for world communism.

"WE WANT AN END TO THE POLICE STATE!" Alicia Garza "Black ...

Garza sits atop a worldwide revolutionary empire, starting with the Black Lives Matter Global Network she founded, which now has 15 chapters in the U.S. and several more all over Canada, Australia, and Europe. As Foreign Affairs wrote in its September/October issue, “Today, BLM has a global network of dozens of chapters. This number will likely grow exponentially in the coming years.”

Garza is also behind the Movement for Black Lives, with its 50 domestic organizations. In July she said, “We helped to also pull together an ecosystem that was much broader than the organization that we founded, and that ecosystem is called the Movement for Black Lives and it is taking the world by storm.”

Movement for Black Lives is unabashedly anti-capitalist, saying on its website, “we are anti-capitalist. We believe and understand that Black people will never achieve liberation under the current global racialized capitalist system.”

So is Garza, and she means to use her international platform to end world capitalism. In 2015, she told an important gathering of global Marxists, “It’s not possible for a world to emerge where black lives matter if it’s under capitalism, and it’s not possible to abolish capitalism without a struggle against national oppression.”

There, she portrayed BLM as an offshoot of the Black Liberation Movement, the Marxist pan-Africanist Movement. “BLM, BLM,” she said coyly.

Last year, Garza told a roomful of Maine progressives, “We’re talking about changing how we’ve organized this country, so that we actually can achieve the justice that we are fighting for. I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society, which creates inequities for everyone.”

The Role of Black Futures Lab

Two years ago, Garza created the Black Futures Lab, the organization that the Chinese Progressive Association funds, as yet another asset in the vast Garza empire. By the looks of it, it acts as a sort of a lobbying arm of this empire.

As Colorlines put it when it was launched on Sept. 26, 2018, Black Futures Lab “seeks to engage advocacy organizations and legislators to advance local-, state- and federal-level policies that make Black communities stronger. It will also craft strategies that harness Black political power to bring those policies to fruition.”

“Today, we are launching the Black Futures Lab as a way to mobilize around our needs, hopes, and dreams,” Garza told Colorlines in an emailed statement. “For too long, people have spoken for us and perpetuated false representations of the issues that drive our votes.”

This legislative clout adds to the organizing muscle that The Black Lives Matters Global Network and Movement for Black Lives organizations already bring.

As I wrote at City Journal last month, the BLM organizations have been the nerve center of this year’s protests: “They have been laying the groundwork for years, carefully cultivating a network of groups that could organize protests when the moment came and amplify the message through social media.”

Communist China has put its vast propaganda apparatus to work in support of the mayhem that has wreaked havoc in American cities this year. China is, after all, a rival of the United States, and would see weakening of U.S. society and the country in general as advantageous.

The involvement of an outfit as closely associated with the Chinese government in the funding of one of Garza’s ventures is something else entirely, however.

Maybe journalists and congressmen have not seen it till now (I myself hadn’t until Jenny Nguyen, a graduate of The Heritage Foundation’s Young Leaders Program, alerted me to it).

But now they have.

More detail here on the founders of BLM

Trump Announces 1776 Commission

Posted on by

Patriotism, factual history and civics could make a comeback in the education system. FINALLY and one must remember civics was replaced in the public school system with ‘social studies’. What is social studies anyway and does it really teach about the founding documents, the Founders themselves, the structure of government and fundamental natural law? Yeah, not so much. There are countless politicians that need refresher courses and most media does as well.

File:The Second Continental Congress voting independence ...

President Donald Trump announced on Thursday he would sign a new executive order establishing the “1776 Commission” to promote patriotic education. The commission will counter the revisionist history peddled by leftist efforts like the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which imposes false narratives on America’s students.

“The narratives about America being pushed by the far left and being chanted in the streets bear a striking resemblance to the anti-American propaganda of our adversaries,” Trump said in remarks during the White House Conference on American History at the National Archives. He further described the 1619 Project—a collection of essays that cast America as an irredeemably racist empire built solely to oppress minorities—as “ideological poison.”

**

Earlier this year, China successfully weaponized American wokeness to drive divisions deeper in the U.S., seeking to evade responsibility for the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak by complaining that any term linking the virus to its Chinese origins was racist. Woke reporters soon complied with Beijing’s orders and began badgering the president repeatedly on his use of terms consistent with the naming of new diseases.

“Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda,” Trump said, “that if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country.”

**

Trump’s announcement marks the latest example of the White House’s decision to engage substantively in the culture war, coming less than two weeks after the administration banned critical race theory trainings at federal agencies.

The new 1776 Commission, Trump said, “will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and make plans to honor the 250th anniversary of our founding.”

Several Republican House members also ramped up their efforts to counter the 1619 Project, which has already infected K-12 curriculums in some 4,500 classrooms. Earlier Thursday, Reps. Ken Buck of Colorado and Rick Allen of Georgia introduced the House companion bill to legislation from Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton that would bar federal funding from schools incorporating the 1619 Project in their curriculums.

Launched last year, the progressive project spearheaded by the Times’ riot-cheering Nikole Hannah-Jones (who won a Pulitzer for the project’s opening essay, even though it required a major correction) has made its way into the classrooms of major schools districts such as Chicago and Washington D.C.

Watch a short documentary debunking the project here:

**

 

 

FinCen Flagged Hunter Biden for Money-Laundering

Posted on by

Adam Schiff is way too quiet on this….and not only is Hunter not returning phone calls, but the Biden presidential campaign wont respond either.

Hunter Biden Has No Regrets For Serving On Ukrainian Gas ...

JTN: Treasury Department agency that polices financial threats such as money laundering flagged several foreign transactions to Hunter Biden-connected businesses as “suspicious” during the end of the Obama administration and the beginning of the Trump administration.

The concerns from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) were highlighted in Suspicious Activity Reports turned over to Senate committees over the last year in conjunction with investigations into the Russia and Ukraine scandals, according to several officials familiar with the evidence.

As those Senate investigations wind toward the issuance of their first official report later this month, an essential question has emerged: Did U.S. law enforcement or intelligence agencies do anything to determine if the money flowing to Vice President Joe Biden’s son posed any criminal or intelligence threats? Officials at Treasury, FBI and the Office of Director of National Intelligence declined comment.

Senate Democrats first called attention to the existence of the SARs in a little-noticed letter late last year and are now bracing for the flagged financial transactions to be a major revelation in a joint report they expect to be published by the GOP-led Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and the Senate Finance Committees as early as next week.

“The Republicans have had this in their back pocket for some time to make headlines as the election drew closer,” one Democratic source told Just the News.

A lawyer for Hunter Biden did not return a call requesting comment. Spokesmen for the two Senate committees declined comment.

The SAR reports were requested as Senate investigators dug into a labyrinth of global businesses that Hunter Biden and his business partners became involved with in Russia, China, Ukraine and elsewhere while his father Joe Biden served as the vice president and Obama administration foreign policy point person. That includes Hunter Biden’s controversial addition in spring 2014 to the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas firm with a long record of corruption allegations.

SARs are one of the law enforcement community’s most powerful and secretive tools in the war against money laundering, drug cartels and terrorist threats, providing real-time warnings from financial institutions to FinCEN that certain transactions have characteristics that make them suspicious. The origin, size and routing channels are just some of the components that can lead a transaction to be flagged.

Treasury typically receives or generates one million to two million Suspicious Activity Reports a year. So a SAR report in and of itself is not evidence of wrongdoing, but it is usually a starting point for investigation, experts say. The question that remains is whether FBI or ODNI did anything to investigate these suspicious reports after they were alerted by FinCEN.

The American suspicious transaction reports turned over to the Senate committees are the second known instance of red flags raised about foreign money flowing into business firms associated with Hunter Biden.

In February 2016, the Latvian government sent a warning to Ukrainian prosecutors that several payments from Burisma to an account in New York controlled by Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca Bohai firm appeared suspicious, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Just the News and Latvian authorities.

“The Office for Prevention of Laundering of Proceeds Derived from Criminal Activity … is currently investigating suspicious activity of Burisma Holdings Limited,” the Latvian agency, also known as the FIU, wrote to Ukraine’s financial authorities.

The letter was confirmed earlier this year by the Latvian embassy to the United States.

The Latvian law enforcement letter identified a series of loan payments totaling about $16.6 million that were routed from companies in Belize and the United Kingdom to Burisma through Ukraine’s PrivatBank between 2012 and 2015.

The flagged funds were “partially transferred” to Hunter Biden, a board member at Burisma since May 2014, and three other officials working for the Ukrainian natural gas company, according to the Latvian letter.

The letter asked Ukrainian officials for any evidence about whether the funds were involved in corruption and whether Ukrainian officials were investigating Burisma and the recipients of the money.

“On the grounds of possible legalization of proceeds derived from criminal activity and corruption, please grant us permission to share the information included in the reply to this request with Latvian law enforcement entities for intelligence purposes only,” the letter said.

Latvian authorities said they did not get any incriminating information back from Ukraine to warrant further investigation and did not take additional action in 2016.

Hunter Biden’s globe-trotting business activities have long generated controversy because they often occurred in the shadows of his father’s foreign policy portfolio. Hunter Biden, for instance, traveled aboard Air Force Two in December 2013 with the vice president to Beijing, walking away soon after with a stake in an investment fund that received funding from the state-owned Bank of China. As his father’s administration took several actions favorable to Beijing, such as opening U.S. capital markets to Chinese companies, Hunter Biden closed deals in China.

One of those involved the sale of an iconic American auto parts manufacturer called Henniges in Michigan, in which Hunter Biden’s firm helped a Chinese military aircraft maker acquire a controlling stake in 2015. The transaction was approved by the Obama administration despite the facts that the Chinese firm had been sanctioned five prior times by the U.S. government for nefarious activity and that less than 15 months prior one of the Chinese firm’s subsidiaries was placed on a black list by the U.S. government for ties to the Chinese military.

Similarly, Hunter Biden was added to the Burisma board in May 2014 just weeks after his father implored Ukraine to expand its natural gas production. Burisma faced multiple corruption investigations, and State Department memos show the U.S. government reported just months after Hunter Biden joined the firm’s board that Burisma allegedly paid a $7 million bribe to Ukrainian prosecutors designed to make the corruption allegations go away.

State officials also testified during last year’s impeachment proceedings that the Bidens created the appearance of a conflict of interest that undercut Joe Biden’s efforts to stamp out corruption in Ukraine.

FBI officials obtained records in an unrelated investigation showing Burisma paid more than $3 million from foreign accounts to a New York investment account tied to Hunter Biden.

Senate investigators have also spent some time investigating real estate investments that Hunter Biden and his business partner Devon Archer were involved in. The investigators’ interest was piqued by evidence that some of the investments received large support from a Russian oligarch and philanthropist based in London named Yelena Baturina, Russia’s only female billionaire and the wife of the late Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov.

Board minutes obtained by the FBI in an unrelated 2017-18 investigation of Archer state that Archer told investors during a 2014 meeting that he had secured upwards of $200 million from Baturina’s real estate businesses in London.

“Mr. Archer further discussed the possible sale of his company and the revenues that might be realized, which he said would be a big liquidity event for him, as well as his connections with Bohai, which he said was sponsored by major banks and institutional investors in China,” according to the minutes. “He also discussed his client relationship with Yelena Baturina, who he said had invested over $200 million dollars in his various investment funds. Mr. Archer emphasized that he had ample funding, but that the investors wanted to be efficient,” the memo read.

You can read those board minutes here:

Baturina’s office in London did not respond to a email request for comment, nor did lawyers for Hunter Biden or Archer.

SecDef Says China, Russia Have ‘Weaponized Space’

Posted on by

Primer: Now we are beginning to understand the creation of the new military branch known as the Space Force and further it is important to embrace the work of NASA and SpaceX.

Is the Space Force Necessary? If Done Correctly, Yes | CyberDB

A year ago, two intelligence agencies have recently released documents that describe in general terms the nature of the threat. Russia and China are developing kinetic and non-kinetic means designed to disrupt, degrade and destroy U.S. space systems. Mechanisms being tested include directed energy weapons such as lasers, spacecraft that can physically manipulate satellites, terrestrial anti-satellite munitions, jammers that can disrupt uplinks and downlinks, and cyber tools that can impair satellites, ground stations and the equipment of warfighters reliant on space-based systems.

For instance, China is believed to possess 120 intelligence and reconnaissance satellites, many of which are operated by the People’s Liberation Army to track the movements of U.S. forces. Russia only possesses about 20 such satellites. And while Russia pioneered development of systems for hacking and attacking U.S. space systems, it is China that is continually increasing it outlays for counterspace technologies. For example, Beijing tested an anti-satellite weapon in 2007 and has continued refining that technology.

With a typical Army combat brigade containing 2,000 pieces of equipment dependent on space systems to function, this is a serious matter. In wartime, counterspace attacks could prevent the joint force from accessing GPS signals vital to the operation of smart bombs, block the transmission of critical intelligence, and even impede the ability of the president to receive timely warning of a nuclear attack. The nation’s entire global military posture could be degraded by disruption of links traveling through orbital assets. More here from Forbes

The U.S. plan for a Space Force risks escalating a 'space arms race'

China and Russia have introduced weapons to space, including killer satellites, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said Wednesday.

“In space, Moscow and Beijing have turned a once peaceful arena into a warfighting domain,” Esper said.

“They have weaponized space through killer satellites, directed energy weapons, and more in an effort to exploit our systems and chip away at our military advantage.”

Directed energy weapons use converted chemical or electrical energy and focus it on a target, resulting in physical damage. Weapons used by the U.S. military include systems that use high energy lasers.

Directed energy weapons can be very effective against swarm attacks, a Pentagon official said in 2018.

“We often think about directed energy as large lasers, and I’ve certainly been involved with some of that for decades, but we also have high power microwaves which can be very effective as what we call an electronics kill,” Dr. Michael D. Griffin, under secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, said at the time.

NTD Photo

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson inspects new technologies being developed and tested at the High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility and USS Desert Ship, a land-based launch facility designed to simulate a ship at sea, at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., on Jan. 25, 2017. (Navy photo by Chief Petty Officer Elliott Fabrizio)

“That sort of thing—it’s really hard to envision handling swarming attacks by purely kinetic means—so that’s one of the future threats that I think we face.”

Killer satellites are satellites with the capability to kill and destroy.

**

Esper said America’s competitors and adversaries “exploit cyberspace to undermine our security without confronting our conventional strengths.”

“They do this all in an increasingly gray zone of engagement that keeps us in a perpetual state of competition. The national defense strategy guides us as we adapt the force to this challenging complex security environment by status quo and continue outpacing the competition,” he added.

But strong investment is enabling the military to move forward with developing hypersonic weapons and other modern tools.

“Thanks to our largest research and development budget in the department’s history, we are advancing critical technologies to maintain our military edge in areas such as hypersonic weapons, directed energy and autonomous systems,” Esper said.

Esper was speaking during the Air Force Association’s Virtual Air, Space & Cyber Conference.

Following an increase of $3.6 billion, the Department of Defense’s budget for research and development was $95.3 billion in fiscal year 2019, according to its financial report (pdf).

President Donald Trump’s administration officially launched Space Force late last year, establishing it as a sixth branch of the military.

“Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital,” Trump said when signing legislation that included funding for the branch.

The Defense Space Strategy, released earlier this year, outlines what the United States needs to do to achieve a “comprehensive military advantage” in space within 10 years.

Three key objectives are identified for the Space Force: to maintain America’s space superiority; to provide space support to all joint military operations; and to “ensure space stability”—or to deter aggression and uphold international agreements in space with a persistent presence, similar to how the Navy polices international waters.

Esper said he’s proud of the progress made in implementing the strategy, which will “ensure our dominance across all domains.”

Esper spoke a day after Gen. John Raymond, who heads Space Force.

Raymond revealed that the force’s Space Based Infrared System satellites were used to detect Iranian missiles aimed at American war planes in January.

Raymond praised the 2nd Space Warning Squadron at Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado.

“They operated the world’s best missile warning capabilities and they did outstanding work, and I’m very very proud of them,” he said at the conference.

Trump had said “an early warning system that worked very well” helped avoid U.S. casualties, but didn’t disclose the nature of the system.