Opponent: Isidore Newman EE | Judge: Brett Boelkens
1AC - PTD AC 1NC - REM PIC Xi Lashout DA 1AR - Case 1NC 2NR - REM PIC Case 2AR - Case REM PIC
ColleyVille
2
Opponent: Plano East HN | Judge: Dhruva Mambapoor
1AC - South Korea AC 1NC - T-Shell South Korea CP Case 1AR - T-Shell South Korea CP Case 2NR - T-Shell South Korea CP Case 2AR - T-Shell South Korea CP Case
ColleyVille
3
Opponent: Southlake Carroll AA | Judge: Kevin Huang
1AC - Space Tourism Military Civil Fusion 1NC - Xi Disad REM PIC Case 1AR - Case Xi Disad REM PIC 2NR - Xi Disad Case 2AR - Case Xi Disad
Damus
2
Opponent: NA | Judge: Elijah Smith
1 AC - Case 1 NC - Vaccine Mandate and Case Answers 1 AR - Case 2 NR - Vaccine Mandate 2 AR - Case
Glenbrooks
1
Opponent: NA | Judge: NA
1AC - Case 1NC - Framing and Vacc DA and Case Answers 1AR - Case 2NR - Vacc DA 2AR - Case
Harvard Westlake
5
Opponent: Harker RT | Judge: Julian Kuffour
1AC - Asteroid Mining AC Multilat 1NC - Heg DisAD CounterPlan Asteroid Mining Case 1AR - Case Heg DisAD CounterPlan 2NR - Heg DisAD CounterPlan Case 2AR - Case Heg DisAD CounterPlan
Harvard Westlake
1
Opponent: Peninsula EL | Judge: Elmer Yang
1 AC - Space Mining AFF 1 NC - Heg Disad Case 1 AR - Case Counter Plan 1 NR - Counter Plan Case 1 AR - Case Counter Plan
Harvard Westlake
4
Opponent: Harvard Westlake WL | Judge: Sam Larson
1AC - Cap AFF 1NC - Hege Disad Cap Good 1AR - Case Disad 1NR - Disad Case 2AR - Case Disad
Palm Classics
2
Opponent: Sequoia AS | Judge: Ben Erdmann
1AC - Case 1NC - Taiwan DA Democracy DA Case 1AR - Case 1NC 2NR - Democracy DA Case 2AR - Case Democracy DA
1AC - Global Commons 1NC - DA Case 1AR - Case DA 1NR - DA Case 2AR - Case DA
Peninsula
4
Opponent: Northwood AA | Judge: Sherry Meng
1 AC - Debris AC Climate Change 1 NC - REM CP Case 1AR - CP Case 2NR - CP Case 2AR - CP Case
Peninsula
5
Opponent: Marlborough MS | Judge: Dillon Johnson
1AC - Space Debris Corporate Colonialism 1NC - Xi Disad Case 1AR - Case Xi Disad 2NR - Xi Disad Case 2AR - Case Xi Disad
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Cites
Entry
Date
Contact Info
Tournament: X | Round: 1 | Opponent: X | Judge: X Email: mfleming2025@ihs.immaculateheart.org
11/20/21
Democracy DA
Tournament: Palm Classics | Round: 2 | Opponent: Sequoia AS | Judge: Ben Erdmann 1NC – DA Democracy’s on the brink – control of information will determine its fate Nye 18 (Joseph, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, University Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus and former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, PhD in political science from Harvard) “Protecting Democracy in an Era of Cyber Information War,” Hoover Institution, 11/13/2018 JL Today, in the face of successful Chinese control of what citizens can see and say on the Internet and Russian use of the Internet to interfere in the 2016 American election, the United States (and allied democracies) find themselves on the defensive. The expected asymmetries seem to have been reversed. Autocracies are able to protect themselves by controlling information flows, while the openness of democracies creates vulnerabilities that autocracies can exploit via information warfare. Ironically, one cause of the vulnerabilities has been the rise of social media and mobile devices in which American companies have been the global leaders. Citizens voluntarily carry Big Brother and his relatives in their pockets. Along with big data and artificial intelligence, technology has made the problem of defending democracy from information warfare far more complicated than foreseen two decades ago. And while rule of law, trust, truth, and openness make democracies asymmetrically vulnerable, they are also critical values to defend. Any policy to defend against cyber information war must start with the Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm. The use of information as an instrument of conflict and manipulation in international politics has a long history. Britain manipulated information to move American opinion in the direction of war with Germany both in 1917 and 1941. The United States and the Soviet Union both used broadcasts, covert organizations, and funds to interfere in foreign elections during the Cold War.3 And more narrowly, in battlefield situations in Iraq or in the campaign against ISIS, information was an important tool. In recent years, Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine has encompassed both cyber attacks and manipulation of information. Information operations are a critical component of modern warfare.4 Russia has used propaganda to express preferences for candidates in American elections since at least 1964, but new technologies have amplified their impact enormously.5 According to former CIA Director Michael Hayden, Russian interference in the 2016 election was “the most successful covert influence campaign in recorded history.”6 For example, Russian operatives used Facebook to publicize 129 staged events, drawing attention of 340,000 users; 10 million people saw ads paid for by Russian accounts; and 126 million Americans saw posts by 470 accounts affiliated with the Russian Internet Research Agency.7 A study by Twitter reported that 50,000 Russia-linked accounts were automated and tweeted election related content.8 Reports released by the Senate Intelligence Committee estimate that the Russian campaign reached not only the 126 million people on Facebook but another 20 million more on Instagram.9 Some Russian messages were crafted to support particular candidates while others were designed to create a general sense of chaos. Still others were micro-targeted to suppress voting by particular demographic groups such as African-Americans or younger voters. While skeptics argue that Russian efforts were a small percentage of the total content on the Internet, “for sub-groups of targeted Americans, the messaging was perhaps ubiquitous.”10 Before the Internet, such operations involved costly training and movement of spies across borders, establishment of foreign bank accounts, and transfers of cash. Now similar effects can be accomplished remotely at much lower cost. It is much easier to send electrons across borders than human agents. Ransoming a failed spy can be costly, but if no one clicks on a phishing e mail, it is simple, deniable, and virtually free to send another. In 1983, when the KGB seeded the rumor that AIDS was the product of U.S. government experiments with biological weapons, the rumor started with an anonymous letter to a small New Delhi newspaper and then was propagated globally but slowly over several years by widespread reproduction and constant repetition in conventional media. It took four years to reach full fruition. 11 In 2016, an updated version of the same technique was used to create “Pizzagate,” the bizarre rumor that Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager ran a child sex ring in a Washington restaurant. It spread instantly on the Internet. What’s new is not the basic model; it’s the speed with which such disinformation can spread and the low cost of spreading it. With its armies of paid trolls and botnets, along with outlets such as Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, Russian intelligence, after hacking into the e-mails of the Democratic National Committee and senior Clinton campaign officials, could distract and disrupt news cycles week after week without setting foot in the United States. And it could also count on the witting and unwitting help of organizations like Wikileaks. Russian messages aimed at priming, framing, agenda setting, and contagion were accelerated by U.S. media that were too quick and unreflective in using the Russian phrasing and frames.12 American voters are subject to many influences, and there were many potential causes of the narrow outcome of the 2016 election. It is far too simple just to blame manipulation of social media. As social scientists say, the outcome was “overdetermined.” But whatever its effects on the particular election outcome, Russia was able to accomplish its deeper goal of sowing disruption and discrediting the democratic model. It successfully undercut American soft power.
Constellations are key to democracy promotion – they put authoritarian leaders on the defensive – it’s perceptual and proven by opposition to satellites Schwille 4/12 (Michael, senior policy analyst at RAND, research interest focuses on the integration of information into combined arms warfare, M.A. in international development studies from George Washington University) “Satellite Internet Services—Fostering the Dictator's Dilemma?” RAND Corporation, 4/12/2021 JL Constellations of low-altitude, low-latency satellites providing broadband internet access to wide swathes of the earth are an impending challenge to the information dominance enjoyed by the world's authoritarian states. Whether Amazon's proposed Project Kuiper, Elon Musk's Starlink (already functional in some areas of North America), or the United Kingdom funded OneWeb, the ability to provide relatively low cost internet access outside of government control is both a challenge for authoritarian states and an opportunity for democracies. In Russia, the Duma is already considering a law to criminalize access to such satellite services. China is not only planning to launch a competing service, it has Starlink's Musk concerned about having his satellites “blown up.” North Korea, which bans its citizens from accessing the internet and (in)famously attacks leaflets with machine guns, shells loudspeakers with artillery, and punishes citizens for accessing Chinese cellphone towers, has yet to comment publicly on such services. Given this history though, Pyongyang's reaction is unlikely to be very positive. What are low-altitude, low-latency satellites and why are authoritarian states so concerned? The problem (for authoritarians) and promise (for democracies) are the services' ability to provide broadband internet access almost anywhere on earth, with nothing new required on the ground aside from a small terminal. Because these satellites orbit at several hundred kilometers (low Earth orbit), versus 35,000km for telecommunication satellites in geostationary orbit, their terminals can be smaller, portable, and easier to conceal, smuggle, and infiltrate. With one of these terminals, users can cheaply and quickly bypass national controls on the internet and information access, plus place phone (e.g. Voice over Internet Protocol, Skype, or Zoom) calls outside of government-controlled systems. It is this freedom of information access and communication that has Russia and China so concerned, and that provides an opportunity for democratic states to rebalance their current information disadvantage. In what some scholars have termed democracy's dilemma, nations that rely on relatively free and open information flows are vulnerable to having that openness turned against them by adversaries. Think Russian influence on Brexit, the 2016 U.S. elections and the COVID-19 infodemic. What these new satellite systems offer is an opportunity to reinvigorate the dictator's dilemma (PDF)—the fear authoritarian leaders have of nonregime narratives reaching their people, or their people communicating outside of government-approved channels. Just how powerful is this fear? Moscow reacts more negatively to criticisms and threats to its information control than it does to (far more expensive) NATO exercises. For years, Russian state media have even coordinated to deflect these criticisms of Russia's censorship onto countries with which Moscow is in conflict, successively targeting Georgia, the United States, and Ukraine. China's rulers have a similar view, more fearful of “American ideals of freedom, democracy, and human rights infecting the people of China and Hong Kong,” than they are of U.S. military or economic challenges. This is not a new concern for Beijing; the term Great Firewall of China was discussed in a Wired article back in 1997. Beijing's controls have expanded since, with hundreds of thousands of censors and billions of dollars spent on informational and societal control, including the uniquely intrusive social credit systems (PDF). North Korea is an even clearer example, with years of North Korea specialists (see Lankov, Baek, Cha, Myers, and others) highlighting Pyongyang's reliance on domestic information control to keep the Kim family in power. Impressive control, but a weakness masquerading as a strength. This desire for information control represents both the dictator's dilemma and democracy's opportunity. Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang (as well as Tehran and others) are clearly concerned about the threat posed by unsupervised information access. Washington (or Brussels, London, Tokyo…whomever) publicly advocating for more open internet access, coupled with a clear mention of the new satellite services, would quickly command attention and establish a compelling narrative (and underlying threat). Coupling this message with a reminder of the West's ability to challenge information controls by, for example, smuggling bulky typewriters, printing presses, and Xerox machines into Eastern Europe in the 80s, which increased the flow of uncensored information, would add credibility to the threat—if authoritarian states thought typewriters were a problem, infiltrating an “internet in a box” (or thousands of them) looms as an even more compelling danger. The physical threat of infiltrated devices combined with a narrative advocating freedom of information access provide the West with a new, information-based tool for foreign policy leverage. A tool, or active measure, based not on fear, deception, or disinformation, but simply on information access. By offering an information-based response to an information-based attack, this tool offers a fresh, calibrated response option. Chinese cyber espionage or recent attacks on Hong Kong's civil liberties, Russian attempts to influence Brexit or U.S. elections (or the more recent SolarWinds hack), North Korean attacks on Sony or South Korea's ATM network, are all activities ripe for response. Once this tool is effectively demonstrated in terms of fostering the dictator's dilemma, democracy's response and deterrence toolkits, for both cyber and influence activities, commensurately expands. Importantly, the utility of this information tool is not confined simply to allowing outside information in; it also allows information to flow out (especially important with North Korea). Perhaps most importantly, it provides another tool to avoid government monitoring inside an authoritarian state. When paired with mesh networks of the type used, for example, during demonstrations in Hong Kong, it further increases the opportunity for the free flow of information dictators perceive as so threatening. This tool (or its threatened use) does not replace other foreign policy tools—diplomatic, economic, and military tools remain options; this proposal simply adds a new information-based capability. The tool fits within a historical context of Western information activities and offers a compelling public narrative—fighting censorship. The hardware costs are relatively low, largely borne by the companies launching the satellites, and coming into existence whether governments wish them to or not. Finally, by rebalancing democracy's dilemma through a reinforcement of the dictator's dilemma, this tool offers an information response to information/cyber/influence attacks, using a method that clearly targets the vulnerabilities and sensitivities of authoritarian adversaries.
Democracy solves war Christopher Kutz 16. PhD UC Berkeley, JD Yale, Professor, Boalt Hall School of Law @ UC Berkeley, Visiting Professor at Columbia and Stanford law schools, as well as at Sciences Po University. “Introduction: War, Politics, Democracy,” in On War and Democracy, 1. Despite Churchill’s famous quip—“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”2—democracy is seen as a source of both domestic and international flourishing. Democracy, understood roughly for now as a political system with wide suffrage in which power is allocated to officials by popular election, can solve or help solve a host of problems with stunning success. It can solve the problem of revolutionary violence that condemns autocratic regimes, because mass politics can work at the ballot box rather than the streets. It can help solve the problem of famine, because the systems of free public communication and discussion that are essential to democratic politics are the backbone of the markets that have made democratic societies far richer than their competitors. It can help solve the problem of environmental despoliation, which occurs when those operating polluting factories (whether private citizens or the state) do not need to answer for harms visited upon a broad public. And democracy has been famously thought to help solve the problem of war, in the guise of the idea of the “peace amongst democratic nations”—an idea emerging with Immanuel Kant in the Age of Enlightenment and given new energy with the wave of democratization at the end of the twentieth century.
2/12/22
JANFEB Hege DA
Tournament: Harvard Westlake | Round: 1 | Opponent: Peninsula EL | Judge: Elmer Yang Heg DA 1NC CP: States, except the United States, should ban the appropriation of outer space by private entities. The United States should increase the funding of private appropriation of outer space. 1NC US leads the private space sector now but other countries sectors are growing— US private sector is key to growth Harding 7/16 (Luke, a Guardian foreign correspondent. His book Shadow State is published by Guardian Faber. Click here for Luke's public key) “The space race is back on – but who will win?” The Guardian, 7/16/21. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/16/the-space-race-is-back-on-but-who-will-win RR Half a century on, space has opened up. It is less ideological and a lot more crowded. About 72 countries have space programmes, including India, Brazil, Japan, Canada, South Korea and the UAE. The European Space Agency is active too, while the UK boasts the most private space startups after the US. Space today is also highly commercial. On Sunday Richard Branson flew to the edge of space and back again in his Virgin Galactic passenger rocket. On Tuesday, Branson’s fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos is due to travel in his own reusable craft, New Shepard, built by the Amazon founder’s company Blue Origin and launched from west Texas. Non-state actors play an increasingly important role in space exploration. Elon Musk’s SpaceX vehicles have made numerous flights to the International Space Station (ISS), and since last year they have transported people as well as cargo. Later this year Musk is due to send his own all-civilian crew into orbit – though he isn’t going himself. Even so, space still reflects tensions on Earth. “Astropolitics follows terrapolitics,” says Mark Hilborne, a lecturer in defence studies at King’s College London. Up there anything goes, he adds. “Space governance is a bit fuzzy. Laws are few and very old. They are not written for asteroid mining or for a time when companies dominate.” The biggest challenge to US space supremacy comes not from Russia – heir to the Soviet Union’s pioneering space programme, which launched the Sputnik satellite and got the first human into space in the form of Yuri Gagarin – but from China. In 2011 Congress prohibited US scientists from cooperating with Beijing. Its fear: scientific espionage. Taikonauts are banned from visiting the ISS, which has hosted astronauts from 19 countries over the past 20 years. The station’s future beyond 2028 is uncertain. Its operations may yet be extended in the face of increasing Chinese competition. In its annual threat assessment this April, the office of the US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) described China as a “near-peer competitor” pushing for global power. It warns: “Beijing is working to match or exceed US capabilities in space to gain the military, economic, and prestige benefits that Washington has accrued from space leadership.” The Biden administration suspects Chinese satellites are being used for non-civilian purposes. The People’s Liberation Army integrates reconnaissance and navigation data in military command and control systems, the DNI says. “Satellites are inherently dual use. It’s not like the difference between an F15 fighter jet and a 737 passenger plane,” Hilborne says. Once China completes the Tiangong space station next year, it is likely to invite foreign astronauts to take part in missions. One goal: to build new soft-power alliances. Beijing says interest from other countries is enormous. The low Earth orbit station is part of an ambitious development strategy in the heavens rather than on land – a sort of belt and rocket initiative. According to Alanna Krolikowski, an assistant professor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, a “bifurcation” of space exploration is under way. In one emerging camp are states led by China and Russia, many of them authoritarian; in the other are democracies and “like-minded” countries aligned with the US. Russia has traditionally worked closely with the Americans, even when terrestrial relations were bad. Now it is moving closer to Beijing. In March, China and Russia announced plans to co-build an international lunar research station. The agreement comes at a time when Vladimir Putin’s government has been increasingly isolated and subject to western sanctions. In June, Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping renewed a friendship treaty. Moscow is cosying up to Beijing out of necessity, at a time of rising US-China bipolarity. These rival geopolitical factions are fighting over a familiar mountainous surface: the moon. In 2019 a Chinese rover landed on its far side – a first. China is now planning a mission to the moon’s south pole, to establish a robotic research station and an eventual lunar base, which would be intermittently crewed. Nasa, meanwhile, has said it intends to put a woman and a person of colour on the moon by 2024. SpaceX has been hired to develop a lander. The return to the moon – after the last astronaut, commander Eugene Cernan, said goodbye in December 1972 – would be a staging post for the ultimate “giant leap”, Nasa says: sending astronauts to Mars. Krolikowski is sceptical that China will quickly overtake the US to become the world’s leading spacefaring country. “A lot of what China is doing is a reprisal of what the cold war space programmes did in the 1960s and 1970s,” she said. Beijing’s recent feats of exploration have as much to do with national pride as scientific discovery, she says. But there is no doubting Beijing’s desire to catch up, she adds. “The Chinese government has established, or has plans for, programmes or missions in every major area, whether it’s Mars missions, building mega constellations of telecommunications satellites, or exploring asteroids. There is no single area of space activity they are not involved in.” “We see a tightening of the Russia-China relationship,” Krolikowski says. “In the 1950s the Soviet Union provided a wide range of technical assistance to Beijing. Since the 1990s, however, the Russian space establishment has experienced long stretches of underfunding and stagnation. China now presents it with new opportunities.” Russia is poised to benefit from cost sharing, while China gets deep-rooted Russian technical expertise. At least, that’s the theory. “I’m sceptical this joint space project will materialise anytime soon,” says Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Centre. Gabuev says both countries are “techno-nationalist”. Previous agreements to develop helicopters and wide-bodied aircraft saw nothing actually made, he says. The Kremlin has been a key partner in managing and resupplying the ISS. US astronauts used Russian Soyuz rockets to reach the station, taking off from a cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, after the Space Shuttle programme was phased out. But this epoch seems to be coming to an end as private companies such as SpaceX take over. “I expect US-Russian relations to get worse,” Gabuev says, adding that Americans “no longer need” Russia’s help. Moscow’s state corporation for space activities, Roscosmos, has faced accusations of being more interested in politics than space research. Last month the newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported that Roscosmos’s executive director of manned space programmes, former cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, had been fired. His apparent crime: questioning an official decision to shoot a film on the Russian section of the ISS. The film, Challenge, is about a female surgeon operating on a cosmonaut in space, and has been backed and financed by Roscosmos . It stars Yulia Peresild, who is due to head to space in October with director Klim Shipenko. The launch seems timed to beat Tom Cruise, who is due to shoot his own movie on board the ISS with director Doug Liman. Krikalev, who spent more than 800 days in space and was in orbit when the USSR collapsed, apparently told Roscomos’s chief, Dmitry Rogozin, that the film was pointless. Rogozin – its co-producer – has called on the west to drop sanctions in return for Russia’s cooperation on space projects. Putin, Rogozin’s boss, appears to not be very interested in other planets, though, and is more concerned with nature and the climate crisis these days. “Space is one of the areas that has traditionally transcended politics. The Mir space station worked at a time of east-west tensions. There was symbolic cooperation. Whether this will continue in the future is really up for debate,” Hilborne says. “The US is very sensitive about what happens in space.” Most observers think the US will remain the world’s pre-eminent space power, thanks to its innovative and flourishing private sector. China’s Soviet-style state programme appears less nimble. Despite ambitious timetables, and billions spent by Beijing, it is unclear when – or even if – an astronaut will return to the moon. The 2030s, perhaps? Will they be American or Chinese? Or from a third country? It may well be that the first person to boldly go again doesn’t merely represent a nation or carry a flag. More likely, they will emerge from a lunar lander wearing a spacesuit with a SpaceX logo on the back – a giant leap not only for mankind, but for galactic marketing.
Continued success of private space companies is key to secure space for the US. Macias and Sheetz 2/3 (Amanda, covers global trade and foreign policy for CNBC. She joined CNBC’s Washington bureau in 2018 from CBS Radio. Amanda studied Broadcast Journalism and Finance at the University of Missouri. She is a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University in New York.) (Micheal, Space Reporter) “Space Force general says success of private companies like SpaceX helps U.S. secure the space domain” CNBC, 2/3/21. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/03/space-force-general-america-owns-space-with-help-from-elon-musks-spacex.html RR WASHINGTON – The nation’s top general leading the U.S. military mission in space said Wednesday that he is excited about Wall Street and billionaire investment in the space industry, which has sparked renewed interest in the field among Americans and strong recruitment at the Pentagon’s youngest branch. “There is a ton of excitement across America on space in all sectors,” said Gen. John Raymond, the U.S. Space Force’s chief of operations, when asked by CNBC about the strides made by private space companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX. “I’ve talked about people knocking on our door wanting to come into the Space Force in numbers greater than what we have slots to fill. I’ve talked in the past about how universities are seeing more students apply for space STEM degrees, which I think is going to be great for our nation,” Raymond added. “I’m excited about all of it, both what we’re doing here on national security and what’s going on in the commercial industry that we can leverage the advantage,” the four-star general said without specifically naming any companies. “The U.S. has always, has long understood that we are stronger with a secure and stable space domain and all of those sectors play into that,” Raymond said. The U.S. Space Force, the Pentagon’s youngest branch, has increasingly looked to partner with the private sector as companies and investors pour into the space industry. The Pentagon is closely watching the progress of rocket builders like Rocket Lab, Astra and Virgin Orbit in addition to SpaceX. Raymond’s comments came on the heels of SpaceX announcing this week that it will fly its first all-civilian crew into orbit later this year, a mission known as Inspiration 4. The landmark flight, led by billionaire Jared Isaacman, is aimed at using high-profile space tourism to raise support for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Three yet-to-be-announced passengers will accompany Isaacman on the multiday journey around the Earth, with two of the seats to be decided in public online competitions this month. SpaceX announces first space mission with all-civilian crew Raymond also called out NASA’s Crew-1 mission, which was the first operational launch of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. “If you look at what’s going on in the civil sector with the launch of U.S. astronauts, and in this last launch a Japanese astronaut from U.S. soil on a commercial launch vehicle, there’s a ton of excitement there,” he said. Raymond did not provide a reaction to SpaceX’s Starship rocket test flight on Tuesday, which resulted in an explosion as it attempted to land. Starship prototype SN9 launched successfully to about 33,000 feet but, like the previous prototype flight in December, the rocket smashed into the ground while attempting to land. Private investment in space companies last year set a fresh annual record, despite industry fears that the Covid-19 pandemic would end the past decade’s momentum, according to a report by Space Capital last month. Builders of rockets and satellites brought in $8.9 billion in 2020, with venture capital and angel investors continuing to pour funds into space businesses. Space privatization key to US heg— Russia and China benefit from a weakened US. Weichert 17 (Brandon J., a former Congressional staff member who holds a Master of Arts in Statecraft and National Security Affairs from the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. He is the founder of The Weichert Report: An Online Journal of Geopolitics, and is currently completing a book on national security space policy.) “The High Ground: The Case for U.S. Space Dominance,” Science Direct, 2017. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0030438717300108 RR The global order is currently disordered. New states with completely different values from the United States are rising to prominence. Many of those states possess strategic cultures opposed to the American hegemony that has defined the post-Cold War order. Yet, the United States still maintains greater power, wealth, and capabilities than the other states seeking to displace her. For the United States to maintain its hegemonic position, it must also maintain a dominant position in space. As has been noted before, space is the ultimate high ground from which a state can dominate all of the other strategic domains (land, air, sea, and cyberspace). The United States has enjoyed the benefits from dominating this region. Yet, states like China and Russia are moving forward with their own plans not only to deny America access to space, but also to dominate this realm. These states would then benefit from commanding the high ground of space at America’s expense. Since at least the Nixon Administration, space has come to be viewed in a militarized light. By the end of the Cold War, space had not only been militarized, but many were searching for a way to weaponize it. Just as the drift toward militarization of space was inexorable, so too is the desire for weaponization. As rival states begin to hone their space skills, the United States should seek to obtain the first move advantage by capitalizing on its already sizable lead in space by weaponizing it first. The placing of weapons in orbit would not only increase the costs of attacking existing U.S. space architecture, but it would also lend itself to increasing global stability by raising the costs of aggressive behavior on belligerents. Whatever negatives the weaponization of space may have, nothing is more negative for America than to find itself losing its dominance of space to a state that has placed weapons in orbit first. To be passive and allow temporary budgetary constraints to dictate longterm space strategy will damage irrevocably the U.S. position in orbit. Our enemies are aware of our shortsighted preference for space superiority over dominance and are moving toward degrading the American advantage in space.23 Space dominance will not only rebuff rising states from challenging the United States, but it will also lend stability to the world order. This proactive stance was the goal of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. It must be the goal of U.S. policymakers today.24 US leadership in this decade solves global war and results in a peaceful end to Chinese revisionism Erickson and Collins 10/21 (Andrew, A professor of strategy in the U.S. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute)(Gabriel, Baker Botts fellow in energy and environmental regulatory affairs at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy) “A Dangerous Decade of Chinese Power Is Here,” Foreign Policy, 10/18/2021 U.S. and allied policymakers are facing the most important foreign-policy challenge of the 21st century. China’s power is peaking; so is the political position of Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) domestic strength. In the long term, China’s likely decline after this peak is a good thing. But right now, it creates a decade of danger from a system that increasingly realizes it only has a short time to fulfill some of its most critical, long-held goals. Within the next five years, China’s leaders are likely to conclude that its deteriorating demographic profile, structural economic problems, and technological estrangement from global innovation centers are eroding its leverage to annex Taiwan and achieve other major strategic objectives. As Xi internalizes these challenges, his foreign policy is likely to become even more accepting of risk, feeding on his nearly decadelong track record of successful revisionist action against the rules-based order. Notable examples include China occupying and militarizing sub-tidal features in the South China Sea, ramping up air and maritime incursions against Japan and Taiwan, pushing border challenges against India, occupying Bhutanese and Tibetan lands, perpetrating crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, and coercively enveloping Hong Kong. The relatively low-hanging fruit is plucked, but Beijing is emboldened to grasp the biggest single revisionist prize: Taiwan. Beijing’s actions over the last decade have triggered backlash, such as with the so-called AUKUS deal, but concrete constraints on China’s strategic freedom of action may not fully manifest until after 2030. It’s remarkable and dangerous that China has paid few costs for its actions over the last 10 years, even as its military capacities have rapidly grown. Beijing will likely conclude that under current diplomatic, economic, and force postures for both “gray zone” and high-end scenarios, the 2021 to late 2020s timeframe still favors China—and is attractive for its 68-year-old leader, who seeks a historical achievement at the zenith of his career. U.S. planners must mobilize resources, effort, and risk acceptance to maximize power and thereby deter Chinese aggression in the coming decade—literally starting now—and innovatively employ assets that currently exist or can be operationally assembled and scaled within the next several years. That will be the first step to pushing back against China during the 2020s—a decade of danger—before what will likely be a waning of Chinese power.
2/5/22
JANFEB Hege Da
Tournament: Harvard Westlake | Round: 4 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake WL | Judge: Sam Larson 1NC CP: States, except the United States, should ban the appropriation of outer space by private entities. The United States should increase the funding of private appropriation of outer space. 1NC US leads the private space sector now but other countries sectors are growing— US private sector is key to growth Harding 7/16 (Luke, a Guardian foreign correspondent. His book Shadow State is published by Guardian Faber. Click here for Luke's public key) “The space race is back on – but who will win?” The Guardian, 7/16/21. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/16/the-space-race-is-back-on-but-who-will-win RR Half a century on, space has opened up. It is less ideological and a lot more crowded. About 72 countries have space programmes, including India, Brazil, Japan, Canada, South Korea and the UAE. The European Space Agency is active too, while the UK boasts the most private space startups after the US. Space today is also highly commercial. On Sunday Richard Branson flew to the edge of space and back again in his Virgin Galactic passenger rocket. On Tuesday, Branson’s fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos is due to travel in his own reusable craft, New Shepard, built by the Amazon founder’s company Blue Origin and launched from west Texas. Non-state actors play an increasingly important role in space exploration. Elon Musk’s SpaceX vehicles have made numerous flights to the International Space Station (ISS), and since last year they have transported people as well as cargo. Later this year Musk is due to send his own all-civilian crew into orbit – though he isn’t going himself. Even so, space still reflects tensions on Earth. “Astropolitics follows terrapolitics,” says Mark Hilborne, a lecturer in defence studies at King’s College London. Up there anything goes, he adds. “Space governance is a bit fuzzy. Laws are few and very old. They are not written for asteroid mining or for a time when companies dominate.” The biggest challenge to US space supremacy comes not from Russia – heir to the Soviet Union’s pioneering space programme, which launched the Sputnik satellite and got the first human into space in the form of Yuri Gagarin – but from China. In 2011 Congress prohibited US scientists from cooperating with Beijing. Its fear: scientific espionage. Taikonauts are banned from visiting the ISS, which has hosted astronauts from 19 countries over the past 20 years. The station’s future beyond 2028 is uncertain. Its operations may yet be extended in the face of increasing Chinese competition. In its annual threat assessment this April, the office of the US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) described China as a “near-peer competitor” pushing for global power. It warns: “Beijing is working to match or exceed US capabilities in space to gain the military, economic, and prestige benefits that Washington has accrued from space leadership.” The Biden administration suspects Chinese satellites are being used for non-civilian purposes. The People’s Liberation Army integrates reconnaissance and navigation data in military command and control systems, the DNI says. “Satellites are inherently dual use. It’s not like the difference between an F15 fighter jet and a 737 passenger plane,” Hilborne says. Once China completes the Tiangong space station next year, it is likely to invite foreign astronauts to take part in missions. One goal: to build new soft-power alliances. Beijing says interest from other countries is enormous. The low Earth orbit station is part of an ambitious development strategy in the heavens rather than on land – a sort of belt and rocket initiative. According to Alanna Krolikowski, an assistant professor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, a “bifurcation” of space exploration is under way. In one emerging camp are states led by China and Russia, many of them authoritarian; in the other are democracies and “like-minded” countries aligned with the US. Russia has traditionally worked closely with the Americans, even when terrestrial relations were bad. Now it is moving closer to Beijing. In March, China and Russia announced plans to co-build an international lunar research station. The agreement comes at a time when Vladimir Putin’s government has been increasingly isolated and subject to western sanctions. In June, Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping renewed a friendship treaty. Moscow is cosying up to Beijing out of necessity, at a time of rising US-China bipolarity. These rival geopolitical factions are fighting over a familiar mountainous surface: the moon. In 2019 a Chinese rover landed on its far side – a first. China is now planning a mission to the moon’s south pole, to establish a robotic research station and an eventual lunar base, which would be intermittently crewed. Nasa, meanwhile, has said it intends to put a woman and a person of colour on the moon by 2024. SpaceX has been hired to develop a lander. The return to the moon – after the last astronaut, commander Eugene Cernan, said goodbye in December 1972 – would be a staging post for the ultimate “giant leap”, Nasa says: sending astronauts to Mars. Krolikowski is sceptical that China will quickly overtake the US to become the world’s leading spacefaring country. “A lot of what China is doing is a reprisal of what the cold war space programmes did in the 1960s and 1970s,” she said. Beijing’s recent feats of exploration have as much to do with national pride as scientific discovery, she says. But there is no doubting Beijing’s desire to catch up, she adds. “The Chinese government has established, or has plans for, programmes or missions in every major area, whether it’s Mars missions, building mega constellations of telecommunications satellites, or exploring asteroids. There is no single area of space activity they are not involved in.” “We see a tightening of the Russia-China relationship,” Krolikowski says. “In the 1950s the Soviet Union provided a wide range of technical assistance to Beijing. Since the 1990s, however, the Russian space establishment has experienced long stretches of underfunding and stagnation. China now presents it with new opportunities.” Russia is poised to benefit from cost sharing, while China gets deep-rooted Russian technical expertise. At least, that’s the theory. “I’m sceptical this joint space project will materialise anytime soon,” says Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Centre. Gabuev says both countries are “techno-nationalist”. Previous agreements to develop helicopters and wide-bodied aircraft saw nothing actually made, he says. The Kremlin has been a key partner in managing and resupplying the ISS. US astronauts used Russian Soyuz rockets to reach the station, taking off from a cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, after the Space Shuttle programme was phased out. But this epoch seems to be coming to an end as private companies such as SpaceX take over. “I expect US-Russian relations to get worse,” Gabuev says, adding that Americans “no longer need” Russia’s help. Moscow’s state corporation for space activities, Roscosmos, has faced accusations of being more interested in politics than space research. Last month the newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported that Roscosmos’s executive director of manned space programmes, former cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, had been fired. His apparent crime: questioning an official decision to shoot a film on the Russian section of the ISS. The film, Challenge, is about a female surgeon operating on a cosmonaut in space, and has been backed and financed by Roscosmos . It stars Yulia Peresild, who is due to head to space in October with director Klim Shipenko. The launch seems timed to beat Tom Cruise, who is due to shoot his own movie on board the ISS with director Doug Liman. Krikalev, who spent more than 800 days in space and was in orbit when the USSR collapsed, apparently told Roscomos’s chief, Dmitry Rogozin, that the film was pointless. Rogozin – its co-producer – has called on the west to drop sanctions in return for Russia’s cooperation on space projects. Putin, Rogozin’s boss, appears to not be very interested in other planets, though, and is more concerned with nature and the climate crisis these days. “Space is one of the areas that has traditionally transcended politics. The Mir space station worked at a time of east-west tensions. There was symbolic cooperation. Whether this will continue in the future is really up for debate,” Hilborne says. “The US is very sensitive about what happens in space.” Most observers think the US will remain the world’s pre-eminent space power, thanks to its innovative and flourishing private sector. China’s Soviet-style state programme appears less nimble. Despite ambitious timetables, and billions spent by Beijing, it is unclear when – or even if – an astronaut will return to the moon. The 2030s, perhaps? Will they be American or Chinese? Or from a third country? It may well be that the first person to boldly go again doesn’t merely represent a nation or carry a flag. More likely, they will emerge from a lunar lander wearing a spacesuit with a SpaceX logo on the back – a giant leap not only for mankind, but for galactic marketing.
Continued success of private space companies is key to secure space for the US. Macias and Sheetz 2/3 (Amanda, covers global trade and foreign policy for CNBC. She joined CNBC’s Washington bureau in 2018 from CBS Radio. Amanda studied Broadcast Journalism and Finance at the University of Missouri. She is a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University in New York.) (Micheal, Space Reporter) “Space Force general says success of private companies like SpaceX helps U.S. secure the space domain” CNBC, 2/3/21. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/03/space-force-general-america-owns-space-with-help-from-elon-musks-spacex.html RR WASHINGTON – The nation’s top general leading the U.S. military mission in space said Wednesday that he is excited about Wall Street and billionaire investment in the space industry, which has sparked renewed interest in the field among Americans and strong recruitment at the Pentagon’s youngest branch. “There is a ton of excitement across America on space in all sectors,” said Gen. John Raymond, the U.S. Space Force’s chief of operations, when asked by CNBC about the strides made by private space companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX. “I’ve talked about people knocking on our door wanting to come into the Space Force in numbers greater than what we have slots to fill. I’ve talked in the past about how universities are seeing more students apply for space STEM degrees, which I think is going to be great for our nation,” Raymond added. “I’m excited about all of it, both what we’re doing here on national security and what’s going on in the commercial industry that we can leverage the advantage,” the four-star general said without specifically naming any companies. “The U.S. has always, has long understood that we are stronger with a secure and stable space domain and all of those sectors play into that,” Raymond said. The U.S. Space Force, the Pentagon’s youngest branch, has increasingly looked to partner with the private sector as companies and investors pour into the space industry. The Pentagon is closely watching the progress of rocket builders like Rocket Lab, Astra and Virgin Orbit in addition to SpaceX. Raymond’s comments came on the heels of SpaceX announcing this week that it will fly its first all-civilian crew into orbit later this year, a mission known as Inspiration 4. The landmark flight, led by billionaire Jared Isaacman, is aimed at using high-profile space tourism to raise support for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Three yet-to-be-announced passengers will accompany Isaacman on the multiday journey around the Earth, with two of the seats to be decided in public online competitions this month. SpaceX announces first space mission with all-civilian crew Raymond also called out NASA’s Crew-1 mission, which was the first operational launch of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. “If you look at what’s going on in the civil sector with the launch of U.S. astronauts, and in this last launch a Japanese astronaut from U.S. soil on a commercial launch vehicle, there’s a ton of excitement there,” he said. Raymond did not provide a reaction to SpaceX’s Starship rocket test flight on Tuesday, which resulted in an explosion as it attempted to land. Starship prototype SN9 launched successfully to about 33,000 feet but, like the previous prototype flight in December, the rocket smashed into the ground while attempting to land. Private investment in space companies last year set a fresh annual record, despite industry fears that the Covid-19 pandemic would end the past decade’s momentum, according to a report by Space Capital last month. Builders of rockets and satellites brought in $8.9 billion in 2020, with venture capital and angel investors continuing to pour funds into space businesses. Space privatization key to US heg— Russia and China benefit from a weakened US. Weichert 17 (Brandon J., a former Congressional staff member who holds a Master of Arts in Statecraft and National Security Affairs from the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. He is the founder of The Weichert Report: An Online Journal of Geopolitics, and is currently completing a book on national security space policy.) “The High Ground: The Case for U.S. Space Dominance,” Science Direct, 2017. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0030438717300108 RR The global order is currently disordered. New states with completely different values from the United States are rising to prominence. Many of those states possess strategic cultures opposed to the American hegemony that has defined the post-Cold War order. Yet, the United States still maintains greater power, wealth, and capabilities than the other states seeking to displace her. For the United States to maintain its hegemonic position, it must also maintain a dominant position in space. As has been noted before, space is the ultimate high ground from which a state can dominate all of the other strategic domains (land, air, sea, and cyberspace). The United States has enjoyed the benefits from dominating this region. Yet, states like China and Russia are moving forward with their own plans not only to deny America access to space, but also to dominate this realm. These states would then benefit from commanding the high ground of space at America’s expense. Since at least the Nixon Administration, space has come to be viewed in a militarized light. By the end of the Cold War, space had not only been militarized, but many were searching for a way to weaponize it. Just as the drift toward militarization of space was inexorable, so too is the desire for weaponization. As rival states begin to hone their space skills, the United States should seek to obtain the first move advantage by capitalizing on its already sizable lead in space by weaponizing it first. The placing of weapons in orbit would not only increase the costs of attacking existing U.S. space architecture, but it would also lend itself to increasing global stability by raising the costs of aggressive behavior on belligerents. Whatever negatives the weaponization of space may have, nothing is more negative for America than to find itself losing its dominance of space to a state that has placed weapons in orbit first. To be passive and allow temporary budgetary constraints to dictate longterm space strategy will damage irrevocably the U.S. position in orbit. Our enemies are aware of our shortsighted preference for space superiority over dominance and are moving toward degrading the American advantage in space.23 Space dominance will not only rebuff rising states from challenging the United States, but it will also lend stability to the world order. This proactive stance was the goal of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. It must be the goal of U.S. policymakers today.24 US leadership in this decade solves global war and results in a peaceful end to Chinese revisionism Erickson and Collins 10/21 (Andrew, A professor of strategy in the U.S. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute)(Gabriel, Baker Botts fellow in energy and environmental regulatory affairs at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy) “A Dangerous Decade of Chinese Power Is Here,” Foreign Policy, 10/18/2021 U.S. and allied policymakers are facing the most important foreign-policy challenge of the 21st century. China’s power is peaking; so is the political position of Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) domestic strength. In the long term, China’s likely decline after this peak is a good thing. But right now, it creates a decade of danger from a system that increasingly realizes it only has a short time to fulfill some of its most critical, long-held goals. Within the next five years, China’s leaders are likely to conclude that its deteriorating demographic profile, structural economic problems, and technological estrangement from global innovation centers are eroding its leverage to annex Taiwan and achieve other major strategic objectives. As Xi internalizes these challenges, his foreign policy is likely to become even more accepting of risk, feeding on his nearly decadelong track record of successful revisionist action against the rules-based order. Notable examples include China occupying and militarizing sub-tidal features in the South China Sea, ramping up air and maritime incursions against Japan and Taiwan, pushing border challenges against India, occupying Bhutanese and Tibetan lands, perpetrating crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, and coercively enveloping Hong Kong. The relatively low-hanging fruit is plucked, but Beijing is emboldened to grasp the biggest single revisionist prize: Taiwan. Beijing’s actions over the last decade have triggered backlash, such as with the so-called AUKUS deal, but concrete constraints on China’s strategic freedom of action may not fully manifest until after 2030. It’s remarkable and dangerous that China has paid few costs for its actions over the last 10 years, even as its military capacities have rapidly grown. Beijing will likely conclude that under current diplomatic, economic, and force postures for both “gray zone” and high-end scenarios, the 2021 to late 2020s timeframe still favors China—and is attractive for its 68-year-old leader, who seeks a historical achievement at the zenith of his career. U.S. planners must mobilize resources, effort, and risk acceptance to maximize power and thereby deter Chinese aggression in the coming decade—literally starting now—and innovatively employ assets that currently exist or can be operationally assembled and scaled within the next several years. That will be the first step to pushing back against China during the 2020s—a decade of danger—before what will likely be a waning of Chinese power. As Beijing aggressively seeks to undermine the international order and promotes a narrative of inevitable Chinese strategic domination in Asia and beyond, it creates a dangerous contradiction between its goals and its medium-term capacity to achieve them. China is, in fact, likely nearing the apogee of its relative power; and by 2030 to 2035, it will cross a tipping point from which it may never recover strategically. Growing headwinds constraining Chinese growth, while not publicly acknowledged by Beijing, help explain Xi’s high and apparently increasing risk tolerance. Beijing’s window of strategic opportunity is sliding shut. China’s skyrocketing household debt levels exemplify structural economic constraints that are emerging much earlier than they did for the United States when it had similar per capita GDP and income levels. Debt is often a wet blanket on consumption growth. A 2017 analysis published by the Bank for International Settlements found that once the household debt-to-GDP ratio in a sample of 54 countries exceeded 60 percent, “the negative long-run effects on consumption tend to intensify.” China’s household debt-to-GDP ratio surpassed that empirical danger threshold in late 2020. Rising debt service burdens thus threaten Chinese consumers’ capacity to sustain the domestic consumption-focused “dual circulation” economic model that Xi and his advisors seek to build. China’s growth record during the past 30 years has been remarkable, but past exceptionalism does not confer future immunity from fundamental demographic and economic headwinds. As debt levels continue to rise at an absolute level that has accelerated almost continuously for the past decade, China also faces a hollowing out of its working-age population. This critical segment peaked in 2010 and has since declined, with the rate from 2015 to 2020 nearing 0.6 percent annually—nearly twice the respective pace in the United States. While the United States faces demographic challenges of its own, the disparity between the respective paces of decline highlights its relative advantage compared to its chief geopolitical competitor. Moreover, the United States can choose to access a global demographic and talent dividend via immigration in a way China simply will not be able to do. Atop surging debt and worsening demographics, China also faces resource insecurity. China’s dependence on imported food and energy has grown steadily over the past two decades. Projections from Tsinghua University make a compelling case that China’s oil and gas imports will peak between 2030 and 2035. As China grapples with power shortages, Beijing has been reminded that supply shortfalls equal to even a few percentage points of total demand can have outsized negative impacts. Domestic resource insufficiency by itself does not hinder economic growth—as the Four Asian Tigers’ multi-decade boom attests. But China is in a different position. Japan and South Korea never had to worry about the U.S. Navy interdicting inbound tankers or grain ships. In fact, the United States was avowedly willing to use military force to protect energy flows from the Persian Gulf region to its allies. Now, as an increasingly energy-secure United States pivots away from the Middle East toward the Indo-Pacific, there is a substantial probability that energy shipping route protection could be viewed in much more differentiated terms—with oil and liquefied natural gas cargoes sailing under the Chinese flag viewed very differently than cargoes headed to buyers in other regional countries. Each of these dynamics—demographic downshifts, rising debts, resource supply insecurity—either imminently threatens or is already actively interfering with the CCP’s long-cherished goal of achieving a “moderately prosperous society.” Electricity blackouts, real estate sector travails (like those of Evergrande) that show just how many Chinese investors’ financial eggs now sit in an unstable $52 trillion basket, and a solidifying alignment of countries abroad concerned by aggressive Chinese behavior all raise questions about Xi’s ability to deliver. With this confluence of adverse events only a year before the next party congress, where personal ambition and survival imperatives will almost drive him to seek anointment as the only Chinese “leader for life” aside from former leader Mao Zedong, the timing only fuels his sense of insecurity. Xi’s anti-corruption campaigns and ruthless removal of potential rivals and their supporters solidified his power but likely also created a quiet corps of opponents who may prove willing to move against him if events create the perception he’s lost the “mandate of heaven.” Accordingly, the baseline assumption should be that Xi’s crown sits heavy and the insecurity induced is thereby intense enough to drive high-stake, high-consequence posturing and action. While Xi is under pressure to act, the external risks are magnified because so far, he has suffered few consequences from taking actions on issues his predecessors would likely never have gambled on. Reactions to party predations in Xinjiang and Hong Kong have been restricted to diplomatic-signaling pinpricks, such as sanctioning responsible Chinese officials and entities, most of whom lack substantial economic ties to the United States. Whether U.S. restraint results from a fear of losing market access or a belief that China’s goals are ultimately limited is not clear at this time. While the CCP issues retaliatory sanctions against U.S. officials and proclaims a triumphant outcome to its hostage diplomacy, these tactical public actions mask a growing private awareness that China’s latitude for irredentist action is poised to shrink. Not knowing exactly when domestic and external constraints will come to bite—but knowing that when Beijing sees the tipping point in its rearview mirror, major rivals will recognize it too—amplifies Xi and the party’s anxiety to act on a shorter timeline. Hence the dramatic acceleration of the last few years. Just as China is mustering its own strategic actions, so the United States must also intensify its focus and deployment of resources. The United States has taken too long to warm up and confront the central challenge, but it retains formidable advantages, agility, and the ability to prevail—provided it goes all-in now. Conversely, if Washington fails to marshal its forces promptly, its achievements after 2030 or 2035 will matter little. Seizing the 2020s would enable Beijing to cripple destroy the free and open rules-based order and entrench its position by economically subjugating regional neighbors (including key U.S. treaty allies) to a degree that could offset the strategic headwinds China now increasingly grapples with. Deterrence is never certain. But it offers the highest probability of avoiding the certainty that an Indo-Pacific region dominated by a CCP-led China would doom treaty allies, threaten the U.S. homeland, and likely set the stage for worse to come. Accordingly, U.S. planners should immediately mobilize resources and effort as well as accept greater risks to deter Chinese action over the critical next decade. The greatest threat is armed conflict over Taiwan, where U.S. and allied success or failure will be fundamental and reverberate for the remainder of the century. There is a high chance of a major move against Taiwan by the late 2020s—following an extraordinary ramp-up in People’s Liberation Army capabilities and before Xi or the party state’s power grasp has ebbed or Washington and its allies have fully regrouped and rallied to the challenge. So how should policymakers assess the potential risk of Chinese action against Taiwan reaching dangerous levels by 2027 or possibly even earlier—as emphasized in the testimonies of Adms. Philip Davidson and John Aquilino? In June, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley testified to the House of Representatives that Xi had “challenged the People’s Liberation Army to accelerate their modernization programs to develop capabilities to seize Taiwan and move it from 2035 to 2027,” although China does not currently have the capabilities or intentions to conduct an all-out invasion of mainland Taiwan. U.S. military leaders’ assessments are informed by some of the world’s most extensive and sophisticated internal information. But what’s striking is open-source information available to everyone suggests similar things. Moving forward, a number of open-source indicators offer valuable “early warning lights” that can help policymakers more accurately calibrate both potential timetables and risk readings as the riskiest period of relations—from 2027 onward—approaches. Semiconductors supply self-sufficiency. Taiwan is the “OPEC+” of semiconductors, accounting for approximately two-thirds of global chip foundry capacity. A kinetic crisis would almost certainly disrupt—and potentially even completely curtail—semiconductor supplies. China presently spends even more each year on semiconductor imports (around $380 billion) than it does on oil, but much of the final products are destined for markets abroad. Taiwan is producing cutting-edge 5-nanometer and 7-nanometer chips, but China produces around 80 percent of the rest of the chips in the world. The closer China comes to being able to secure “good enough” chips for “inside China-only” needs, the less of a constraint this becomes. Crude oil, grain, strategic metals stockpiles—the commercial community (Planet Labs, Ursa Space Systems, etc.) has developed substantial expertise in cost-effectively tracking inventory changes for key input commodities needed to prepare for war. Electric vehicle fleet size—the amount of oil demand displaced by electric vehicles varies depending on miles driven, but the more of China’s car fleet that can be connected to the grid (and thus powered by blockade-resistant coal), the less political burden Beijing will face if it has to weather a maritime oil blockade imposed in response to actions it took against Taiwan or other major revisionist adventures. China’s passenger vehicle fleet, now approximately 225 million units strong, counts nearly 6.5 million electric vehicles among its ranks, the lion’s share of which are full-battery electrics. China’s State Council seeks to have 20 percent of new vehicles sold in China be electric vehicles by 2025. This target has already basically been achieved over the last few months, meaning at least 3.5 to 4 million (and eventually many more) new elective vehicles will enter China’s car fleet each year from now on. Local concentration of maritime vessels—snap exercises with warships, circumnavigations, and midline tests with swarms of aircraft highlight the growing scale of China’s threat to Taiwan. But these assets alone cannot invade the island. To capture and garrison, Beijing would need not only air, missile, naval, and special operations forces but also the ability to move lots of equipment and—at the very least—tens of thousands of personnel across the Taiwan Strait. As such, Beijing would have to amass maritime transport assets. And given the scale required, this would alter ship patterns elsewhere along China’s coast in ways detectable with artificial intelligence-facilitated imagery analysis from firms like Planet Labs (or national assets). Only the most formidable, agile American and allied deterrence can kick the can down the road long enough for China’s slowdown to shut the window of vulnerability. Holding the line is likely to require frequent and sustained proactive enforcement actions to disincentivize full-frontal Chinese assaults on the rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific. Chinese probing behavior and provocations must be met with a range of symmetric and asymmetric responses that impose real costs, such as publishing assets owned by Chinese officials abroad, cyber interference with China’s technological social control apparatus, “hands on” U.S. Navy and Coast Guard enforcement measures against Maritime Militia-affiliated vessels in the South China Sea, intensified air and maritime surveillance of Chinese naval bases, and visas and resettlement options to Hong Kongers, Uyghurs, and other threatened Chinese citizens—including CCP officials (and their families) who seek to defect and/or leave China. U.S. policymakers must make crystal clear to their Chinese counterparts that the engagement-above-all policies that dominated much of the past 25 years are over and the risks and costs of ongoing—and future—adventurism will fall heaviest on China. Bombastic Chinese reactions to emerging cohesive actions verify the approach’s effectiveness and potential for halting—and perhaps even reversing—the revisionist tide China has unleashed across the Asian region. Consider the recent nuclear submarine deal among Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Beijing’s strong public reaction (including toleration of nuclear threats made by the state-affiliated Global Times) highlights the gap between its global information war touting China’s irresistible power and deeply insecure internal self-perception. Eight nuclear submarines will ultimately represent formidable military capacity, but for a bona fide superpower that believes in its own capabilities, they would not be a game-changer. Consider the U.S.-NATO reaction to the Soviet Union’s commissioning of eight Oscar I/II-class cruise missile subs during the late Cold War. These formidable boats each carried 24 SS-N-19 Granit missiles specifically designed to kill U.S. carrier battle groups, yet NATO never stooped to public threats. With diplomatic proofs of concepts like the so-called AUKUS deal, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, and hard security actions like the Pacific Deterrence Initiative now falling into place, it is time to comprehensively peak the non-authoritarian world’s protective action to hold the line in the Indo-Pacific. During this decade, U.S. policymakers must understand that under Xi’s strongman rule, personal political survival will dictate Chinese behavior. Xi’s recreation of a “one-man” system is a one-way, high-leverage bet that decisions he drives will succeed. If Xi miscalculates, a significant risk given his suppression of dissenting voices while China raises the stakes in its confrontation with the United States, the proverbial “leverage” that would have left him with outsized returns on a successful bet would instead amplify the downside, all of which he personally and exclusively signed for. Resulting tensions could very realistically undermine his status and authority, embolden internal challengers, and weaken the party. They could also foreseeably drive him to double down on mistakes, especially if those led to—or were made in the course of—a kinetic conflict. Personal survival measures could thus rapidly transmute into regional or even global threats. If Xi triggered a “margin call” on his personal political account through a failed high-stakes gamble, it would likely be paid in blood. Washington must thus prepare the U.S. electorate and its institutional and physical infrastructure as well as that of allies and partners abroad for the likelihood that tensions will periodically ratchet up to uncomfortable levels—and that actual conflict is a concrete possibility. Si vis pacem, para bellum (“if you want peace, prepare for war”) must unfortunately serve as a central organizing principle for a variety of U.S. and allied decisions during the next decade with China. Given these unforgiving dynamics and stakes, implications for U.S. planners are stark: Do whatever remains possible to “peak” for deterrent competition against China by the mid-to-late 2020s, and accept whatever trade-offs are available for doing so. Nothing we might theoretically achieve in 2035 and beyond is worth pursuing at the expense of China-credible capabilities we can realistically achieve no later than the mid-to-late 2020s.
2/5/22
JANFEB South Korea CP
Tournament: ColleyVille | Round: 2 | Opponent: Plano East HN | Judge: Dhruva Mambapoor 1NC – CP CP: The Republic of Korea should ban the appropriation of outer space by private entities except for 6G satellites. The Republic of Korea should fund the appropriation of outer space for 6G satellites from asteroids by private entities. South Korea is looking into 6G programs now but continued private sector investment is key. Fletcher 7/1 (Bevin, editor of FierceWireless. She previously served as senior reporter for Wireless Week and CED Magazine, covering the wireless industry on a variety of topics including regulation, technology, and business. She has also worked as a journalist at biotech and finance trade publications. Bevin has a bachelor's degree in journalism from West Virginia University.) “South Korea kickstarts 6G plans,” Fierce Wireless, 7/1/21. https://www.fiercewireless.com/tech/south-korea-kickstarts-6g-plans RR South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT this week established a 6G RandD implementation plan that calls for investing around $194 million by 2025 in six focus areas. The plan targets government investment totaling KRW 17.9 billion ($15.78 million) in 2021 across 10 strategic technologies, including Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, with KRW 220 billion within four years. The technologies correlate with the focus areas, including performance, Terahertz bands, space communications, ultra-precision; artificial intelligence; and reliability. Specifically MSIT outlined strategic technologies that include Tbps-capable wireless and optical communication for maximum 1 Tbps speeds; Terahertz RF components and spectrum model for bands between 100-300 GHz; space mobile and satellite communications to help expand support altitude to 10 km above ground; end-to-end ultra-precision networking for 1/10 latency compared to 5G; intelligent wireless access and network with a focus on applying AI to all sections of the network; and technology for constant network quality monitoring for 5G focused on embedded security. This year the focus is on laying the groundwork for technologies and identifying technical requirements for key areas of the 6G network. The government is also establishing 6G research centers at three universities in 2021, including KAIST, Sungkyunkwan University and Korea University. South Korea is also targeting leadership in international standards and patents, with an emphasis on active public-private cooperation in the early stages of 6G. “As next-generation communications network lays foundation for digital innovation, the public and private sector should work together to take challenges in leading global market in 6G era based on our experiences and knowhow in network,” said Minister Lim Hyesook of Science and ICT. “Furthermore, as both countries have solid foundation for collaboration thanks to Korea-U.S. Summit, we will work together in the early stage of 6G deployment based on such cooperation. We will continue to closely cooperate with relevant ministries, large companies and small and medium-sized enterprises to secure competitiveness in the future and further strengthen Korea’s position as a digital powerhouse.” In May U.S. and South Korea agreed to encourage joint RandD on emerging technology including 6G. South Korea and the U.S. signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) through the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the South Korean Institute of Information and Communications Technology Planning and Evaluation (IITP) for collaborative research opportunities, including 6G. South Korea plans to promote joint studies on core 6G technologies and spectrum, including 11 studies with the U.S., one study with China and two studies with Finland. The country’s 5G Forum will sign MoUs for 6G collaboration with organizations in the private sector, like the Next G Alliance in the U.S. While 5G deployments are still largely in early phases, industry and governments are turning an eye toward 6G. Europe started a flagship program called Hexa-X, targeting 6G leadership. Groups like ATIS’ Next G Alliance in North America are looking to form next steps and roadmaps for 6G. China has indicated the start of 6G efforts as well. The U.S. and U.K. earlier this month announced plans to create a detailed science and technology partnership agreement, including collaboration on 6G. Executives from Qualcomm and Ericsson testified on Wednesday before the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology for a legislative hearing focused on securing U.S. wireless networks and supply chain. Qualcomm SVP of Spectrum Strategy and Tech Policy Dean Brenner said at the hearing that 5G still has a long runway, but the company has started early work on 6G. He emphasized that there won’t be 6G without spectrum, allocated by the FCC, and that spectrum and technology interactions need to take place at a very early stage. Jason Boswell, head of security and network product solutions for Ericsson North America, said before the subcommittee that if they had not already started on the race to 6G, “we would already be behind.” In addition to the vendor’s own RandD, he noted it’s important to show collaborations including public-private partnerships. Boswell cited involvement with the NSF RINGS (Resilient and Intelligent NextG Systems) program, noting a focus on potentially significantly impactful technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, kilohertz spectrum. There will be many different things needed to take advantage of 6G – “not just make it go faster,” he added. A strong South Korean space sector is key to launching 6G networks. Clarke 10/24 (Carrington, he ABC's Seoul Correspondent, covering East Asia for the network. He works across digital, television and radio) “Asia is in the midst of a space race, but it's not just about exploration. It's also a military flex,” ABC Net News, 10/24/21. https://www.abc.net.au/news/carrington-clarke/8042208 RR South Korea may not yet have its own dedicated 'Space Force' like the US, but it has made clear that space is crucial to its defence. However, there are also legitimate civilian and scientific motivations for its ambitions for a space industry. South Korea's capacity to launch its own rockets is a critical step for reaching goals like a national 6G cellular network and a sovereign radio navigation system like the American GPS. Lee Hyung-mok, who is a professor emeritus in physics and astronomy at Korea National University, said he and his fellow scientists were excited about the opportunity to use these rockets. He said they will help transport observation equipment outside the earth's atmosphere, allowing them to better understand our universe.
1AC Clarke proves our link – inserted in green South Korea may not yet have its own dedicated 'Space Force' like the US, but it has made clear that space is crucial to its defence. However, there are also legitimate civilian and scientific motivations for its ambitions for a space industry. South Korea's capacity to launch its own rockets is a critical step for reaching goals like a national 6G cellular network and a sovereign radio navigation system like the American GPS. Lee Hyung-mok, who is a professor emeritus in physics and astronomy at Korea National University, said he and his fellow scientists were excited about the opportunity to use these rockets. He said they will help transport observation equipment outside the earth's atmosphere, allowing them to better understand our universe. Such a discovery doesn't come cheap and Professor Lee said he recognises that space travel can be expensive. He also said he knows that national defence is often an easier way to get the government to loosen the public purse strings. "Maybe the government decided to spend a huge amount of money because of the military importance," he said. Although competition might be spurring further investment in space, he still worries about where it might lead. "What I really hope is that instead of competing too much, it's better to collaborate," he said. "So in many areas, they try to work together." But he said within Asia, no-one is in that "mood" yet.
South Korea is a global leader in 6G development— encourages other countries to adopt 6G networks. Castro 20 (Caio, Journalist since eight years old, when I would read the newspaper out loud and pretend it was a radio show. Based in São Paulo, I have worked for Brazilian websites as reporter and editor before joining 6GWorld) “Korea lays out plan to become the first country to launch 6G,” 6G World, 11/5/20. https://www.6gworld.com/exclusives/korea-lays-out-plan-to-become-the-first-country-to-launch-6g/ RR Pushing for 6G at the United Nations Patents and standardization are two other areas where Korea wants to become a leader. And the push for that has already begun. On September 24 2020, Korea’s delegation at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) – the UN body responsible, among others, for global communications standards – filed a proposal for ITU members to start developing a 6G vision. This is part of an articulated attempt to put Korea at the centre of discussions on the next generation of networks before other well-established countries do the same. According to the MSIT’s strategy, the effort comes as a “pre-emptive response to global hegemony battle,” and the two core actions in this field are “applying to 3GPP, ITU Standards of 6G core technology.” Still, the plan also envisions mutual collaboration with other nations regarding research and training specialized workforce. Setting the environment Besides establishing the RandD committee, the provisional strategy also has an eye on network development’s educational aspect. The idea includes building four Network Research Centres by 2022, plus an investment in a platform for knowledge exchange, featuring Massive Open Online Courses about 6G technology evolution and “real-time sharing of best ideas.” Another effort planned by the MSIT regards how to combine the private sector and academia. The plan states that universities could support companies’ RandD while they act on retraining the workforce. On the other hand, it would be the industry’s role to ” support field training of university students and offer student mentoring.” The document to which 6GWorld has had access envisions 6G commercialization starting in 2028. In August, the Korean government published a provisional timetable including details for each phase of the process: 6G is key to cyber security – turns scenario 1 Ziegler et al. 10/14 (Volker, (Senior Member, IEEE) received the Dipl.-Ing. (M.Sc.) and Dr.-Ing. (Ph.D.) degrees from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Universität (TH) Karlsruhe, Germany.) “Security and trust in the 6G era,” Nokia Bell Labs, 10/14/21. Graphs/Figures Omitted https://d1p0gxnqcu0lvz.cloudfront.net/documents/Nokia_Security_and_trust_in_the_6G_era_White_Paper_EN.pdf RR In our 6G security vision, we cluster security technology enablers into domains of cyber-resilience, privacy and trust, and their respective intersection as shown in Figure 3. Our approach emphasizes the need to extend cyber-resilience technologies by privacy-preserving technologies and on top of that, trust-creating technologies in order to achieve the ultimate goal of trustworthy 6G networks. We consider resilience against all kinds of cyber-attacks as the core element and indispensable foundation — a network that lacks these attributes of
2/5/22
JANFEB T-Shell
Tournament: ColleyVille | Round: 2 | Opponent: Plano East HN | Judge: Dhruva Mambapoor 1NC – T Interpretation: appropriation is a generic bare plural. The aff may not defend that a subsset of appropriation is unjust. Nebel 19 Jake Nebel Jake Nebel is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California and executive director of Victory Briefs. , 8-12-2019, "Genericity on the Standardized Tests Resolution," Briefly, https://www.vbriefly.com/2019/08/12/genericity-on-the-standardized-tests-resolution/ SM Both distinctions are important. Generic resolutions can’t be affirmed by specifying particular instances. But, since generics tolerate exceptions, plan-inclusive counterplans (PICs) do not negate generic resolutions. Bare plurals are typically used to express generic generalizations. But there are two important things to keep in mind. First, generic generalizations are also often expressed via other means (e.g., definite singulars, indefinite singulars, and bare singulars). Second, and more importantly for present purposes, bare plurals can also be used to express existential generalizations. For example, “Birds are singing outside my window” is true just in case there are some birds singing outside my window; it doesn’t require birds in general to be singing outside my window. So, what about “colleges and universities,” “standardized tests,” and “undergraduate admissions decisions”? Are they generic or existential bare plurals? On other topics I have taken great pains to point out that their bare plurals are generic—because, well, they are. On this topic, though, I think the answer is a bit more nuanced. Let’s see why. 1.1 “Colleges and Universities” “Colleges and universities” is a generic bare plural. I don’t think this claim should require any argument, when you think about it, but here are a few reasons. First, ask yourself, honestly, whether the following speech sounds good to you: “Eight colleges and universities—namely, those in the Ivy League—ought not consider standardized tests in undergraduate admissions decisions. Maybe other colleges and universities ought to consider them, but not the Ivies. Therefore, in the United States, colleges and universities ought not consider standardized tests in undergraduate admissions decisions.” That is obviously not a valid argument: the conclusion does not follow. Anyone who sincerely believes that it is valid argument is, to be charitable, deeply confused. But the inference above would be good if “colleges and universities” in the resolution were existential. By way of contrast: “Eight birds are singing outside my window. Maybe lots of birds aren’t singing outside my window, but eight birds are. Therefore, birds are singing outside my window.” Since the bare plural “birds” in the conclusion gets an existential reading, the conclusion follows from the premise that eight birds are singing outside my window: “eight” entails “some.” If the resolution were existential with respect to “colleges and universities,” then the Ivy League argument above would be a valid inference. Since it’s not a valid inference, “colleges and universities” must be a generic bare plural. Second, “colleges and universities” fails the upward-entailment test for existential uses of bare plurals. Consider the sentence, “Lima beans are on my plate.” This sentence expresses an existential statement that is true just in case there are some lima beans on my plate. One test of this is that it entails the more general sentence, “Beans are on my plate.” Now consider the sentence, “Colleges and universities ought not consider the SAT.” (To isolate “colleges and universities,” I’ve eliminated the other bare plurals in the resolution; it cannot plausibly be generic in the isolated case but existential in the resolution.) This sentence does not entail the more general statement that educational institutions ought not consider the SAT. This shows that “colleges and universities” is generic, because it fails the upward-entailment test for existential bare plurals. Third, “colleges and universities” fails the adverb of quantification test for existential bare plurals. Consider the sentence, “Dogs are barking outside my window.” This sentence expresses an existential statement that is true just in case there are some dogs barking outside my window. One test of this appeals to the drastic change of meaning caused by inserting any adverb of quantification (e.g., always, sometimes, generally, often, seldom, never, ever). You cannot add any such adverb into the sentence without drastically changing its meaning. To apply this test to the resolution, let’s again isolate the bare plural subject: “Colleges and universities ought not consider the SAT.” Adding generally (“Colleges and universities generally ought not consider the SAT”) or ever (“Colleges and universities ought not ever consider the SAT”) result in comparatively minor changes of meaning. (Note that this test doesn’t require there to be no change of meaning and doesn’t have to work for every adverb of quantification.) This strongly suggests what we already know: that “colleges and universities” is generic rather than existential in the resolution. Fourth, it is extremely unlikely that the topic committee would have written the resolution with the existential interpretation of “colleges and universities” in mind. If they intended the existential interpretation, they would have added explicit existential quantifiers like “some.” No such addition would be necessary or expected for the generic interpretation since generics lack explicit quantifiers by default. The topic committee’s likely intentions are not decisive, but they strongly suggest that the generic interpretation is correct, since it’s prima facie unlikely that a committee charged with writing a sentence to be debated would be so badly mistaken about what their sentence means (which they would be if they intended the existential interpretation). The committee, moreover, does not write resolutions for the 0.1 percent of debaters who debate on the national circuit; they write resolutions, at least in large part, to be debated by the vast majority of students on the vast majority of circuits, who would take the resolution to be (pretty obviously, I’d imagine) generic with respect to “colleges and universities,” given its face-value meaning and standard expectations about what LD resolutions tend to mean.
It applies to appropriation:
Upward entailment test – spec fails the upward entailment test because saying that appropriating space for mining is unjust doesn’t entail that appropriating space for colonization is unjust 2. Adverb test – adding “usually” to the res doesn’t substantially change its meaning because appropriation is universal and lasting
Violation: they defend appropriation in the PRC – host of other actors like the US, India, Russia, plus individual companies and permutations Vote neg:
Limits – there are countless affs accounting for every subset of space actors, like nations and companies – unlimited topics incentivize obscure affs that negs won’t have prep on – limits are key to reciprocal prep burden – potential abuse doesn’t justify foregoing the topic and 1AR theory checks PICs 2. Ground – spec guts core generics like space col good, the heg DA, and the NewSpace econ DA, because the link is premised on reducing space privatization across the board – also means there is no universal DA to spec affs
3. TVA solves – read as an advantage to whole rez
Paradigm issues:
Drop the debater – their abusive advocacy skewed the debate from the start 2. Comes before 1AR theory – NC abuse is responsive to them not being topical 3. Competing interps – reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation 4. No RVIs – fairness and education are a priori burdens – and encourages baiting – outweighs because if T is frivolous, they can beat it quickly 5. Fairness is a voter ¬– necessary to determine the better debater 6. Education is a voter – why schools fund debate
2/5/22
JANFEB Xi DA
Tournament: ColleyVille | Round: 3 | Opponent: Southlake Carroll AA | Judge: Kevin Huang 1NC – Shell Xi is consolidating unprecedented political power – that’s only possible with strong PLA support Chang 21 (Gordon, columnist, author and lawyer, has given briefings at the National Intelligence Council, the CIA, and the State Department, JD from Cornell Law School) “China Is Becoming a Military State,” Newsweek, 1/14/2021 JL At this moment, the Communist Party is taking back power from all others in society, including the State Council, and the military is gaining influence inside Party circles. Why is the People's Liberation Army making a comeback? The answer lies in succession politics. Xi Jinping was selected the top leader because he was not identified with any of the main factional groupings—like the Communist Youth League of Hu Jintao or the Shanghai Gang of Jiang—that dominated Party politics. Xi, in short, was the least unacceptable choice to the Party's squabbling factional elders. Xi, once chosen, apparently decided that in order to rule, he needed a base, so he made certain officers the core of his support. As longtime China watcher Willy Lam told Reuters in 2013, Xi Jinping's faction is the military. And with the help of the military, Xi has accumulated almost unprecedented political power, ending the Party's two-decade-old consensus-driven system and replacing it with one-man rule. As Wang, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, notes, Xi, with the amendments to the National Defense Law, is demonstrating his power of "leading everything and everyone." He is wrapping that effort in a "rule by law" move that is formalizing his perch at the top of the Chinese political system. How is Xi using his newfound power? There is a hint in the National Defense Law amendments. These changes, Fisher tells us, "increase the powers of the CMC to mobilize the civilian sector for wartime and to better authorize the CMC to engage in foreign military exercises to defend China's 'development interests.'" As such, the changes "point to China's ambition to achieve 'whole nation' levels of military mobilization to fight wars, and give the CMC formal power to control the future Chinese capabilities for global military intervention." "The revised National Defense Law also embodies the concept that everyone should be involved in national defense," reports the Communist Party's Global Times, summarizing the words of an unnamed CMC official. "All national organizations, armed forces, political parties, civil groups, enterprises, social organizations and other organizations should support and take part in the development of national defense, fulfill national defense duties and carry out national defense missions according to the law." That sounds like Xi is getting ready to pick even more fights with neighbors—and perhaps the United States. On January 5, he ordered People's Liberation Army generals and admirals to be prepared to "act at any second." Why would Xi want to start a war? "This is really indicative of there being instability in China, and Mr. Xi seeking to consolidate power around himself. ...The new National Defense Law essentially removes the alternative power base of the premier of the State Council, in this case Li Keqiang, from interfering with Mr. Xi's own power ambitions," said Charles Burton of the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute to John Batchelor, the radio host, earlier this month. As Burton noted, the amendments to the National Defense Law undermine Premier Li Keqiang, the head of the State Council and long-standing rival to Xi. "I think this really gives the green light for him to dispatch the military on any pretext that he feels is necessary to defend his power," Burton says. "China is becoming a military state." The plan alienates the PLA – they view space dominance as the linchpin of China’s legitimacy – specifically, public-private tech development is key Economic Times 20 (Economic Times, Indian daily newspaper, internally cites Dean Cheng, Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, former analyst in the International Security and Space Program at the Office of Technology Assessment, BA in Politics from Princeton University) “China attempting to militarize space as it seeks to modernize its military power,” 8/31/2020 JL The Jamestown Foundation, a US think-tank, hosted a webinar on August 19 entitled "China's Space Ambitions: Emerging Dimensions of Competition." One presenter, Dean Cheng, Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, noted that Beijing's space programme is linked to China's central concept of comprehensive national power. "This is basically how the Chinese think about how they rack and stack, how they compare with other countries." China recognises that military power is important, but it is not the only factor in being a great power. Cheng drew a parallel with the former USSR, where military power alone did not ensure survival of that communist state. Other comprehensive national power factors are political unity, economic power, diplomatic strength, science and technology, and even culture. "Space touches every one of these aspects in comprehensive national power, and that is a part of why Chinese see space as so important." Indeed, a strong space industrial complex will generate benefits that ripple through the rest of China's economy. Furthermore, he said space achievements "promote pride within China, especially for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ... It's symbolic of how far China has come," he said, and "it gives the CCP legitimacy". China is pushing into space services, including satellite launches, satellite applications and Earth observation/satellite imagery for others. Satellite customers include Belarus, Laos, Pakistan and Venezuela, for example, attracting hard currency and influence. Cheng said most underestimate the impact this has, as such countries grow almost totally dependent on Chinese equipment, assets and training over time. Incidentally, China could have manufactured back doors into these systems for foreigners to allow it access. Mark Stokes, Executive Director at the US-based Project 2049 Institute think-tank, said in the same webinar that PLA requirements have always been fundamental to development of Chinese space capabilities. Potential PLA space missions in support of joint warfighting in a crisis include targeting (battlefield surveillance, electronic reconnaissance and ocean surveillance), communications, PNT services (obtaining target data, navigation information, navigation support and timing services), space jamming (encompassing space communications, radar, electro-optical and PNT) and space protection. Stokes said the end of 2015 was "significant" for Chinese space efforts because consolidation of end-users under the PLA's Strategic Support Force (PLASSF) occurred, specifically within the Space Systems Department. In terms of developing and meeting requirements, the PLASSF is now "much more efficient," the American analyst posited. Indeed, China created its space force in 2015, just a few months after Russia. After formally establishing its Space Force in December 2019, the US is still getting its equivalent off the ground. Cheng said both China and Russia have been pushing to militarise space, even though such a term is probably meaningless given that 95 per cent of space technology has dual applications for both military and civilian use. Certainly, outer space can no longer be viewed as a sanctuary. Stokes said that "not much has changed really in terms of the space launch infrastructure and the launch, tracking and control of space ... but they are now integrated with end-users, and that is going to have an effect on making the whole system more efficient." China has freedom of action in space, and the creation of the PLASSF and consolidation of space/counter-space research, development and acquisition, as well as training and operations, have benefitted from a single integrated command. The PLA's ability to interfere with American military operations in places like Taiwan will continue to grow yearly. Cheng said, "The Chinese see future war as revolving around joint operations, which are not just land, air and sea forces." They also include the outer space and electronic warfare domains, which are necessary for information dominance." China, therefore, wishes to deny an adversary like the US the use of space, plus it needs to give the Chinese military every advantage. China has therefore developed the ability to target hostile space-based assets (from the ground or space) and their all-important data-links. Indeed, jamming and electronic warfare complement anti-satellite weapons (which China has already tested), any of which can achieve effective mission kills against US and allied satellites. Stokes has not yet ascertained which agency is responsible for satellite kinetic kills, but it could well be the PLA Rocket Force, which is traditionally very tightly controlled by the Central Military Commission. A detailed report entitled China's Space and Counter-space Capabilities and Activities, prepared for the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, was published on March 30. Its authors, Mark Stokes, Gabriel Alvarado, Emily Weinstein and Ian Easton, summarised China's counter-space capabilities as follows. "China has an operational counter-space capability that will evolve through 2020 and out to 2035. These capabilities include anti-satellite kinetic kill vehicles (KKV) and space electronic countermeasures ... On the non-kinetic side, the PLA has an operational ground-based satellite electronic countermeasures capability designed to disrupt adversary use of satellite communications, navigation, search and rescue, missile early warning and other satellites through use of jamming." China obtained its first ground-based satellite jammers from Ukraine in the late 1990s, but it has developed its own solutions since then. "The PLA is capable of carrying out electronic countermeasures to disrupt, deny, deceive or degrade space services. Jamming prevents users from receiving intended signals and can be accomplished by attacking uplinks and downlinks. The PLA and defence industry are developing and deploying jammers capable of targeting satellite communications over a large range of frequencies, including dedicated military communication bands. The PLASSF also has advanced cyber capabilities that could be applied in parallel with counter-space operations." Nonetheless, the report asserted that the US still assumed a technological lead in space. "China also is carrying out research, development and testing on potential space-based counter-space systems. The PLASSF and defense industry have carried out advanced satellite maneuvers and are likely testing orbital technologies that could be applied to counter-space operations." The PLASSF Network Systems Department probably oversees satellite jamming operations. That factionalizes the CCP and emboldens challenges to Xi – the PLA is increasingly powerful and not unconditionally subservient Simpson 16 (Kurtis, Centre Director with Defence Research and Development Canada, has been conducting research on China’s leadership, Communist Party politics, the People’s Liberation Army and foreign policy for over 30 years,Master’s Degree and a Ph.D from York University, previously served as an intelligence analyst at the Privy Council Office and leader of the Asia Research Section at the Department of National Defence’s Chief Defence Intelligence (CDI) organization) “China’s Re-Emergence: Assessing Civilian-Military Relations In Contemporary Era – Analysis,” Eurasia Review, 12/21/2016 JL Paralleling divided loyalties between Chinese Party, military and government bodies, one must also recognize that within each, factions exist, based upon generational, personal, professional, geographic, or institutional allegiances.19 These minor fault lines are most pronounced during crises, and they continue independent of professionalization.20 As was demonstrated by the civil-military dynamics of the Chinese government’s suppression of student demonstrators, both divisions and allegiances of interests emerged with respect to how to contain this situation and factional interests largely determined which troops would carry out the orders, who commanded them, what civilian Party leaders supported the actions, and who would be sanctioned following the mêlée. A consequence of factionalism within the PLA is that the Party’s control mechanisms (particularly because rule of law and constitutional restraints on the military are weak) needs to be robust to control not only a single military chain of command but (particularly during crises) perhaps more than one. This is not likely the case. A review of the evidence indicates the military’s influence, on the whole, is increasing, and the Party’s control decreasing. On one level, the Party clearly controls the military as the Central Military Commission or CMC (the highest military oversight body in the PRC) is chaired by a civilian, President Xi Jinping. Moreover, the PLAs representation on formal political decision-making bodies (such as the Politburo Standing Committee, the Politburo, the Central Committee, and the NPC) has decreased over the years, but this does not necessary equate to a reduced level of influence. For example, the two Vice-Chairman of the CMC are now military generals, as are the remaining other eight members. Irrespective of institutional membership, military leaders retain considerable say. Personal interactions and informal meetings with senior party elites provide venues to sway decisions. They do, also, hold important places on leading small groups dedicated to issues like Taiwan and other security questions, such as the South China Seas.21 In a similar vein, other methods of Party influence, as exercised through political commissars, party committees, and discipline inspection commissions are no longer empowered to enforce the ideological dictates of a paramount leader. In the face of diffuse reporting chains, competing allegiances, and often effective socialization by the military units they are supposed to be watching over, most do not provide the Party guardian and guidance function once so pervasive. While perhaps overstated, Paltiel’s observation that “…China’s energies over the past century and half have given the military a prominent and even dominant role in the state, preempting civilian control and inhibiting the exercise of constitutional authority” is likely now truer than ever before in history.22 While still loyal to the party as an institution, the PLA is not unconditionally subservient to a particular leader and retains the resources to enter the political arena if (at the highest levels) a decision is made to do so. The civilian-military trend lines evident in China since the end of the Cultural Revolution affirm that the symbiotic nature of the Party-PLA relationship has morphed in important respects since the late 1960s. The promotion of professionalism, a reduced role for ideological indoctrination, an increasing bifurcation of civil-military elites, and growing state powers (complete with divided loyalties and continued factionalism) has complicated the political landscape informing how the CCP interacts with the PLA. If, as postulated, we have moved from a fused, ‘dual role elite’ model to one of ‘conditional compliance’ in which the military actually holds a preponderance of the power capabilities and where its interests are satisfied through concessions, bargaining, and pay-offs, empirical evidence should reflect this. A review of China’s three major leadership changes since the transition from the revolutionary ‘Old Guard’ to the modern technocrats confirms this. Formally anointed and legitimized by Deng in 1989, Jiang assumed leadership without military credentials and few allies, viewed by many as a ‘caretaker’ Party Secretary in the wake of the Tiananmen Massacre. Despite his limitations, Jiang was well versed in the vicissitudes of palace politics. Informed by a high political acumen, he immediately promoted an image as an involved Commander-in-Chief, personally visiting all seven military regions, a sign of commitment not made by either the likes of Mao or Deng. Symbolic gestures like this were bolstered by his providing incentives to the PLA, such as: consistent raises in the defence budget; funds for military modernization; as well as equipment, logistics, and augmented RandD.23 Referred to as the ‘silk-wrapped needle,’ Jiang marshalled Party resources to not only reward, but to punish.24 His institutional authority over appointments enabled him to manipulate factions, dismiss those who opposed him, enforce new rigid retirement standards, and promote loyalists. A delicate equilibrium was established during the early-1990s until his semi-retirement in 2004,25 where Jiang guaranteed military priorities such as supporting ‘mechanization’ and an ‘information-based military’ (promoting the concept of RMA with Chinese characteristics) in exchange for the PLA backing of his legacy contributions to Marxist Leninist Mao Zedong thought with the enshrinement of his “Three Represents” doctrine. Like Jiang, Hu Jintao’s succession was the product of negotiation, compromise, and concessions. While neither opposed by the PLA, nor supported by the military ‘brass,’ Hu was a known commodity, having served as Vice-President (1998) and CMC Vice-Chairman since 1999. He was deemed acceptable until proven otherwise. In the shadow of Jiang (who retained the position of CMC Chair until 2004), Hu did not exert the same kind of influence in, nor engender the same kind of deference from, China’s military, but equally proved capable of fostering a pragmatic relationship with the army which ensured its interests, and in so doing, legitimized his leadership position. Ceding much of the military planning and operational decisions to the PLA directly, Hu played to his strengths and focused upon national security issues (such as the successful resolution of SARs in China), which bolstered his credibility as a populist leader among the masses, indirectly increasing his power within both the military and the Party. Additionally, he focused upon foreign military security affairs (most notably, North Korea-US negotiations), which enabled him to link his personal political agenda with the military’s latest ambitions. In according the military a distinct place in China’s national development plan, supporting China’s rise, and ensuring its vital interests, Hu recognized the military’s evolving requirement to ‘go global’ and its worldwide interests in non-combat operations, such as peacekeeping and disaster relief, as well as stakes in the open seas, outer space, and cyberspace as interest frontiers with no geographic boundaries.26 Under the slogan of ‘China’s historical mission in the new phase of the new century’ and his acquiescence to the PLA’s stated requirements ‘to win local wars under modern conditions’ by funding new technology acquisition, Hu received the army’s formal recognition for his contributions to military thought based upon “scientific development” which informed a “strategic guiding theory,” resulting in a new operational orientation for China’s military. Emulating his predecessor, Hu won ‘conditional compliance’ from the PLA by successfully bartering military needs and wants for the army’s support and endorsement of his political tenure. This was not done outside of self-interest. Hu, as did Jiang, skillfully coopted, fired, and promoted select Generals to serve his greater ends, and he did this through varied means. Ultimately, however, it was done in a manner acceptable to the military. Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012, while replicating the ‘horse-trading’ of Jiang and Hu, marks a fundamental departure in leadership style. Often described as a transformative leader, Xi is openly critical of his predecessors and rails against earlier periods where reform stalled and corruption grew.27 An advocate of ‘top-level design,’ incrementalism is being supplanted by a massive attempt to centralize all aspects of the CCP’s power, which includes a major restructuring of the economy, government, administration, and military. Nicknamed “the gun and the knife” as a slight for his attempts to simultaneously control the army, police, spies, and the ‘graft busters,’ Xi’s power appears uncontested at present. Nevertheless, he is also viewed as ‘pushing the envelope too far’ and endangering the equilibrium which has been established between the Party and PLA over the past 25 years. For example, only two years into his mandate, he fostered a Cult of Personality, “the Spirit of Xi Jinping” which was officially elevated to the same standing as that of Mao and Deng, by comparison, foundational figures in Chinese history. His open attacks of political ‘enemies’ (most notably Zhou Yongkang, a Politburo Standing Committee member and former security czar) breeds fear among almost every senior official, all of whom are vulnerable on some point. Equally true, an unprecedented anti-corruption campaign is inciting comrades to turn on comrades, not unlike a massive game of prisoner’s dilemma. Nowhere is the pressure for reform greater than in the PLA. Xi advocates administering the army with strictness and austerity, promoting frugality and obedience. At his direction, “mass-line educational campaigns” designed to “rectify work style” through criticism and self-criticism are being implemented.28 Ideological and political building is now equated with army building, as a means of ensuring the Party’s uncontested grip over the troops ideologically, politically, and organizationally. Select military regions (those opposite Taiwan and adjacent to the South China Seas) and commanders from those regions are witnessing favoritism and promotion at the expense of others. Moreover, a new “CMC Chairmanship Responsibility System” has been instituted, which directly calls into question the support of some of Xi’s senior-most generals. A ‘hardliner’ by nature, Xi recognizes that he must earn the support of the PLA. New military priorities he supports include: accelerating modernization; Joint Command and C4ISR; training; talent management, as well as equipment and force modernization. That said, his goal of achieving the Chinese dream of building a “wealthy, powerful, democratic, civilized, and harmonious socialist modernized nation” by 2021, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CCP, is exceptionally ambitious. It will require endless commitments to competing interests in a period of economic stagnation and global economic downturn. Should the PLA come to believe they are not first in line for government largess, support for Xi could erode very quickly.29 CCP instability collapses the international order – extinction Perkinson 12 (Jessica, MA in international affairs from American University) “The Potential for Instability in the PRC: How the Doomsday Theory Misses the Mark,” American University School of International Service, 2012 JL Should the CCP undergo some sort of dramatic transformation – whether that be significant reform or complete collapse, as some radical China scholars predict2 – the implications for international and US national security are vast. Not only does China and the stability of the CCP play a significant role in the maintenance of peace in the East Asian region, but China is also relied upon by many members of the international community for foreign direct investment, economic stability and trade. China plays a key role in maintaining stability on the Korean Peninsula as one of North Korea’s only allies, and it is argued that instability within the Chinese government could also lead to instability in the already sensitive military and political situation across the Taiwan Strait. For the United States, the effect of instability within the CCP would be widespread and dramatic. As the United States’ largest holder of US treasury securities, instability or collapse of the CCP could threaten the stability of the already volatile economic situation in the US. In addition, China is the largest trading partner of a number of countries, including the US, and the US is reliant upon its market of inexpensive goods to feed demand within the US. It is with this in mind that China scholars within the United States and around the world should be studying this phenomenon, because the potential for reform, instability or even collapse of the CCP is of critical importance to the stability of the international order as a whole. For the United States specifically, the potential - or lack thereof - forreform of the CCP should dictate its foreign policy toward China. If the body of knowledge on the stability of the Chinese government reveals that the Chinese market is not a stable one, it is in the best interests of the United States to look for investors and trade markets elsewhere to lessen its serious dependence on China for its economic stability, particularly in a time of such uncertain economic conditions within the US. Independently, Xi will lash out to preserve cred in the SCS – US draw-in ensures extinction Mastro 20 (Oriana Skylar, Assistant Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute) “Military Confrontation in the South China Sea,” Council on Foreign Relations, 5/21/2020 JL The risk of a military confrontation in the South China Sea involving the United States and China could rise significantly in the next eighteen months, particularly if their relationship continues to deteriorate as a result of ongoing trade frictions and recriminations over the novel coronavirus pandemic. Since 2009, China has advanced its territorial claims in this region through a variety of tactics—such as reclaiming land, militarizing islands it controls, and using legal arguments and diplomatic influence—without triggering a serious confrontation with the United States or causing a regional backlash. Most recently, China announced the creation of two new municipal districts that govern the Paracel and Spratly Islands, an attempt to strengthen its claims in the South China Sea by projecting an image of administrative control. It would be wrong to assume that China is satisfied with the gains it has made or that it would refrain from using more aggressive tactics in the future. Plausible changes to China’s domestic situation or to the international environment could create incentives for China’s leadership to adopt a more provocative strategy in the South China Sea that would increase the risk of a military confrontation. The United States has a strong interest in preventing China from asserting control over the South China Sea. Maintaining free and open access to this waterway is not only important for economic reasons, but also to uphold the global norm of freedom of navigation. The United States is also at risk of being drawn into a military conflict with China in this region as a result of U.S. defense treaty obligations to at least one of the claimants to the contested territory, the Philippines. China’s ability to control this waterway would be a significant step toward displacing the United States from the Indo-Pacific region, expanding its economic influence, and generally reordering the region in its favor. Preventing China from doing so is the central objective of the U.S. National Security Strategy and the reason the Indo-Pacific is the U.S. military’s main theater of operations. For these reasons, the United States should seek ways to prevent Chinese expansion, ideally while avoiding a dangerous confrontation and being prepared to deftly manage any crises should they arise. China considers the majority of the South China Sea to be an inalienable part of its territory. Exercising full sovereignty over this area is a core component of President Xi Jinping’s “China Dream.” China does not accept or respect the sovereignty claims of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, or Vietnam in this region. Although China has been cautious in pressing its claims thus far, three developments could convince Xi that China should be more assertive. Xi could feel compelled to accelerate his timeline in the South China Sea to maintain his consolidated position within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), particularly if the political situation in Hong Kong worsens, peaceful reunification with Taiwan becomes less likely, or domestic criticism of his management of the novel coronavirus outbreak increases. With China’s economic growth for 2020 projected to hit only 1.2 percent—the lowest since the mid-1970s—Xi could find it necessary to demonstrate strength while Beijing deals with internal fallout from the pandemic. China has already declared two new administrative districts in the South China Sea in April 2020 and has escalated its criticism of U.S. freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) in the area. Moreover, with expectations that the first stage of China’s military modernization efforts will be completed in 2020, Xi could become more confident that China would succeed in pressing its claims militarily, especially if the United States is distracted internally with managing the coronavirus pandemic or its aftermath.
2/5/22
NOVDEC - Vaccine Mandate DA
Tournament: Damus | Round: 2 | Opponent: NA | Judge: Elijah Smith see open source.
11/6/21
NOVDEC - Vaccine Mandate DA
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 1 | Opponent: NA | Judge: NA Framing The standard is maximizing expected wellbeing First, pleasure and pain are intrinsically valuable. People consistently regard pleasure and pain as good reasons for action, despite the fact that pleasure doesn’t seem to be instrumentally valuable for anything. Moen 16 Ole Martin Moen, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo “An Argument for Hedonism” Journal of Value Inquiry (Springer), 50 (2) 2016: 267–281 SJDI Let us start by observing, empirically, that a widely shared judgment about intrinsic value and disvalue is that pleasure is intrinsically valuable and pain is intrinsically disvaluable. On virtually any proposed list of intrinsic values and disvalues (we will look at some of them below), pleasure is included among the intrinsic values and pain among the intrinsic disvalues. This inclusion makes intuitive sense, moreover, for there is something undeniably good about the way pleasure feels and something undeniably bad about the way pain feels, and neither the goodness of pleasure nor the badness of pain seems to be exhausted by the further effects that these experiences might have. “Pleasure” and “pain” are here understood inclusively, as encompassing anything hedonically positive and anything hedonically negative.2 The special value statuses of pleasure and pain are manifested in how we treat these experiences in our everyday reasoning about values. If you tell me that you are heading for the convenience store, I might ask: “What for?” This is a reasonable question, for when you go to the convenience store you usually do so, not merely for the sake of going to the convenience store, but for the sake of achieving something further that you deem to be valuable. You might answer, for example: “To buy soda.” This answer makes sense, for soda is a nice thing and you can get it at the convenience store. I might further inquire, however: “What is buying the soda good for?” This further question can also be a reasonable one, for it need not be obvious why you want the soda. You might answer: “Well, I want it for the pleasure of drinking it.” If I then proceed by asking “But what is the pleasure of drinking the soda good for?” the discussion is likely to reach an awkward end. The reason is that the pleasure is not good for anything further; it is simply that for which going to the convenience store and buying the soda is good.3 As Aristotle observes: “We never ask a man what his end is in being pleased, because we assume that pleasure is choice worthy in itself.”4 Presumably, a similar story can be told in the case of pains, for if someone says “This is painful!” we never respond by asking: “And why is that a problem?” We take for granted that if something is painful, we have a sufficient explanation of why it is bad. If we are onto something in our everyday reasoning about values, it seems that pleasure and pain are both places where we reach the end of the line in matters of value. Moreover, only pleasure and pain are intrinsically valuable. All other values can be explained with reference to pleasure; Occam’s razor requires us to treat these as instrumentally valuable. Moen 16 Ole Martin Moen, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo “An Argument for Hedonism” Journal of Value Inquiry (Springer), 50 (2) 2016: 267–281 SJDI I think several things should be said in response to Moore’s challenge to hedonists. First, I do not think the burden of proof lies on hedonists to explain why the additional values are not intrinsic values. If someone claims that X is intrinsically valuable, this is a substantive, positive claim, and it lies on him or her to explain why we should believe that X is in fact intrinsically valuable. Possibly, this could be done through thought experiments analogous to those employed in the previous section. Second, there is something peculiar about the list of additional intrinsic values that counts in hedonism’s favor: the listed values have a strong tendency to be well explained as things that help promote pleasure and avert pain. To go through Frankena’s list, life and consciousness are necessary presuppositions for pleasure; activity, health, and strength bring about pleasure; and happiness, beatitude, and contentment are regarded by Frankena himself as “pleasures and satisfactions.” The same is arguably true of beauty, harmony, and “proportion in objects contemplated,” and also of affection, friendship, harmony, and proportion in life, experiences of achievement, adventure and novelty, self-expression, good reputation, honor and esteem. Other things on Frankena’s list, such as understanding, wisdom, freedom, peace, and security, although they are perhaps not themselves pleasurable, are important means to achieve a happy life, and as such, they are things that hedonists would value highly. Morally good dispositions and virtues, cooperation, and just distribution of goods and evils, moreover, are things that, on a collective level, contribute a happy society, and thus the traits that would be promoted and cultivated if this were something sought after. To a very large extent, the intrinsic values suggested by pluralists tend to be hedonic instrumental values. Indeed, pluralists’ suggested intrinsic values all point toward pleasure, for while the other values are reasonably explainable as a means toward pleasure, pleasure itself is not reasonably explainable as a means toward the other values. Some have noticed this. Moore himself, for example, writes that though his pluralistic theory of intrinsic value is opposed to hedonism, its application would, in practice, look very much like hedonism’s: “Hedonists,” he writes “do, in general, recommend a course of conduct which is very similar to that which I should recommend.”24 Ross writes that “it is quite certain that by promoting virtue and knowledge we shall inevitably produce much more pleasant consciousness. These are, by general agreement, among the surest sources of happiness for their possessors.”25 Roger Crisp observes that “those goods cited by non-hedonists are goods we often, indeed usually, enjoy.”26 What Moore and Ross do not seem to notice is that their observations give rise to two reasons to reject pluralism and endorse hedonism. The first reason is that if the suggested non-hedonic intrinsic values are potentially explainable by appeal to just pleasure and pain (which, following my argument in the previous chapter, we should accept as intrinsically valuable and disvaluable), then—by appeal to Occam’s razor—we have at least a pro tanto reason to resist the introduction of any further intrinsic values and disvalues. It is ontologically more costly to posit a plurality of intrinsic values and disvalues, so in case all values admit of explanation by reference to a single intrinsic value and a single intrinsic disvalue, we have reason to reject more complicated accounts. The fact that suggested non-hedonic intrinsic values tend to be hedonistic instrumental values does not, however, count in favor of hedonism solely in virtue of being most elegantly explained by hedonism; it also does so in virtue of creating an explanatory challenge for pluralists. The challenge can be phrased as the following question: If the non-hedonic values suggested by pluralists are truly intrinsic values in their own right, then why do they tend to point toward pleasure and away from pain?27 Moral uncertainty means preventing extinction should be our highest priority. Bostrom 12 Nick Bostrom. Faculty of Philosophy and Oxford Martin School University of Oxford. “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority.” Global Policy (2012) These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at existential risk; they also suggest a new way of thinking about the ideal of sustainability. Let me elaborate.¶ Our present understanding of axiology might well be confused. We may not now know — at least not in concrete detail — what outcomes would count as a big win for humanity; we might not even yet be able to imagine the best ends of our journey. If we are indeed profoundly uncertain about our ultimate aims, then we should recognize that there is a great option value in preserving — and ideally improving — our ability to recognize value and to steer the future accordingly. Ensuring that there will be a future version of humanity with great powers and a propensity to use them wisely is plausibly the best way available to us to increase the probability that the future will contain a lot of value. To do this, we must prevent any existential catastrophe. Vax Mandate DA 1NC-Shell Mandates boost overall vaccination rates – skeptics eventually get vaxxed Jones 9/29 (Ja'han Jones is The ReidOut Blog writer. He's a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include "Black Hair Defined" and the "Black Obituary Project.") “Turns out, COVID vaccine mandates work. Good thing more are on the way.” MSNBC. September 29, 2021. AW As it turns out, many people who previously refused the Covid-19 vaccines are discovering that they will have to pay a great deal if they want to remain unvaccinated. I don’t hate to say, “I told you so,” so I’ll say it: I told you so. The Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in August effectively paved the way for vaccination requirements across the U.S. Turns out those mandates boosted the overall vaccination rate among some groups of workers, including teachers and health care professionals. The number of vaccination mandates is growing. Given the choice between joblessness and getting a potentially lifesaving vaccine shot, many people are choosing the latter — even if begrudgingly. After a vaccination mandate went into effect for health care workers in New York on Monday, the state reported that 92 percent of all its hospital and nursing home employees have gotten at least one shot — that’s a roughly 10 percentage-point increase among both groups. And never fret, America’s private industry workers. If you clock in for a nongovernmental entity, it’s highly likely that your job imposes a vaccination mandate, as well. The mandates are taking hold beyond the world of health. After United Airlines instituted a vaccination deadline of this Monday for its employees, CEO Scott Kirby said this week that 98.5 percent of its roughly 67,000 employees have been vaccinated. Some states — including Maine, Rhode Island and Washington — will require vaccinations for health care workers beginning next month. Others — like Oregon and Colorado — will implement mandates for health care professionals later next month. On Monday, a federal judge ruled that the New York City school district — the country’s largest — can require its employees to get vaccinated. On Wednesday, the San Diego Unified School District — California’s second-largest school district — announced a requirement that all eligible students and staff be vaccinated by December. On Sept. 9, President Joe Biden said the government will require that all federal employees and contractors be vaccinated and that all private employers with 100 or more employees must require either vaccinations or weekly testing. Covid-19 mandates are legal and ethical – but current labor laws are the only barrier preventing widespread strikes Millhiser 7/30 (Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. Before joining Vox, Ian was a columnist at ThinkProgress. Among other things, he clerked for Judge Eric L. Clay of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and served as a Teach for America corps member in the Mississippi Delta. He received a B.A. in philosophy from Kenyon College and a J.D., magna cum laude, from Duke University, where he served as senior note editor on the Duke Law Journal and was elected to the Order of the Coif. He is the author of Injustices: The Supreme Court's History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted.) “Yes, Covid-19 Mandates are Legal” Vox. July 30, 2021. AW In 1902, the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, faced a smallpox outbreak. In response, the local health board ordered the city’s residents over the age of 21 to be vaccinated against this disease. Violators faced a $5 fine. After a local pastor was fined for violating this vaccine mandate, he appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court told him to pound sand in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905). “The liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint,” Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote for the Court. He added that “there are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good.” Under Jacobson, state and local governments — though not necessarily the federal government — may mandate vaccines for nearly all of their residents. That decision has obvious relevance today. We now have multiple vaccines against Covid-19 that are both safe and shockingly effective, and they are available for free for all Americans. Yet the pandemic continues to rage in the United States because a large minority of Americans have yet to get a shot. While some people may face legitimate obstacles, others are just obstinate. Policymakers and other leaders, in other words, may need to take a page from Cambridge’s early 20th-century health board. Some already are. Many of the first mandates are from employers: The state of New York, for example, recently announced that all of its employees will have to either get vaccinated or submit to weekly coronavirus testing, and President Joe Biden plans to impose similar requirements on federal employees. Many private employers also require vaccines — Google, for example, will insist that its employees be vaccinated in order to enter the company’s offices. More than 600 colleges and universities require at least some of their students, faculty, and staff to be vaccinated. These sorts of mandates will undoubtedly trigger lawsuits from vaccine resisters. In some cases, individuals with religious objections to vaccines or people with disabilities that preclude them from being vaccinated will have strong legal claims — much like schoolchildren who can already seek exemptions from schools’ vaccination requirements if they have religious objections. But, assuming that the courts follow existing law — and assuming that Republican state governments do not enact new laws prohibiting employers from disciplining workers who refuse to be vaccinated — most challenges to employer-imposed vaccination requirements should fail. Under Jacobson, moreover, states should be free to order everyone within their borders to be vaccinated against Covid-19, although it’s far from clear whether the federal government could do the same. Of course, there is no guarantee that the Roberts Court, which is eager to impose limits on public health officials and not especially bothered about overruling precedents, will follow Jacobson if a state does enact a vaccine mandate. But there is good reason to believe that it will. Even Justice Neil Gorsuch, one of the most conservative members of the current Court, recently described Jacobson as a “modest” decision that “didn’t seek to depart from normal legal rules during a pandemic.” The bottom line, in other words, is that, under existing law, numerous institutions within the United States may require their employees — and, in some cases, their citizens — to be vaccinated against Covid-19. Your boss probably can require you to get vaccinated Employment relationships in the United States are typically “at-will,” meaning that an employee can be fired at any time and for any reason, even if that reason is completely arbitrary. If you have an at-will relationship with your employer, your boss can fire you because they don’t like your haircut. Or because they don’t like what you had for breakfast last Tuesday. Or, for that matter, because you refuse to get a Covid-19 vaccine. The general rule, in other words, is that your employer can fire you for any reason unless some outside legal force — a federal or state law, or maybe an individual or collective bargaining contract between you and your employer — intervenes to give you additional job security. And there is no federal law prohibiting employers from requiring nearly all of their employees to get vaccinated. Vaccine mandates guarantee strikes – that kills the work force Koenig 11/4 (David Koenig of the Associated Press contributed to this report and is a contributor to K5 News) “Vaccine mandate rules affecting 84 million Americans finalized” K5 News. November 4, 2021 AW WASHINGTON — Tens of millions of Americans who work at companies with 100 or more employees will need to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by Jan. 4 or get tested for the virus weekly under government rules that took effect Thursday. The new requirements are the Biden administration’s boldest move yet to persuade reluctant Americans to finally get a vaccine that has been widely available for months -- or potentially face financial consequences. If successful, administration officials believe it will go a long way toward ending a pandemic that has killed more than 750,000 Americans. First previewed by President Joe Biden in September, the requirements will apply to about 84 million workers at medium and large businesses, although it is not clear how many of those employees are unvaccinated. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations will force the companies to require that unvaccinated workers test negative for COVID-19 at least once a week and wear a mask while in the workplace. OSHA left open the possibility of expanding the requirement to smaller businesses. It asked for public comment on whether employers with fewer than 100 employees could handle vaccination or testing programs. Tougher rules will apply to another 17 million people who work in nursing homes, hospitals and other facilities that receive money from Medicare and Medicaid. Those workers will not have an option for testing — they will need to be vaccinated. Workers will be able to ask for exemptions on medical or religious grounds. The requirements will not apply to people who work at home or outdoors. Biden framed the issue as a simple choice between getting more people vaccinated or prolonging the pandemic. “While I would have much preferred that requirements not become necessary, too many people remain unvaccinated for us to get out of this pandemic for good,” he said Thursday in a statement. Biden said his encouragement for businesses to impose mandates and his own previous requirements for the military and federal contractors have helped reduce the number of unvaccinated Americans over 12 from 100 million in late July to about 60 million now. Those measures, he said, have not led to mass firings or worker shortages, adding that vaccines have been required before to fight other diseases. OSHA said companies that fail to comply with the regulations could face penalties of nearly $14,000 per violation. The agency will face enforcement challenges. Even counting help from states, OSHA has only 1,850 inspectors to oversee 130 million workers at 8 million workplaces. An administration official said the agency will respond to whistleblower complaints and make limited spot checks. The release of the rules followed weeks of regulatory review and meetings with business groups, labor unions and others. OSHA drafted the rules under emergency authority meant to protect workers from an imminent health hazard. The agency estimated that the vaccine mandate will save more than 6,500 worker lives and prevent more than 250,000 hospitalizations over the next six months. The rules set up potential legal battles along partisan lines between states and the federal government. Several states and Republican governors threatened to sue, contending that the administration lacks the power to make such sweeping mandates under emergency authority. OSHA's parent agency, the Labor Department, says it is on sound legal footing. The department's top legal official, Seema Nanda, said OSHA rules preempt conflicting state laws or orders, including those that bar employers from requiring vaccinations, testing or face masks. Senate Republicans immediately launched a petition to force a vote to overturn the vaccine mandate, but with Democrats controlling the chamber, the effort is nearly certain to fail. The rules will require workers to receive either two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines or one dose of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine by Jan. 4 or be tested weekly. Employees who test positive must be removed from the workplace. Companies won't be required to provide or pay for tests for unvaccinated workers, but they must give paid time off for employees to get the shots and sick leave to recover from side effects that prevent them from working. The requirements for masks and paid time off for shots take effect Dec. 5. Employers covered by the requirements must verify their workers’ vaccination status by checking documents such as CDC vaccination cards or records from doctors or pharmacies. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued a separate rule requiring vaccination for workers in 76,000 health facilities and home health care providers that get funding from the government health programs. A senior administration official said that several large private health care organizations imposed their own mandates and achieved high vaccination rates — 96 or higher — without widespread resignations. A previously announced requirement for federal contractors to make sure workers are vaccinated was scheduled to take effect Dec. 8, but on Thursday the administration delayed that measure until Jan. 4 to match the requirements on other large employers and health care providers. Already more than a dozen states have sued to block the mandate on contractors. For weeks, Biden has encouraged businesses not to wait for OSHA to act. He has touted businesses that announced their own vaccine requirements and urged other companies to follow their lead. Administration officials say those efforts are paying off, with about 70 of the nation's adults now fully vaccinated. Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, said in late July it was requiring all workers at its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, and managers who travel within the United States to be vaccinated by Oct. 4. The retailer stopped short of requiring shots for frontline workers, however. United Airlines required 67,000 U.S. employees to get vaccinated or face termination. Only a couple hundred refused to do so, although about 2,000 are seeking exemptions. In August, Tyson Foods told its 120,000 U.S. workers that they must be vaccinated by Nov. 1. On Thursday, the company said more than 96 of its workforce was vaccinated, including 60,500 people who got their shots after the August announcement. However, some companies have expressed fear that some vaccine-hesitant workers might quit, leaving their workforces even thinner in an already-tight labor market. Several corporate groups, including the Business Roundtable, endorsed the mandate. However, retail groups worried the requirement could disrupt their operations during the critical Christmas shopping period. Retailers and others also said it could worsen supply chain disruptions. The National Retail Federation suggested the new rules are not needed because the rolling average number of new daily cases in the U.S. has fallen by more than half since September. “Nevertheless, the Biden administration has chosen to declare an ‘emergency’ and impose burdensome new requirements on retailers during the crucial holiday shopping season,” said David French, a senior vice president for the trade group. The number of new infections in the U.S. is still falling from a summer surge caused by the highly contagious delta variant, but the rate of decline has slowed in recent weeks. The 7-day moving average is down 6 from two weeks ago, at more than 76,000 new cases and 1,200 deaths per day. The earlier mandate on federal contractors led to demonstrations by opponents, including workers at a NASA rocket engine test site in Mississippi. Some said they are immune because they contracted COVID-19. Others said vaccines violated their religious beliefs and constitutional rights. “No one should be forced to take a medical treatment just to keep their job,” said Nyla Trumbach, an engineer at the site. “There’s years and years of experience and skill out here, and I just want anyone who’s watching to see what we stand to lose here if these people don’t keep their jobs.” Declining workforce decimates the economy Isidore 8/20 (Chris Isidore is a senior writer for CNN Business, where he covers the auto industry, airlines, labor and all other manner of breaking financial news. Over the last 30 years, he has covered most major US bankruptcies, including GM, Chrysler, Lehman Brothers, most US airlines and Sears, as well as the city of Detroit.) “Vaccine mandates at work meet their toughest opponent: America’s labor shortage” August 20, 2021. AW
At Kevin Smith's home health care agency in Massachusetts, only 52 of his 400 staff members have been vaccinated. He'd like to order them all to get the shot, but he says he can't risk a mass exodus. It's a legitimate fear. The labor market is very tight, with a record number of job openings and not enough job candidates. And among unvaccinated workers asked what they would do if their employer instituted a mandate, 50 said they'd leave their job, according to a June survey by health policy think tank KFF. "It puts you at risk of alienating the staff, if not losing them to a competitor," said Smith, who has run the family-owned Best of Care since 2013. "No one can afford to do that. That is why any employer in our industry is so reluctant to impose a mandate." The meeting of the labor market challenge and public health crisis puts employers in a tough spot: The worker shortage means employer mandates are not likely to be the answer to raising the nation's vaccination rate. But a higher inoculation rate is exactly what experts say we need to end the pandemic. Difficulty finding workers The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has given guidance to employers that they have the right to impose a vaccine mandate as long as there are exceptions for employees with health conditions that pose a risk or legitimate religious objections. Yet "employers in a labor shortage environment don't want to create any barrier for employment, let alone any cause for people to go elsewhere," said Julia Pollak, chief economist for job site Ziprecruiter. It's not clear how many employers are taking that step. A June survey from the Society of Human Resource Management showed 29 of workers say their employers are requiring vaccines. A Gartner survey from the end of July found only 9 doing so. Even among hospitals, most employers don't have vaccine mandates: The American Hospital Association said only 2,100 hospitals, about a third of the nation's total, require vaccines. And many are in places where state laws or executive orders mandate them. Brian Kropp, chief of research at consulting firm Gartner's HR practice, says he believes that figure will remain a minority -— even as household-name companies have begun implementing mandates in response to the Delta variant surge of Covid cases. They're most common at major tech companies such as Google (GOOG) and Facebook (FB), or Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs (GS) and Morgan Stanley (MS). But there's a critical difference here: These employers offer high-paying jobs, benefits and other advantages that inspire workers to stick around. For the many small businesses and other employers who depend on hourly workers to fill most positions, there's greater fear about losing vaccine-hesitant employees and not being able to find vaccinated workers to replace them. "If you run a restaurant or a store and you have employees who are vaccine-hesitant, they are going to quit and go to the store or restaurant next door," said Kropp. "It's a whole lot easier for people to switch jobs, particularly in today's labor market." Even some employers with stable workforces are reluctant to impose a vaccine mandate. While United Airlines (UAL) recent ordered all US employees to be vaccinated, rivals American (AAL), Delta (DAL) and Southwest (LUV) have yet to do so. 'Divisive' moral arguments and partial rules Further complicating matters is opposition to mandates, even from employees who have gotten vaccinated themselves. The KFF survey in June found that even among those who are vaccinated, 42 said they don't want it mandated by their employer, while only 43 want a vaccine required. "In general we find that vaccine mandates are very divisive," said Liz Hamel, vice president and director of public opinion and survey research at KFF. "There's a sense that getting a vaccine is personal choice." Attitudes may be changing with the recent surge in cases, however: Recent polls conducted by Axios/Ipos and Gallup found a slight majority of Americans favoring employer vaccine mandates. That compares to KFF's June survey that found only 28 wanted an employer mandate and 61 opposed the idea. Seven states — Arizona, Arkansas, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota and Tennessee — have passed laws banning vaccine mandates for at least some employers, according to the National Academy for State Health Policy. Similar legislation has been introduced in 39 other states, all but Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada and West Virginia. Another complex issue is differing rules for white-collar vs. blue-collar employees. Major employers including Walmart (WMT) and UPS (UPS) are requiring vaccines for corporate office staff, but not for those on the front lines, working in stores or driving trucks. Neither company would comment on whether the labor crunch for hourly workers is the driving force of the different rules. "Those office environments are very different than our operating facilities, which have been safely staffed in-person since the beginning and throughout the pandemic," said a statement from UPS. Some employers are following the lead of President Joe Biden's order for federal workers, giving them the choice of vaccination or the more stringent testing and masking, said Amber Clayton, director of SHRM's HR Knowledge Center. "That's probably what we'll see more of than full vaccine mandates," she said. A plea to government leaders Smith, the CEO of the home health care agency in Massachusetts, wants more than just a model from the government: He would prefer a mandate at the state or federal level to require everyone in his industry to get vaccinated. It would level the playing field among all employers in the sector, he explained, and would help protect the health of his employees and clients. "From a pure safety standpoint, it would make me feel better if it were required," he said. "And it would take the pressure off me." Smith's wish is hardly unique, Kropp said. Many other employers are worried unvaccinated workers could spread the virus even to inoculated coworkers and cause high absenteeism. And some workers, especially those with young children at home or other vulnerable family members, won't want to return to the office unless they know everyone else is vaccinated, he said. "What almost every employer wants is either the governors or some other government body to say vaccines are required," Kropp said. "Then they get what they want, and they don't get any of the blame or frustration." Economic decline causes global nuclear war Tønnesson 15 (Stein, Research Professor, Peace Research Institute Oslo; Leader of East Asia Peace program, Uppsala University) “Deterrence, interdependence and Sino–US peace,” International Area Studies Review, Vol. 18, No. 3, p. 297-311, 2015 SJDI Several recent works on China and Sino–US relations have made substantial contributions to the current understanding of how and under what circumstances a combination of nuclear deterrence and economic interdependence may reduce the risk of war between major powers. At least four conclusions can be drawn from the review above: first, those who say that interdependence may both inhibit and drive conflict are right. Interdependence raises the cost of conflict for all sides but asymmetrical or unbalanced dependencies and negative trade expectations may generate tensions leading to trade wars among inter-dependent states that in turn increase the risk of military conflict (Copeland, 2015: 1, 14, 437; Roach, 2014). The risk may increase if one of the interdependent countries is governed by an inward-looking socio-economic coalition (Solingen, 2015); second, the risk of war between China and the US should not just be analysed bilaterally but include their allies and partners. Third party countries could drag China or the US into confrontation; third, in this context it is of some comfort that the three main economic powers in Northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) are all deeply integrated economically through production networks within a global system of trade and finance (Ravenhill, 2014; Yoshimatsu, 2014: 576); and fourth, decisions for war and peace are taken by very few people, who act on the basis of their future expectations. International relations theory must be supplemented by foreign policy analysis in order to assess the value attributed by national decision-makers to economic development and their assessments of risks and opportunities. If leaders on either side of the Atlantic begin to seriously fear or anticipate their own nation’s decline then they may blame this on external dependence, appeal to anti-foreign sentiments, contemplate the use of force to gain respect or credibility, adopt protectionist policies, and ultimately refuse to be deterred by either nuclear arms or prospects of socioeconomic calamities. Such a dangerous shift could happen abruptly, i.e. under the instigation of actions by a third party – or against a third party. Yet as long as there is both nuclear deterrence and interdependence, the tensions in East Asia are unlikely to escalate to war. As Chan (2013) says, all states in the region are aware that they cannot count on support from either China or the US if they make provocative moves. The greatest risk is not that a territorial dispute leads to war under present circumstances but that changes in the world economy alter those circumstances in ways that render inter-state peace more precarious. If China and the US fail to rebalance their financial and trading relations (Roach, 2014) then a trade war could result, interrupting transnational production networks, provoking social distress, and exacerbating nationalist emotions. This could have unforeseen consequences in the field of security, with nuclear deterrence remaining the only factor to protect the world from Armageddon, and unreliably so. Deterrence could lose its credibility: one of the two great powers might gamble that the other yield in a cyber-war or conventional limited war, or third party countries might engage in conflict with each other, with a view to obliging Washington or Beijing to intervene.
Nuclear war causes extinction – famine and climate change Starr 15 (Steven, Director of the University of Missouri’s Clinical Laboratory Science Program and a senior scientist at the Physicians for Social Responsibility) “Nuclear War, Nuclear Winter, and Human Extinction,” Federation of American Scientists, 10/14/2015 DD While it is impossible to precisely predict all the human impacts that would result from a nuclear winter, it is relatively simple to predict those which would be most profound. That is, a nuclear winter would cause most humans and large animals to die from nuclear famine in a mass extinction event similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Following the detonation (in conflict) of US and/or Russian launch-ready strategic nuclear weapons, nuclear firestorms would burn simultaneously over a total land surface area of many thousands or tens of thousands of square miles. These mass fires, many of which would rage over large cities and industrial areas, would release many tens of millions of tons of black carbon soot and smoke (up to 180 million tons, according to peer-reviewed studies), which would rise rapidly above cloud level and into the stratosphere. For an explanation of the calculation of smoke emissions, see Atmospheric effects and societal consequences of regional scale nuclear conflicts. The scientists who completed the most recent peer-reviewed studies on nuclear winter discovered that the sunlight would heat the smoke, producing a self-lofting effect that would not only aid the rise of the smoke into the stratosphere (above cloud level, where it could not be rained out), but act to keep the smoke in the stratosphere for 10 years or more. The longevity of the smoke layer would act to greatly increase the severity of its effects upon the biosphere. Once in the stratosphere, the smoke (predicted to be produced by a range of strategic nuclear wars) would rapidly engulf the Earth and form a dense stratospheric smoke layer. The smoke from a war fought with strategic nuclear weapons would quickly prevent up to 70 of sunlight from reaching the surface of the Northern Hemisphere and 35 of sunlight from reaching the surface of the Southern Hemisphere. Such an enormous loss of warming sunlight would produce Ice Age weather conditions on Earth in a matter of weeks. For a period of 1-3 years following the war, temperatures would fall below freezing every day in the central agricultural zones of North America and Eurasia. For an explanation of nuclear winter, see Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences. Nuclear winter would cause average global surface temperatures to become colder than they were at the height of the last Ice Age. Such extreme cold would eliminate growing seasons for many years, probably for a decade or longer. Can you imagine a winter that lasts for ten years? The results of such a scenario are obvious. Temperatures would be much too cold to grow food, and they would remain this way long enough to cause most humans and animals to starve to death. Global nuclear famine would ensue in a setting in which the infrastructure of the combatant nations has been totally destroyed, resulting in massive amounts of chemical and radioactive toxins being released into the biosphere. We don’t need a sophisticated study to tell us that no food and Ice Age temperatures for a decade would kill most people and animals on the planet. Would the few remaining survivors be able to survive in a radioactive, toxic environment? 1NC – Heg Impact CP: A just government, except for the United States, should recognize the unconditional right for workers to strike except for industrial workers. (whole rez) 1NC CP: The United States should recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike except for industrial workers. (us spec edition) 1NC Industrial workforce shortages are happening now— Covid and inability to compete. Scull and Stone 8/28 (John, an associate in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, office of Jackson Lewis P.C. His practice focuses on representing employers in workplace law matters, including preventive advice and counseling.) (James, a principal of the Cleveland, Ohio, office of Jackson Lewis P.C. From the opening of the office in 2006 until early 2020, Jim served as office managing principal in Cleveland. At that time, he stepped down to focus on his busy practice and increased task force activities within practice groups and serving as co-leader of the firm’s Manufacturing industry group.) “Manufacturing Labor Shortage: Cultivating Skilled Labor By Engaging Local Communities,” JDSupra, 8/28/21. https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/manufacturing-labor-shortage-1463687/ RR The worker shortage in manufacturing has been exacerbated by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, which erased over a decade of job gains in the manufacturing sector, eliminating more than 1.4 million positions, according to a report by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute (MI). To counter the trend, manufacturers should consider working with local schools and youth programs to develop a sustainable pipeline of talent. While approximately 820,000 of the jobs lost in the COVID-19 pandemic have since been backfilled, nearly 500,000 positions remain open and manufacturing employers have had difficulty filling these roles. According to the MI report, manufacturing employers say it is currently 36 percent harder to find talent than it was in 2018, even though the unemployment rate today is much higher. This manufacturing employment shortage is likely to intensify as the number of unfilled manufacturing positions in the United States is expected to grow to approximately 2.1 million by 2030 — damaging the U.S. economy by up to $1 trillion. While the pandemic certainly played a large role in damaging the U.S. manufacturing sector’s employment numbers, the worker shortage is nothing new. There are approximately five million fewer Americans employed in the manufacturing sector today than 20 years ago. Employers hope to reverse this trend and are under pressure to do so quickly as the median age of an American working in manufacturing is 44 years old, and older workers are retiring faster than they are being replaced. A strong industrial workforce is key to US military primacy Bloomberg Editorial Board 4/7 (Members of the editorial board will write and edit in other capacities within Bloomberg Opinion. Because our columnists have always spoken for themselves, they will continue as before — though columnists will still refrain from endorsing candidates, a policy we have had in place since we started in 2011.) “America’s Depleted Industrial Base Is a National Security Crisis,” Bloomberg, 4/7/21. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-07/america-s-depleted-industrial-base-is-a-national-security-crisis RR President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address is most famous for its warning against the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex. But Eisenhower also stressed the defense industry’s importance to the country’s security: After all, it helped the U.S. maintain superiority over its rivals, forestall great-power conflict and win the Cold War. Six decades on, America’s military remains the most advanced in the world — but the industrial base supporting it has deteriorated. Industry consolidation, domestic manufacturing decline and dysfunctional federal budgeting have combined to reduce competition throughout the defense supply chain, eroding military readiness and potentially jeopardizing national security.
11/20/21
Taiwan DA
Tournament: Palm Classics | Round: 2 | Opponent: Sequoia AS | Judge: Ben Erdmann 1NC – DA China’s capitalizing on US vulnerabilities and ramping up ASAT development now – that emboldens Xi to invade Taiwan Chow and Kelley 8/21 (Brian G., policy analyst for the Institute of World Politics, Ph.D in physics from Case Western Reserve University, MBA and Ph.D in finance from the University of Michigan, and Brandon, graduate of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service ) “China’s Anti-Satellite Weapons Could Conquer Taiwan—Or Start a War,” National Interest, 8/21/2021 JL If current trends hold, then China’s Strategic Support Force will be capable by the late 2020s of holding key U.S. space assets at risk. Chinese military doctrine, statements by senior officials, and past behavior all suggest that China may well believe threatening such assets to be an effective means of deterring U.S. intervention. If so, then the United States would face a type of “Sophie’s Choice”: decline to intervene, potentially leading allies to follow suit and Taiwan to succumb without a fight, thereby enabling Xi to achieve his goal of “peacefully” snuffing out Taiwanese independence; or start a war that would at best be long and bloody and might well even cross the nuclear threshold. This emerging crisis has been three decades in the making. In 1991, China watched from afar as the United States used space-enabled capabilities to obliterate the Iraqi military from a distance in the first Gulf War. The People’s Liberation Army quickly set to work developing capabilities targeted at a perceived Achilles’ heel of this new American way of war: reliance on vulnerable space systems. This project came to fruition with a direct ascent ASAT weapons test in 2007, but the test was limited in two key respects. First, it only reached low Earth orbit. Second, it generated thousands of pieces of long-lasting space junk, provoking immense international ire. This backlash appears to have taken China by surprise, driving it to seek new, more usable ASAT types with minimal debris production. Now, one such ASAT is nearing operational status: spacecraft capable of rendezvous and proximity operations (RPOs). Such spacecraft are inevitable and cannot realistically be limited. The United States, European Union, China, and others are developing them to provide a range of satellite services essential to the new space economy, such as in situ repairs and refueling of satellites and active removal of space debris. But RPO capabilities are dual-use: if a satellite can grapple space objects for servicing, then it might well be capable of grappling an adversary’s satellite to move it out of its servicing orbit. Perhaps it could degrade or disable it by bending or disconnecting its solar panels and antennas all while producing minimal debris. This is a serious threat, primarily because no international rules presently exist to limit close approaches in space. Left unaddressed, this lacuna in international law and space policy could enable a prospective attacker to pre-position, during peacetime, as many spacecraft as they wish as close as they wish to as many high-value targets as they wish. The result would be an ever-present possibility of sudden, bolt-from-the-blue attacks on vital space assets—and worse, on many of them at once. China has conducted at least half a dozen tests of RPO capabilities in space since 2008, two of which went on for years. Influential space experts have noted that these tests have plausible peaceful purposes and are in many cases similar to those conducted by the United States. This, however, does not make it any less important to establish effective legal, policy, and technical counters to their offensive use. Even if it were certain that these capabilities are intended purely for peaceful applications—and it is not at all clear that that is the case—China (or any other country) could at any time decide to repurpose these capabilities for ASAT use. There is still time to get out ahead of this threat, but likely not for much longer. China’s RPO capabilities have, thus far, lagged about five years behind those of the United States. There are reasons to believe this gap may close, but even assuming that it holds, we should expect to see China demonstrate an operational dual-use rendezvous spacecraft by around 2025. (The first instance of a U.S. commercial satellite docking with another satellite to change its orbit occurred in February 2020.) At the same time, China is expanding its capacity for rapid spacecraft manufacturing. The Global Times reported in January that China’s first intelligent mass production line is set to produce 240 small satellites per year. In April, Andrew Jones at SpaceNews reported that China is developing plans to quickly produce and loft a thirteen thousand-satellite national internet megaconstellation. It is not unreasonable to assume that China could manufacture two hundred small rendezvous ASAT spacecraft by 2029, possibly more. If this happens, and Beijing was to decide in 2029 to launch these two hundred small RPO spacecraft and position them in close proximity to strategically vital assets, then China would be able to simultaneously threaten disablement of the entire constellations of U.S. satellites for missile early warning (about a dozen satellites with spares included); communications in a nuclear-disrupted environment (about a dozen); and positioning, navigation, and timing (about three dozen); along with several dozen key communications, imagery, and meteorology satellites. Losing these assets would severely degrade U.S. deterrence and warfighting capabilities, yet once close pre-positioning has occurred such losses become almost impossible to prevent. For this reason, such pre-positioning could conceivably deter the United States from coming to Taiwan’s aid due to the prospect that intervention would spur China to disable these critical space systems. Without their support, the war would be much bloodier and costlier—a daunting proposition for any president. Should the United States fail to intervene, the consequences would be disastrous for both Washington and its allies in East Asia, and potentially the credibility of U.S. defense commitments around the globe. Worse yet, however, might be what could happen if China believes that such a threat will succeed but proves to be wrong. History is rife with examples of major wars arising from miscalculations such as this, and there are many pathways by which such a situation could easily escalate out of control to a full-scale conventional conflict or even to nuclear use.
Starlink development solves – mega-constellations are unjammable and accurate Harris 20 (Mark, Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT in 2013, writes about technology, science, business, the environment, and travel, internally cites Todd Humphreys, Professor of Aerospace Engineering at UT Austin, and Peter Iannucci Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at UT Austin) “SpaceX’s Starlink satellites could make US Army navigation hard to jam,” MIT Technology Review, 9/28/2020 JL Now, research funded by the US Army has concluded that the growing mega-constellation could have a secondary purpose: doubling as a low-cost, highly accurate, and almost unjammable alternative to GPS. The new method would use existing Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) to provide near-global navigation services. In a non-peer-reviewed paper, Todd Humphreys and Peter Iannucci of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin claim to have devised a system that uses the same satellites, piggybacking on traditional GPS signals, to deliver location precision up to 10 times as good as GPS, in a system much less prone to interference. The Global Positioning System consists of a constellation of around 30 satellites orbiting 20,000 kilometers above Earth. Each satellite continuously broadcasts a radio signal containing its position and the exact time from a very precise atomic clock on board. Receivers on the ground can then compare how long signals from multiple satellites take to arrive and calculate their position, typically to within a few meters. The problem with GPS is that those signals are extremely weak by the time they reach Earth, and are easily overwhelmed by either accidental interference or electronic warfare. In China, mysterious GPS attacks have successfully “spoofed” ships in fake locations, while GPS signals are regularly jammed in the eastern Mediterranean. The US military relies heavily on GPS. Last year, the US Army Futures Command, a new unit dedicated to modernizing its forces, visited Humphreys’s lab to talk about a startup called Coherent Navigation he had cofounded in 2008. Coherent, which aimed to use signals from Iridium satellites as a rough alternative to GPS, was acquired by Apple in 2015. “They told me the Army has a relationship with SpaceX it signed an agreement to test Starlink to move data across military networks in May and would I be interested in talking to SpaceX about using their Starlink satellites the same way that I used these old Iridium satellites?” Humphreys says. “That got us an audience with people at SpaceX, who liked it, and the Army gave us a year to look into the problem.” Futures Command also provided several million dollars in funding. The concept of using LEO satellites for navigation isn't new. In fact, some of the first US spacecraft launched in the 1960s were Transit satellites orbiting at 1,100 kilometers, providing location information for Navy ships and submarines. The advantage of an LEO constellation is that the signals can be a thousand times stronger than GPS. The disadvantage is that each satellite can serve only a small area beneath it, so that reliable global coverage requires hundreds or even thousands of satellites. Building a whole new network of LEO satellites with ultra-accurate clocks would be an expensive undertaking. Bay Area startup Xona Space Systems plans to do just that, aiming to launch a constellation of at least 300 Pulsar satellites over the next six years. Humphreys and Iannucci’s idea is different: they would use a simple software upgrade to modify Starlink’s satellites so their communications abilities and existing GPS signals could provide position and navigation services . They claim their new system can even, counterintuitively, deliver better accuracy for most users than the GPS technology it relies upon. That is because the GPS receiver on each Starlink satellite uses algorithms that are rarely found in consumer products, to pinpoint its location within just a few centimeters. These technologies exploit physical properties of the GPS radio signal, and its encoding, to improve the accuracy of location calculations. Essentially, the Starlink satellites can do the heavy computational lifting for their users below. The Starlink satellites are also essentially internet routers in space, capable of achieving 100 megabits per second. GPS satellites, on the other hand, communicate at fewer than 100 bits per second. “There are so few bits per second available for GPS transmissions that they can’t afford to include fresh, highly accurate data about where the satellites actually are,” says Iannucci. “If you have a million times more opportunity to send information down from your satellite, the data can be much closer to the truth.” The new system, which Humphreys calls fused LEO navigation, will use instant orbit and clock calculations to locate users to within 70 centimeters, he estimates. Most GPS systems in smartphones, watches, and cars, for comparison, are only accurate to a few meters. But the key advantage for the Pentagon is that fused LEO navigation should be significantly more difficult to jam or spoof. Not only are its signals much stronger at ground level, but the antennas for its microwave frequencies are about 10 times more directional than GPS antennas. That means it should be easier to pick up the true satellite signals rather than those from a jammer. “At least that’s the hope,” says Humphreys. According to Humphreys and Iannucci’s calculations, their fused LEO navigation system could provide continuous navigation service to 99.8 of the world’s population, using less than 1 of Starlink’s downlink capacity and less than 0.5 of its energy capacity. “I do think this could lead to a more robust and accurate solution than GPS alone,” says Todd Walter of Stanford University’s GPS Lab, who was not involved with the research. “And if you don’t have to modify Starlink’s satellites, it certainly is a fast, simple way to go.”
Taiwan goes nuclear – the US gets drawn in The Week 1/4 (The Week Staff, weekly news magazine with editions in the United Kingdom and United States) “What would happen if China tried to invade Taiwan?” The Week Staff, 1/4/2022 JL If a conflict were to break out between the two neighbours it would be “a catastrophe”, reported The Economist. This is first because of “the bloodshed in Taiwan” but also because of the risk of “escalation between two nuclear powers”, namely the US and China. Beijing massively outguns Taiwan, with estimates from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute showing that China spends about 25 times more on its military. However, Taiwan has a defence pact with the US dating back to the 1954 Sino-American Mutual Defence Treaty, meaning the US could, in theory, be drawn into the conflict. “Beijing’s optimistic version of events” after the decision to invade would see “cyber and electronic warfare units target Taiwan’s financial system and key infrastructure, as well as US satellites to reduce notice of impending ballistic missiles”, Bloomberg said. “Chinese vessels could also harass ships around Taiwan, restricting vital supplies of fuel and food,” the news site continued, while “airstrikes would quickly aim to kill Taiwan’s top political and military leaders, while also immobilising local defences”. This would be followed by “warships and submarines traversing some 130 kilometres 80 miles across the Taiwan Strait”, before “thousands of paratroopers would appear above Taiwan’s coastlines, looking to penetrate defences and capture strategic buildings”. According to satellite imagery seen by military news site The Drive, China has also begun “beefing up its combat aviation infrastructure across from Taiwan as invasion fears grow”. Beijing “is upgrading three air bases located opposite” the island, “boosting its air power capability in an already tense region that is flush with air combat capabilities.” “Construction of the new infrastructure began in early 2020 and continued uninterrupted through the pandemic, underlining its priority,” the site added. Taiwan would be reliant on “natural defences” – its rugged coastline and rough sea – with plans to “throw a thousand tanks at the beachhead” in the event of a Chinese invasion that could result in “brutal tank battles” that “decide the outcome”, according to Forbes. The island’s top military leadership has also “warned China that the closer its aircraft and ships get to the island the harder Taipei will respond”, Bloomberg reported, with “a multi-pronged approach that utilises aircraft, ships and its air defence systems to counter Chinese military incursions” in the works. “Chinese state media has dismissed the idea of Taiwan retaliating,” the news agency added. But a report by the island’s defence ministry sent to legislators shows the island is preparing to “take tougher measures” should they be necessary. This would all be complicated by the US pledge to defend its ally in what The Economist called a “test of America’s military might and its diplomatic and political resolve”. Asked last week during a CNN town hall meeting whether the US would mount a military response if Beijing attempted to take the island by force, Biden responded: “Yes, we have a commitment to do that.” The Guardian said that Biden “made a similar pledge in August”, when he told ABC News that the US has a “sacred commitment” to defend its Nato allies in Canada and Europe and it was the “same with Japan, same with South Korea, same with Taiwan”. If the US had decided against intervention, “China would overnight become the dominant power in Asia” and “America’s allies around the world would know that they could not count on it”, the paper added. In other words, “Pax Americana would collapse”. That would be unacceptable in Washington, especially as “Joe Biden pivots US foreign policy towards a focus on the Indo-Pacific as the main arena for 21st-century superpower competition”, The Guardian said. Biden’s comments during the CNN event were “at odds with the long-held US policy” of “strategic ambiguity”, The Telegraph said. Historically, Washington has helped “build Taiwan’s defences” but has “not explicitly promised to come to the island’s aid”. US manoeuvres have so far consisted of building up “large amounts of lethal military hardware”, The Guardian added, with “the steady buildup of troops and equipment and the proliferation of war games” meaning there is “more of a chance of conflict triggered by miscalculation or accident”. The primary danger that comes with US involvement lies in the fact that both Washington and Beijing possess nuclear weapons. Leaked documents published by The New York Times earlier this year revealed the extent of Washington’s discussions about using nuclear weapons to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in the 1950s. Provided to the paper by Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower behind the 1971 Pentagon Papers, the documents appeared to show an “acceptance by some US military leaders of possible retaliatory nuclear strikes on US bases”, CNN noted, raising the spectre of how the nuclear powers would square off in a 21st-century conflict.