Latest news with #DouglasMacArthur
South China Morning Post
16-06-2025
- Politics
- South China Morning Post
Can the island chain strategy contain China's blue-water naval ambitions?
China's navy is pushing past the strategic island chains that for decades have marked defensive boundaries for the United States and its allies in the Western Pacific. The deployment of two Chinese aircraft carrier groups in the open waters of the Pacific Ocean since late May has underscored a critical advance in Beijing's ambitions to become a blue-water navy by 2035. The Liaoning and Shandong have been on a routine training exercise to test their 'far-sea defences and joint operational capabilities', according to the PLA Navy. Notably, it is the first time a Chinese carrier has sailed beyond the second island chain. What is the island chain strategy? The strategy was proposed in 1951 by the then US secretary of state John Foster Dulles, as a way of using American-aligned island bases to contain the communist Soviet Union and China in the Western Pacific. Taiwan – famously described in 1950 by General Douglas MacArthur as an 'unsinkable aircraft carrier' – was pivotal to the concept. While the strategy became less prominent after the Cold War, it re-emerged strongly post-1991 as a way to counter a rising Beijing. The first island chain runs along East Asia's coastline, from the Kuril Islands through Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines down to Borneo. This marks the Chinese mainland's near seas from the wider Pacific. The second island chain is further east and includes the major US base at Guam. It extends through the Marianas to Palau and New Guinea.
Telegraph
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
General Trump has entered the fray and this is just the beginning
Donald Trump has long had a keen fascination with swashbuckling generals from the Second World War. His rally speeches are peppered with anecdotes about General Douglas MacArthur and he used a clip from one of his favourite war movies to open his event at Manhattan's Madison Square a week before last year's election. 'Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser,' says George C Scott, playing Gen George Patton in the 1970 movie Patton. What could be more Trumpian? The president's first administration was packed with generals and retired generals. Mr Trump made no secret of his admiration for their can-do attitude and straightforward command structure until, that is, he soured on their adherence to rules and legal norms. This time around, his flood-the-zone strategy of bamboozling the media and Democratic opponents with a constant stream of executive orders, public comments, and proclamations could come from one of Patton's real-life quotes: 'As long as you attack them, they cannot find the time to attack you.' This week, Mr Trump is leaning into his role of commander-in-chief in a much more literal sense. He has deployed active service personnel as an arm of domestic policy to back his massive deportation push. As protests grew in response to immigration raids around Los Angeles, he took the highly unusual step of deploying National Guard troops at the weekend despite the opposition of the California governor. On Tuesday he used a speech honouring soldiers to defend his decision against charges it was a politically motivated stunt. 'Generations of army heroes did not shed their blood on distant shores only to watch our country be destroyed by invasion and third-world lawlessness,' he said at the army base in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. A day later, the first of 700 Marines arrived in Los Angeles. And he has left open the possibility of going even further, using the Insurrection Act, which authorises the president to deploy military forces on American soil to suppress domestic violence in certain scenarios. 'If there's an insurrection, I would certainly invoke it. We'll see,' he said from the Oval Office. And then there is Saturday's military parade. More than 100 military vehicles and thousands of soldiers are set to roll or march down Constitution Avenue in front of the White House. Black Hawk and Apache helicopters will fill the skies. It will be the $50 million fulfillment of a dream Mr Trump has had since 2017, when he was a guest of Emmanuel Macron, the French president, at a Bastille Day parade. Hundreds of troops marching down the Champs-Élysées beneath plumes of red, white and blue smoke trailing behind fighter jets, left a deep impression on Mr Trump. 'It was one of the greatest parades I've ever seen,' he later said. 'We're going to have to try and top it.' A parade during his visit to China in 2017 also got the Trump seal of approval. He called it 'magnificent'. Then, he was quietly advised then that it would not be appropriate to parade the nation's military might through the capital. But like so much of his thwarted first-term agenda, he has spent the past four years staffing up with officials who can make his dreams come true. Officially, Saturday's parade will mark the 250th birthday of the army. And it doesn't hurt that it falls on the 79th birthday of Mr Trump. Critics say he is abusing the nation's armed forces for his own ends. 'He views the military as political props,' said John Bolton, who worked as Trump's national security adviser in his first term before falling out with him. 'He thinks they make him look good.' The event could serve another purpose, illustrating how Mr Trump is bringing the nation's biggest and strongest institutions into line. And as commander-in-chief he is the one to call the shots, illustrating his hold on power. Members of Washington's diplomatic corps will be in the audience on Saturday. 'He just likes the pomp and circumstance,' said one, speaking on condition of anonymity. 'I don't see an attack on democracy. Mr Trump looks around at other leaders and thinks that this is the sort of thing that a head of state gets.' In the meantime, polls suggest a limit to what he can do as commander-in-chief. A new YouGov survey found that 47 per cent of Americans disapprove of deploying the Marines to Los Angeles, with only 34 per cent approving, despite other polls showing that voters approve of the broader deportation operation. And while legal scholars will debate whether Mr Trump's decision to deploy troops stands up to scrutiny, and whether it breaches a federal law, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prevents the use of American forces to enforce domestic laws, the president sees things in black and white. He knows where the battle lines are drawn as he made clear in his Fort Bragg speech. He used highly partisan language to slam the Los Angeles protesters and to champion the armed forces. 'They're heroes. They're fighting for us,' he said. 'They're stopping an invasion, just like you'd stop an invasion.' His armed forces are all part of Mr Trump's us-against-them view of the world.
AllAfrica
04-06-2025
- Politics
- AllAfrica
Ukraine shows it knows wars are never won in the past
The iconoclastic American general Douglas MacArthur once said that 'wars are never won in the past.' That sentiment certainly seemed to ring true following Ukraine's recent audacious attack on Russia's strategic bomber fleet, using small, cheap drones housed in wooden pods and transported near Russian airfields in trucks. The synchronized operation targeted Russian Air Force planes as far away as Irkutsk – more than 5,000 kilometers from Ukraine. Early reports suggest around a third of Russia's long-range bombers were either destroyed or badly damaged. Russian military bloggers have put the estimated losses lower, but agree the attack was catastrophic for the Russian Air Force, which has struggled to adapt to Ukrainian tactics. This particular attack was reportedly 18 months in the making. To keep it secret was an extraordinary feat. Notably, Kyiv reportedly did not inform the United States that the attack was in the offing. The Ukrainians judged – perhaps understandably – that sharing intelligence on their plans could have alerted the Kremlin in relatively short order. Ukraine's success once again demonstrates that its armed forces and intelligence services are the modern masters of battlefield innovation and operational security. Western military planners have been carefully studying Ukraine's successes ever since its forces managed to blunt Russia's initial onslaught deep into its territory in early 2022, and then launched a stunning counteroffensive that drove the Russian invaders back towards their original starting positions. There have been other lessons, too, about how the apparently weak can stand up to the strong. These include: attacks on Russian President Vladimir Putin's vanity project, the Kerch Bridge, linking the Russian mainland to occupied Crimea (the last assault occurred just days ago) the relentless targeting of Russia's oil and gas infrastructure with drones attacks against targets in Moscow to remind the Russian populace about the war, and its incursion into the Kursk region, which saw Ukrainian forces capture around 1,000 square kilometres of Russian territory. On each occasion, Western defense analysts have questioned the wisdom of Kyiv's moves. Why invade Russia using your best troops when Moscow's forces continue laying waste to cities in Ukraine? Why hit Russia's energy infrastructure if it doesn't markedly impede the battlefield mobility of Russian forces? And why attack symbolic targets like bridges when it could provoke Putin into dangerous 'escalation'? The answer to this is the key to effective innovation during wartime. Ukraine's defense and security planners have interpreted their missions – and their best possible outcomes – far more accurately than conventional wisdom would have thought. Above all, they have focused on winning the war they are in, rather than those of the past. This means: using technological advancements to force the Russians to change their tactics shaping the information environment to promote their narratives and keep vital Western aid flowing, and deploying surprise attacks not just as ways to boost public morale, but also to impose disproportionate costs on the Russian state. In doing so, Ukraine has had an eye for strategic effects. As the smaller nation reliant on international support, this has been the only logical choice. Putin has been prepared to commit a virtually inexhaustible supply of expendable cannon fodder to continue his country's war ad infinitum. Russia has typically won its wars this way – by attrition – albeit at a tremendous human and material cost. That said, Ukraine's most recent surprise attack does not change the overall contours of the war. The only person with the ability to end it is Putin himself. That's why Ukraine is putting as much pressure as possible on his regime, as well as domestic and international perceptions of it. It is key to Ukraine's theory of victory. This is also why the latest drone attack is so significant. Russia needs its long-range bomber fleet, not just to fire conventional cruise missiles at Ukrainian civilian and infrastructure targets, but as aerial delivery systems for its strategic nuclear arsenal. The destruction of even a small portion of Russia's deterrence capability has the potential to affect its nuclear strategy. It has increasingly relied on this strategy to threaten the West. A second impact of the attack is psychological. The drone attacks are more likely to enrage Putin than bring him to the bargaining table. However, they reinforce to the Russian military that there are few places – even on its own soil – that its air force can act with operational impunity. The surprise attacks also provide a shot in the arm domestically, reminding Ukrainians they remain very much in the fight. Finally, the drone attacks send a signal to Western leaders. US President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, for instance, have gone to great lengths to tell the world that Ukraine is weak and has 'no cards'. This action shows Kyiv does indeed have some powerful cards to play. That may, of course, backfire: after all, Trump is acutely sensitive to being made to look a fool. He may look unkindly at resuming military aid to Ukraine after being shown up for saying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would be forced to capitulate without US support. But Trump's own hubris has already done that for him. His regular claims that a peace deal is just weeks away have gone beyond wishful thinking and are now monotonous. Unsurprisingly, Trump's reluctance to put anything approaching serious pressure on Putin has merely incentivised the Russian leader to string the process along. Indeed, Putin's insistence on a maximalist victory, requiring Ukrainian demobilisation and disarmament without any security guarantees for Kyiv, is not diplomacy at all. It is merely the reiteration of the same unworkable demands he has made since even before Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022. However, Ukraine's ability to smuggle drones undetected onto an opponent's territory, and then unleash them all together, will pose headaches for Ukraine's friends, as well as its enemies. That's because it makes domestic intelligence and policing part of any effective defence posture. It is a contingency that democracies will have to plan for, just as much as authoritarian regimes, who are also learning from Ukraine's lessons. In other words, while the attack has shown up Russia's domestic security services for failing to uncover the plan, Western security elites, as well as authoritarian ones, will now be wondering whether their own security apparatuses would be up to the job. The drone strikes will also likely lead to questions about how useful it is to invest in high-end and extraordinarily expensive weapons systems when they can be vulnerable. The Security Service of Ukraine estimates the damage cost Russia US$7 billion. Ukraine's drones, by comparison, cost a couple of thousand dollars each. At the very least, coming up with a suitable response to those challenges will require significant thought and effort. But as Ukraine has repeatedly shown us, you can't win wars in the past. Matthew Sussex is associate professor (Adj), Griffith Asia Institute; and fellow, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Restoration to MacArthur Memorial's 175-year-old dome making headway
NORFOLK, Va. (WAVY) — The Mermaid City is known for its historic landmarks and structures, but it takes continued preservation efforts to keep them standing tall, and now, there's a focus on the MacArthur Memorial, with special attention to its beloved cupola, currently under construction. MacArthur Memorial artifact a finalist for conservation prize The memorial itself was constructed between 1847 and 1850, serving as Norfolk's very first City Hall and Courthouse. And 1964 was the year it officially transitioned to become the MacArthur Memorial by the city of Norfolk. But atop the site is its most prominent fixture — its 175-year-old dome. 'The interior of the space right beneath the dome is now the final resting place of general of the Army Douglas MacArthur and his wife, Jean MacArthur,' said MacArthur Memorial director Amanda Williams. Restoration to the dome began last November and is financially backed by the city of Norfolk. It was designed by Thomas U. Walter, a notable American architect of the 19th-century, and also, the brains behind constructing the dome of the United States Capitol building in Washington, D.C. 'The dome is one of the great historic structures in Norfolk, and the work is basically to conserve that 175-year-old structure and make sure that we can maintain it in its glory for another 50, 100 years,' she said. 'And so, it's basically just repairing wood that's rotted, painting, and just again, making sure that we preserve it in the way that it was constructed.' The curved structure is 50 feet high and houses what's called General MacArthur's resumé . The dome plays a monumental part in what attracts more than 130,000 visitors a year, especially on holidays like Memorial Day. 'It's a list of some of the major accomplishments and jobs that he held throughout his 52-year Army career. And it's a very, very impressive list,' Williams said. 'General MacArthur's career took him all over the world, and there are a lot of people that come to Norfolk, really to see this museum and to kind of pay their respects to the general and his legacy.' The dome restoration project is expected to be completed in the fall of this year. The MacArthur Memorial at 198 Bank St. in Norfolk is free and open to the public year-round from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. For information on the site's Memorial Day holiday events, click . Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Metro
05-05-2025
- General
- Metro
How did World War II end – and why do Europe and the US mark different dates?
This week marks 80 years since Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allies, bringing the Second World War to an end in Europe. The war killed an estimated 75 million people, including troops and innocent civilians, across 30 different nations. And while populations in Europe were able to welcome the end of the fighting in May with joy and relief, it continued for several more months in Asia and the Pacific Ocean. So how did the war come to an end, and why does the US mark a different date to Europe? Here is all you need to know. World War II ended in 1945 after six years of fighting – but the exact date varies depending on what country you are from. Unlike World War I, which is generally agreed to have ended with the armistice signed on November 11 1918, different 'theatres' of conflict came to an end at different times. In Europe, the war concluded on May 8, which is annually celebrated as Victory in Europe Day (or VE Day). That was the date when the German Instrument of Surrender was signed in Berlin by representatives of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the US, the UK and France. In Russia, the end of the war is celebrated on May 9, as time zones meant the document was actually signed the following day local time. Other parts of the world, including the US, place a greater weight on September 2 when the Japanese Instrument of Surrender was signed on board USS Missouri. Since this brought an end to the final theatre, Victory over Japan Day (or VJ Day) marks the official conclusion of World War II. In Europe, the war ended following the fall of Berlin to Soviet troops, Adolf Hitler's suicide, and Germany's unconditional surrender on May 8. The Nazis were defeated around a year after the UK, France, the US, Canada, and other allies launched the largest seaborne invasion in history in Normandy, France – known as D-Day. Over the following 11 months, two enormous military forces approaching from the east and the west eventually wore the Axis powers down. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video In the rest of the world, World War II ended when U.S. General Douglas MacArthur accepted Japan's formal surrender aboard the US battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay. More Trending The war between the US and Japan had started with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. The Japanese surrender in 1945 occurred after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, respectively. It remains the only two times such weapons have been used in an armed conflict: more than 150,000 people were killed, with countless more suffering the effects for years afterwards. However, the idea of surrender was still fiercely debated by the Japanese government and military top brass, with the decision only being made by Emperor Hirohito on August 15. Follow Metro across our social channels, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram Share your views in the comments below MORE: Queen tells veteran how her 'lucky' dad survived being shot in face during war MORE: I ate like a WWII Land Girl for a week to see if it helped me muster the Blitz spirit MORE: Is VE Day 2025 a bank holiday in the UK?
