SNUB NO MORE

 I like reading Zerohedge. It is always informative and interesting. I did think of a few subtitles for the photos in the article attached. Here you go:

The Scourge and Flail of Moscow

 

Where's the leader?

This is the EU. Not shown is their Leader for Animal Welfare.

Oh for Heaven's sake, just look at the titles they give themselves in the EU. They are clearly missing an essential element of any self-proclaimed sovereign and that it obviously the military arm.

When you realize that the EU is simply the European Coal and Steel Community that was established in 1951 to ensure that coal and steel were used in Europe for peaceful purposes and that as a result of the enlargement of that insignificant institution into the colossus known as the EU, it is easy to see how they simply did away with most of their production of coal and steel. I don't think there are any blast furnaces in the United Kingdom and God only knows what is left in Germany, France and the Netherlands. 

Job titles:

What is a a Clean Just and Competitive Transition? Is this where you dismiss the popular votes and referendums that rejected the EU but which were nonetheless set aside and imposed by fiat? Or is this where most of the countries involved had so little faith in their arguments for the EU that they refused to submit them to referendums and approval by the actual people of Europe? 

This overlaps that amazing office known as Technical Sovereignty, Security and Democracy whose stated purpose is at odds with all of its actions. There simply isn't much if any tech in Europe and the way they interpret security and democracy is one vote, one time and maximum enforcement of government directed censorship and jailing of the any and all opposition. Doesn't sound very clean, just, secure or democratic to me.

Prosperity and Industrial Strategy sounds nice but it appears to have led Europe to completely destroy its energy generation, nuclear power, steel, coal and most other energy intensive industries which invites the question, what kind of stupid industrial strategy is that? Where is the productivity in any of that?

High Rep for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy doesn't really sound like 'Office devoted to kicking America's ass out of Europe and making war on Russia using any and every flimsy excuse or casus belli we can dig up and shove up Putin's nose.' I mean, that's apparently what that means in European but I'm not a native speaker fluent in European.

My favorite one other than the Animal Welfare dude has got to be, Social Rights and Skills, Quality Jobs and Preparedness. Just how this title conforms with the EU DEMANDS that the member nations let in every single African and muslim on the planet and give them all the native's money, housing, education, medical and dental plus unlimited free housing, free transportation etc, is a complete mystery to me. It seems to mean, in European, 'Screw the whities, take all their money, schools, houses, freedoms and give them to people with zero skills, no understanding of civilized behavior and who do not know, follow or understand the concept of rules.' Again, as I said, not a fluent speaker of European but it does sound like a devilishly complex language.

We come finally to Cohesion and Reforms. This sounds almost too evil to be true. I mean it sounds like once you voted yourself into the sick twisted 4th Reich that there is no getting out because it is really very sticky and you cannot reform it because why would anyone reform perfection?

I studied the ECSC, BENELUX, the Western Union and of course the European Economic Community in school a long time ago and never dreamed that Europeans would vote themselves into the worst aspects of a combined Holy Roman Empire and 4th Reich....but they did. To say that this thing is 10 times worse than its idiot predecessor is not wrong and like that and all the rest, the only way out is war on a new scale not seen 1648.

When you look at the history of the place it is inevitable:

The 30 Years War and the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648

The Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna and Concert of Europe in 1815

The First World War and the Treaty of Versailles in 1919

The Second World War and the United Nations.  

When you think about it, each of the institutions created out of the wars that preceded them became instantly corrupt and the corruption has grown far worse in each iteration of the World Peace Enforcement Nirvana created by idealists after the last 2 world wars. There were no idealists at Westphalia or Vienna in 1815. 

I really don't understand why Europe's leaders and rulers are so intent on irritating Russia but as noted, not a fluent European am I. That there is money to be made I don't doubt but I don't see how they need to keep killing men in the mud in Ukraine to make that money since historically the real thieving and stealing begins when the peace breaks out and beaks get dipped so frantically in reconstruction money that people are blinded by flying $. On the other hand, there is also endless corruption in European military spending.

CONSIDER THE MAN WHO RULES

 Grok did its thing for me when I typed in "Vladimir Putin" and it was pretty interesting and informative. It is worth keeping in mind as you hear and read about what a dangerous lunatic he is that he has actually been running things in Russia for 26 years now and doesn't seem to be doing at all badly. YMMV. For those who think war and special military operations define both the man and the country, consider that this country waged war on the far side of the planet for 18 years against countries so far beneath us as to be unnoticeable while also apparently warring in 18 or 19 African countries at the same time under Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden.

Anyway, I'd be curious what your Grok has to say about Vladimir Putin. Mine says this at the outset:

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (born 7 October 1952) is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer serving as President of Russia since 7 May 2012, having previously held the office from 31 December 1999 to 7 May 2008 and the position of Prime Minister from 8 May 2008 to 7 May 2012.[1][2] Born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) to working-class parents, Putin graduated from Leningrad State University with a law degree in 1975 before joining the KGB, where he served for 16 years, including as a foreign intelligence officer in Dresden, East Germany, from 1985 to 1990. Following the Soviet Union's dissolution, he entered politics in Saint Petersburg as deputy mayor, then relocated to Moscow, ascending to director of the Federal Security Service in 1998, Prime Minister in August 1999 under Boris Yeltsin, and acting president later that year. 

Putin's leadership has focused on Russia's economic recovery from the 1990s crises, consolidation of central authority through federal reforms and oversight of key economic sectors, and assertive foreign policies aimed at safeguarding national interests amid shifting post-Soviet geopolitics and Western institutional expansions. Re-elected in 2024 for a term extending to 2030 following constitutional amendments, his tenure emphasizes sovereignty, strategic partnerships with non-Western powers, and resistance to perceived external pressures.

He has already headed up the Soviet Union Russia for more than twice as long as FDR ruled the United States. The entire story at Grok is worth reading. It shows just how his life and times defined the man who defines Russia in this century. He swims in the most dangerous seas in modern times and is clearly a very large shark when compared to all the tadpoles flailing around in Europe demanding his head for being naughty. It really is a wonder that he takes any of them at all seriously. Well, OK. No. I don't take any of them seriously so I very much doubt that Putin does. 

ON TYRANNY AND ULTIMA RATIO REGIS

 You know I used to admire Great Britain. It was something I picked up from my father and other relatives and it did seem like quite a nice place when I started visiting it in 1988 but it is now no less than it always was and it always was a First Class Tyranny. There's a reason we split away from those demons and as I watch them caper and dance in like lunatic zombies trying to shed head lice I can see why our Founders were so willing to fight them and to make damned sure that this nation and its peoples would always retain the right to fight the reptiles using all the weapons that come to hand when nations get to fighting among themselves. As I recall, it is still quite legal to own personal artillery in this country.

As one of the Cavaliers quipped in one of those BBC shows about their Civil War, “this house needs a cannon.” It’s a pity they allowed themselves to be gelded and turned back into peasants and serfs.

Not us, of course. 

 

In fact, I just saw this today while driving down to Wooster to pick up some replacement windows from an Amish guy for my 100 year old house.

TO THE BREAKERS

 What will it take for America to be able to build warships again? There are several answers but each is merely a reflection of the underlying basis for building ships. Is there a compelling need for warships today or tomorrow?

Up in the Great Lakes they were building a new Constellation class frigate. It was to an Italian design that Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) and the dedicated work force of 80,000 people all of whom worship at the alter of NotInventedHere made every effort to sink before it even left the building ways in Marinette, Wisconsin. The trolls of NAVSEA are a well known hazard to navigation but the real downfall is probably one that can be laid at the feet of the shipyard selected as the Prime to build the damned things. They failed across the board.

In the real world of accomplishments, builders are forced to pay for what they need and they don't get to whinge about having to pay too dearly for things that are absolute requirements. For instance, when building the Alaska Pipeline there was a need for skilled welders and other trades all along the route and you don't hire a workforce like that from the leavings at the 7/11 employment line. You pay enormous wages and benefits to attract the workers you need. It is obvious that Fincantieri Marinette simply declined to follow this path. 

The problems as I see it are:

– There is no compelling need to build surface force warships given the nature of the threat and the paralyzed infantile state of national will and leadership. The business of a Navy is to control the seas and the only reason to control the seas is to deny them to others and permit your trade to pass freely. We don't have much outgoing seaborne trade and our leadership thinks it is against some law to order the death or destruction of our enemies. Navies cannot survive in that kind of environment yet that is what the US is like today.

– The modern threat environment militates rather heavily against surface warships and projecting into the future, their survival on the surface is one that looks pretty bleak. In the littoral seas they can be tracked and attacked at will from drones launched from the shore. It is easy to say that drones can be suppressed as easily as ever we talked about suppressing shore batteries of anti-ship missiles but then we NEVER went up against dozens of shore batteries of anti-ship missiles in a drone environment and people have literally no conception of how cheap and easy it is to mass manufacture long range attack drones and fire them off in waves of hundreds.

– I used to laugh at the idea of our modern navy enforcing EMCON. I still laugh at it. Home on Jam was easy, Home on ELINT signals was even easier and you know why of course.....NAVSEA probably doesn't but I'll share it with you. Drones do not shift into Terminal Homing and a final course to target the way that an ASCM does. A drone, unless jammed, can also furnish the operator with video of the target in final acquisition and the operator knows if it is being spoofed.

The massive battles of WWII that saw our Navy essentially ward off attacks by thousands of manned drones reflect something not seen since the late days of the Cold War; redundancy and layers of it applied over a real Battle Group. Long Range Naval aviation is long gone. The layers of frigates and destroyers providing anti-missile and anti-aircraft defenses are now just one or two ships close in and the fleets combat logistics train of endless resupplies of missiles and ammo are long gone.

The doctrine is now so outdated as to be almost useless. The tactics and methods are astonishingly weak and probably completely ineffective against a real bad guy. You can look around now and you'll hear everyone in the trade whining about China and what a terrible threat China is because it has a big navy and once again I would be asking, why? It was our biggest trading partner and shipped us millions of tons of goods in thousands of its own commercial ships. Are they going to attack their own ships to deny us the trade? Are we going to attack China for some reason?

Look at who talks about attacking China or needing a Navy to fight China and ask yourself, what do they get out of such a silly posture? Why do they want this thing? Who benefits from such a war? Who loses the most in such a war?

So the Soviet Union is no more and Europe is the most pathetic excrescence ever and the question being asked again, why do we need this large and powerful Navy? We have raised a third generation now since Vietnam that does not believe that we should police the world and make it safe for Soros and Bill Gates. A lot of them would not fight for the USA so why does anyone think they would fight to the death for Ukraine?

The Pentagon has carefully selected the very worst people to be admirals and generals for 25 years now and there is no real way to stop that except to send all of the current ones home and convene a board of terminal Captains to select the next future leaders of the Navy and only select the best without any resort whatsoever to the DIE and sex of the future admirals. One helpful aspect to this would be the final understanding and realization that we only need a couple of dozen admirals since that is about all the Navy we have and/or need. We might also begin to accept that we don't need perfect angels at the top of the pyramid. A few personal foibles and an interest in pretty women should not be disqualifying.

You know what else we don't need? Yeah, we don't need 80,000 people whose job it is to tell industry how to build ships. Not one of them ever built a ship, the vast majority never served at sea and probably fewer than 100 have sailed off a lee shore in a storm. 

I read a story in the Surface Forces Pacific Maintenance Quarterly about one of our Missile Patrol Hydrofoils that had run into a difficulty getting up on its foils. The Fleet engineers had investigated and researched and delved into the reason for some time before they concluded that everything was working exactly according to spec and design but the ship would not come up on its foils and reach anywhere near full speed......until they removed 11 tons of unnecessary paperwork, manuals and files from the ship. That pretty much describes NAVSEA at this point and most of the Navy. 

NOW we have hardly scratched the surface and that is the point that the Navy would make. Drones attacking ships can really only scratch the hulls and superstructure they will claim but warships are no stronger now than merchant ship hulls are and we have seen just how flimsy merchant ships can be when attacked. The not invented here also applies to our naval architects and specifiers who simply decline to believe that we have made giant strides in strength of materials and that other forces can contribute to a real modern lethal warship design other than EM cannons and lasers that seemingly never work at sea for some damned reason. Oh yeah, salt air and humidity. Maybe if we had the deck force paint them....

 

WAR CRIMES ALL THE WAY DOWN NOW

 Well, it didn't take long did it? Every single officer involved in killing our enemies is now accused of war crimes and there will be investigations. Nothing will gut a military faster than breaking faith with your soldiers that they will not be used as political pawns in pointless games played by politicians. When Judge Napolitano comes out and declares a reattack on an enemy vessel is a war crime there is a social failure on a massive and damned near unfixable level.

Right off the bat it calls into question the deterrent patrols. It opens the door to endless post facto prosecutions of every single shot fired in the last 80 years and it must be crushed right now at the outset or there is no defense. This is not a time for pussyfooting around and narrowly edging or trimming to appease stupid people. 

The problem is that right now there are zero men of the stature necessary to knock this on the head and put it away. There is no George Washington, Eisenhower or MacArthur and there is zero credibility in the legal profession as a whole or in part and the Church pissed away every scrap of moral authority it ever had over the last 30 years.

If soldiers fear that they will only meet endless legal retribution and attacks for their actions, we have lost. This is the goal sought for all these decades by the left and the liberal machine. The military was the last crutch propping up the idea of a State and if falls there is nothing left. 

A HARD BLOW AT NASA

 I was reading this article and it seems to have left out the most important bit of pseudo news. It suggests that the Russian launch pad for its Soyuz program took a devastating and severe hit during the last manned launch to the International Space Station and that it looks like this could end Soviet Russian cooperation in the boondoggle. It seems that the damaged structure must be replaced if any further Soyuz are to launch and there is some doubt that Russia still feels the need for ISS games.

The article does mention that Russia will have difficulty replacing the launch complex and fixing it up since the country is so heavily sanctioned for waging war on its frontiers and has, as a consequence got every stupid dolt in NATO talking about launching preemptive strikes on Russia and cutting off all trade and technical support and exchanges. This is amusing on several fronts.

Why is anyone wasting time in orbit now? LEO is not even the back yard in space exploration and development and the tricky bits all now happen much further out and sadly, NASA is not really playing any kind of meaningful role in any of it. The only people that seem interested in getting to the moon and to Mars are working at Space X and they don't seem to feel any need to spend time messing around in orbit. They plan to play much further out and it shows.

NASA has been building a replacement space suit for something like 25 years and is no further along then when they started the whole process 25 years ago. Think about it, 25 years is a long time to screw up something as simple as making a modern space suit out of modern materials and processors and yet this is simply the margarine on NASA's cold toast. NASA does nothing well and it shows.

OK, the slings and arrows are well deserved but if Roscosmos and the Russians simply terminate their share of the missions in support of the ISS, is NASA going to pick them up? The Russians have already cut their investment by 25% and with a war that is costing them far more than they anticipated once they realized that every tinhorn dictator in the EU and EU Commission got involved in furthering the war to the bitterest end and the death of every Ukrainian, it looks like they need to trim their expenditures at no cost to their own enterprises. What better thing to cut than the ISS?

Can NASA and Boeing take up the 'slack'? It's an interesting question.

Oh, and do you believe a mission critical structure that survived dozens of Soyuz launches just happens to have failed catastrophically when the need for it went away in the minds of those who work in the Kremlin? Yeah, me neither. 

A QUIET WEEK

There was a meal with a very large bird and then there was the road trip and the whole time there was an absence of news, radio, tv, the internet and it was all quite good and relaxing. I think that it was time very well spent but it did mean that the cylinders that autoload with ideas worth writing down were all put away and are only now starting to recharge. 

Back at 11.

EVIL COUNSELORS

 The six scumbag democrat politicians that made the video basically encouraging junior enlisted and even young junior officers to consider disobeying the orders of their superiors is familiar territory to me. Those politicians just took to the media and encouraged some really ignorant people to gamely consider that they can defy a direct order they don't like because in their simple minds, the order is illegal. 

I once signed and gave the order that this whole thing all turned on:

The order I gave was for her to have no further contact with Petty Officer Lewis-Wiggan. That was the sum total of the whole entire case and she could not obey it and in fact ramped it up and up until it cost her everything she worked 19 years for. If we're charitable, she thought it was an illegal order.

Those idiots who decided that they needed to advise the entire military that they could disobey orders have basically invited a thousand more cases where dumb people do dumb things and take stupid advice, and really stupid advice from non-JAG lawyers and end up with a felony conviction.

Understand, that idiot above was free and clear and could have walked away with a simple letter that ordered her to cease contact and it would not have gone in anyone's files and it would have been forgotten about and probably not considered when it came time to write her fitness report if she had otherwise been doing an outstanding job. That was easy. She made it hard and then harder and then she compounded it and made it really hard. Had she listened to reason she would have done the thing ordered. Had she listened to her sane friends she would have taken Commodore's Mast and walked it off. By demanding a Court Martial she reaped every bad thing from a simple failure to obey orders and the lawyers got involved. Never involve the lawyers.

 What this all was for those who don't know the military, was the worst fallout from a simple easily fixable non-criminal admonishment. Life doesn't get fairer than that. Now junior sailors and military personnel who despise President Trump are going to consider that they have the RIGHT to disobey an order they disagree with and there is NO UPSIDE to this behavior. Even if they win, they lose and they will never win.

I remember a conversation I had one night on an island off the coast of Kuwait during Desert Storm and the Petty Officer I was talking to was telling me how much he hated the navy and that his dad had told him that if he really wanted out all he had to do was slug an officer. It was late at night, we're both armed to the teeth and there's nobody around so I asked him, "what did you think of that advice?"

"He don't know shit!" 

Captain Kelly and the rest of the scumbags deliberately and with malice gave stupid advice to dumb people wearing our uniform and Kelly knows that part of the mandatory training for all the decades after My Lai  has been instruction on illegal orders. He and those other idiots just threw it into a political context where stupidity abounds and idiocy is compounded daily.

You cannot despise them enough. 

HERDING TERRORISTS

 The always amusing British tabloid press came up with this winner of a headline to show just how dismal things are in Iran.

 You have to wonder at the idiocy of headline writers, tabloid press types and the idiots who read this sort of tripe to imagine how lost to reality they are if they thought some mullah in Tehran was calling the shots in Houthiland. The Soviets had a knack for running what looked like terrorist cells but they were all fakes.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure none of the controllers in Iran had any illusions and they all knew what they were doing was sending money and weapons to psychopaths* pretty much just like how the EU and we are sending weapons to psychopaths running Ukraine. I think Houthis probably don't cost Iran nearly as much as Ukrainians cost and the Russians used to say that Ukrainians were cheap....

*PolySci types and other dullards imagine that terrorists are behaving like terrorists because they want something. Realists know that this is not so. Terrorists exist to kill and maim and that is about the sum total of their purpose, plans and intent. They also want to get rich and become professors at Universities in Chicago and California but that's strictly an individual goal and not the group's goal.

NEW COLOR REVOLUTIONARIES

 Remember the Good Ole Days™ when all revolutionaries intent on overthrowing the State were black and brown? These losers are trying to balance the colors, yes, balance them.

I do wish they'd pose in front of their own flag

 

THAT LITTLE X TRICK

 It seems that much of what appeared to be a kerfuffle on the Constitutional side of politics when it looked like it was splitting over Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson and other issues, was largely just a matter of fakers pretending to be Constitutionalists and living abroad where they enjoyed a no doubt surreal life pretending to be real men and probably stroking their imaginary AR-15 doom guns. That is a relief. I was getting a little concerned that the idiots were way more numerous then expected and now it turns out they were mostly imaginary. The whole thing was revealed when Elon Musk ordered X to drop the mask on commenters and reveal where they are posting from.

We are fortunate in this regard because we have,

For Strength

Don't listen to crazies and nutjobs. If what you hear or read seems unreal, it probably is and somebody somewhere else is making it up. Relax and have another one, for the strength that's in it.

SIGN OF THE TIMES

 If only there was a sign.

It is so easy to go astray. You just put one foot wrong and the next thing you know….

MAKES YOU WONDER

 As I was reading about a sliver of New Yorkers trying to exercise their Second Amendment rights I was suddenly struck by an errant thought. It is probably illegal to sell anybody in NYC a gun without going through all the ridiculous hassle of forms and paperwork that don't seem to have any basis in our Constitution and so should not exist but,

what if I loaned them a 3D printer that also had directions to the sites on the web where it is possible to download files that would allow a 3D printer operator to download and print a .45 or an AR-15? It's not like selling someone a gun or giving someone a gun, it's just a technology transfer and I don't know if ITAR applies when transferring tech between Americans in America.

It's like loaning someone a book or a car. Nothing illegal about that.... 

RUNNING DOWN THE ENEMY

When I read those words as a boy they usually involved a frigate chasing another ship for days and miles in what could be called a running battle if it involved less running and more battling but the outcome was almost always going to be a battle. The same seems true with President Trump and as someone who does the NYT puzzles most days, I always take a moment to enjoy their outrage as they get run over yet again by not just President Trump but every single member of his family. It is a wonderment and fun.

I was reading that they finally cottoned on to the simple fact that a man so clearly and so obviously with nothing to hide, did not need to have anyone withhold the Epstein emails for his sake. His position is unlike that of just about every other friend of the man who loved to destroy people, he despised him and was despised in turn. Wow, what a shocker. So he carefully arranges for the leading stupid idiots to demand full production of the emails and yep, they are going to blow out of the water all the democrats who have not already retired. 

The whole delay and obfuscation was not just about limiting damage but to give some politicians and other people time to retire and clear the stage so the outrage would fall on the unwary and the slow. The Congress voted to demand the release of the emails and so in time we will see some heavily redacted shit shower of emails lacking all context and simply naming the names of people who shared email addresses with someone who knew Epstein. Not exactly the smoking guns the democrats were lusting for. OTOH, they have a weird gun lusts so there's no telling.

Of course, the dolts are fooled again because the emails were not the Epstein files. Those were the boxes and boxes (scores of boxes) that federal agents were filmed walking away from Epstein's various residences carrying into safe and secure FBI and DOJ storage. Those are the files people were once interested in and curiously, 100% of them have gone missing. Ssssshhhh, don't tell anybody.

Did you ever wonder what was going to happen if New York pulled off a Haiti and what the effects would be downstream for everyone? It is almost like nobody reads or comprehends history or understands that great cities get abandoned almost overnight and it happens all the time. Cities like Detroit and Cleveland were once among the richest and most productive cities in the world and then something happened, almost overnight.

I wonder where all those pedophile friends of Epstein call home these days. Do you think they can muster the Congressional votes to bail out New York again? I certainly don't want to bail them out. I'm kind of looking forward to them refugeeing out to Camden and other garden spots in the Garden State. Anything to get away from what the people elected.
 

You know the funny thing is that Ford never said those words but still contributes the sentiment that page engendered with costing him reelection as people turned to the dufus to save New York. 

LIKE WAR BUT BETTER

 As we learn more about the Deep State and the sheer mass of conniving bureaucratic hate filled leftoids controlling every single bureaucracy and school and university and so on, it always occurs to some people that we need to prune it back and what better place to start than at the top. On the other hand there is plenty of evidence to show that when the rot goes all the way to the tail, cutting off the head doesn't do a thing about the smell or the effects of slimy bureaucracy and the whole thing needs to be purged.

So the question must be, where do we find the people to replace all the bureaucrats? And the answer should be,

Why would anyone want to replace them? Just get rid of them all. There is no reason on earth to have 16,000 people working for the Center for Disease Control. I could see a couple of hundred but even that is probably too many. This applies to literally every bureaucracy. You don't need to find the bad ones and get rid of them, simply get rid of them all. 100% swept away overnight.

Then, the new management team appointed by the ACTUAL Constitutionally mandated authority can hire the 2-5% of employees that the job requires and terminate all the mission creep that dominated a system that rewards bureaucrats for engaging in mission creep and awards more and more resources to things that just don't matter.

Honestly, can anybody see any reason to retain even a single worker from the Bureau of Labor Statistics? 

Losing militaries shed useless drones overnight once the actual combat begins. Something like that is required for Education Departments, Agriculture Departments and especially for the Department of War. 

MANAGEMENT BY WALKING AROUND

 The MBWA theory was something I was taught on my first ship as a young division officer. My boss and the CO both felt compelled to share with me the idea that it was my job to visit every single one of my spaces every day. There was a brief time when I thought that meant that I should visit the work spaces because something like 73 spaces on that ship belonged to my division and to be honest, that was an awful lot of ladder climbing and hatch openings and closings but I soon learned that they were both sincere.

When the CO invites his newest division officer down to the forward ballast pump room and asks, "when did you first notice that none of the lights in this space actually work?" I kind of got the message loud and clear. He sort of tossed over his shoulder as we climbed up 4 decks of ladder in the access trunk that the lights also didn't work in the after ballast control pump room, ballast control room or the JP-5 pump room....

I spotted this the other day and laughed out loud. This is in a 20 building compound for older folks.

Things are beyond hope at this place of work and Nobody Cares

CONSCIPTION, AGAIN

 I see this morning that both Poland and Germany are seeking to bring back conscription. It is only fair that they start to man up just in case a war or something breaks out in Europe among NATO members because there are certain signs and portents that not everybody is getting along well. It does make me laugh.

They are both talking about another one of those completely fair conscription scams where they stuff recruits into boot camp via a fair lottery system that will of course exclude all immigrant muslims and africans and you will never ever see the sons of billionaires or millionaires or politicians or knights of the holy roman empire drafted into the army.

 The really serious problem I have with conscription is the illusion that it solves all problems because once you have men on the job, your problems are solved. This is nonsense in military terms because what you need more than fodder for the war machine is senior leaders who know how to wage war, junior leaders who know how to do it, senior noncoms that know how to motivate men and junior noncoms that know how to get the actual job done. Privates are about the least part of the problem because we haven't even addressed having the weapons, doctrine, tactics, techniques and training to make it possible for modern armies to successfully engage in combat operations without getting destroyed.

There is no sign at all anywhere in Europe that they have even started to think about the last 5 items on the list. Their great grandfathers could be sent into the line with nothing but a rifle and a handful of bullets but that just hasn't been a thing since 1950. Seventy years of taking a vacation from all things warlike and military has left a vacuum in Europe that only one thing can fill and they don't know it and would never allow it and I doubt they could afford it. Yeah, mercenary armies and condottieri like the good old days when states could wage war to the hilt without all that messy raising armies nonsense.

Well, good luck with that. 

I REMEMBER THEM

 I have a picture somewhere around here of me as a little boy wearing the outfit my mother made for me back when we were living in Carlisle while my dad was off to war in Vietnam and I had to polish up and look good for the grand opening of my great Uncle John's church there in downtown. Afterwords I recall that we went to his rooms where we watched as the Parade marched through Carlisle with a sizeable group of marchers wearing the uniforms they wore during the Great War. As I look back from now I can see that those old veteran's probably used to watch a similar parade as the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic marched on their Remembrance Day.

This time of year is not the one that any sane person would pick to honor veterans of our nation's wars but it was chosen long ago by the day that the guns finally fell silent all along the endless front as the fighting of World War I finally came to an end. It is by any light a fine day to simply take a few long moments and remember the veterans and if you know some, buy them a cup of coffee and maybe a nice chocolate cream donut or a really good bagel because we they deserve it! 

And remember, all veterans are way too old and broken to garden or shovel snow. 

SNOW ON THE GROUND

 I saved this for the first snow day of this winter. As I wrote last time, she has everything well in hand. Me? I’ve been listening to snow plow driving by since midnight.

FOOLS RUSSIAN

 So the newest members of NATO did just what you knew they would, they launched a casus belli this week by blockading Konigsberg and preventing Russia from sending fuel and goods into East Prussia exterior Russia. They turned off the power and lights in European Russia and the reward for behavior like that is almost always war.

US out of NATO, US out of Europe!

These stupid vicious idiots don’t know anything about how to stay at peace with their neighbors and they’ve never given us a good reason to fight for them. I suspect that Victoria Nuland has holdovers in the Baltic Desk at State Department. Stupid like this has to be encouraged by some nitwit with no brakes and no understanding of history or diplomacy.

COMMAND IS FLEETING

 I was reading the latest from Simplicius this evening and it struck me as I was reading about the latest collapse of the battle front in Ukraine that what we are seeing played out there is a lot like what Sir Julian Corbett wrote about in his book, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy. In a twist unique to this blog we're going to stand the normal order of things military on its head and see what applying maritime strategy looks like when its overlaid on military strategy. The second link above will let you download the book at Project Gutenberg  to read for yourself if you're interested. 

Corbett was one of the three naval strategists we studied back when we were young. He, Alfred Thayer Mahan and Jomini were the big 3 in addressing characteristics of naval strategy and applying them to history. One might say that a study of history was a necessary foundation for strategy but it sure doesn't look like it is anymore. 

Corbett was the one that wrote about the simple fact that appears to escape every stupid naval strategist today and most of the lamer ones of the last 100 years. 

“The object of naval warfare must always be directly or indirectly either to secure the command of the sea or to prevent the enemy from securing it. 

The second part of the proposition should be noted with special care in order to exclude a habit of thought, which is one of the commonest sources of error in naval speculation. That error is the very general assumption that if one belligerent loses the command of the sea it passes at once to the other belligerent. The most cursory study of naval history is enough to reveal the falseness of such an assumption. It tells us that the most common situation in naval war is that neither side has the command; that the normal position is not a commanded sea, but an uncommanded sea. The mere assertion, which no one denies, that the object of naval warfare is to get command of the sea actually connotes the proposition that the command is normally in dispute.”

He continues a few paragraphs later,  

“In the first place, "Command of the Sea" is not identical in its strategical conditions with the conquest of territory. You cannot argue from the one to the other, as has been too commonly done. Such phrases as the "Conquest of water territory" and "Making the enemy's coast our frontier" had their use and meaning in the mouths of those who framed them, but they are really little but rhetorical expressions founded on false analogy, and false analogy is not a secure basis for a theory of war.”

When the command of the seas wavered it wavered pretty hard.

During the Okinawa campaign, the Japanese kamikaze attacks resulted in the sinking of 36 Allied ships and the damaging of 368 others, with an estimated 4,907 Allied sailors killed and 4,824 wounded. These figures were largely the result of widespread and persistent suicide attacks that occurred between March and June 1945, impacting numerous naval vessels supporting the invasion. Author's note: this is my first AI quote. Yay AI!

We are going to see that the common precept now for all warfare must be one of a total lack of command of the sky, command of the sea or pushing the front forward to destroy and envelop the enemy which yields total command of the land behind the front to the one occupying the territory. It simply isn't going to work like that anymore. 

I also saw a news headline that said that the US Army was buying a million drones. I do hope not. There is nothing worse than ossified doctrine, tactics, techniques and procedures based on buying the wrong hardware and then gearing all of that around the purchased obsolete crap the bean counters bought.  Of course this raises two fundamental problems with breakthrough tech in modern times. 

1. The whole concept of exploiting breakthrough tech is instantly poisoned by putting it in the hands of the Civil Service and one of the military's formally established labs. I might offer it to MCTSSA but even there it is doomed to eventual corruption by bureaucrat.

2. Put the whole idea into a series of non-stop RFPs for really cool, cheap, deadly long range / short range, tactical, surveillance, bomb delivery or other drones and have industry just flood the Pentagon and services with some really cool, cheap deadly designs. The obvious problem here is that the Pentagon can't and won't buy them all so they'll end up on the world market and find their way into the hands of our enemies or even worse, democrats and liberal progressives.

As you read up on the battles and cauldrons consuming men for nothing in Ukraine it is hard to believe that military strategists and generals are right now keen to put this all behind us because they know that this is not how they plan to wage war. In their minds nothing has changed since Desert Storm and they mean to keep right on exploiting those features of the military industrial complex and expanding on Counter Insurgency Operations. 

All through the Cold War the premier threat we all accepted was a sudden and devastating attack on the nation's capital and the death or destruction of the national command authority and we knew our potential enemies had the means to get a sea launched ballistic missile over the capital in as little as 12 minutes. We developed something like the Launch on Warning of television and movie fame. We had no choice. 

The interesting thing though is that back then we knew of one other country on the planet that had that capability. Now? Well now we have anybody with a few bucks and some tech savvy who can pretty much flood the National Capital Region with dozens of drones practically at will.

Something else we used to read about back in that old war was the Look Down Shoot Down capabilities we'd need to deal with some threats. How much thought do you suppose the Air Defense mavens at the NCR have given to collateral damage from shooting down drones with high explosives over Bethesda, Arlington, Alexandria, etc? That's just on the strategic level. How are the C4I nodes of the various generals going to survive in the same but worse threat environment of today?

I know the Russian General Staff has been working on these matters for a couple of years now. I suspect our versions of the General Staff (we don't have one) haven't even looked at what it means, what it will take to stop it and how they will command the resources to eliminate the threat as needed over those areas where command of the skies or command of the seas is essential and must be unequivocal.  Hell, they're all in unpaid status and may be out fishing for all I know.

The United States since its founding has been immune to deep strike. We don't even think about it because nobody can attack us from thousands of miles away short of using ballistic missiles....except we flooded our country with enemy civilians and they can and are exploiting every loophole (loopholes the size of the Grand Canyon) to be able to instantly implement death and destruction if we go to war with their principal country. You see them smuggling in biological  materials that will destroy our crops and poison the land. They bought up land around our strategic air bases. They are ready now to wage this kind of warfare.

We read about the Russian's shadow fleet of tankers but I wonder that we don't hear about their shadow industries that have set up scores of fronts inside the USA to carry out deep strikes as needed in the future. They're out there. They always will be, now. 

 

PLAY BY THE RULES

 Next time one side plays chicken with everybody’s lives and shuts down the whole government in a snit, send every single air traffic controller home and don’t resume non-military flying until the entirely politics driven “crisis du jour” is over. I figure that will last at most one or two days.

You don't have to be smart, clever or fast, just ruthless. A lot of people don't know that.

FIGURED IT OUT

I heard that voting exploded in NYC and the mobs flocked to the polling station or sent in thousands of mail in ballots for the commie and I just figured out why it was the biggest election turnout in NYC since 1969.

 Every single democrat and all their dead relatives had to get their vote in for the other guy after Trump endorsed the scum of the earth.

To be honest, were I a dem I could see why it makes sense to vote for the commie because let's be honest, you know exactly what you're going to get good and hard if you vote for Cuomo and honestly, it takes real stupidity to vote for a man you know to be evil. 

ABOUT THOSE RIGHTS

 I have read lately that a number of government officials have elected to take refuge from the mobs by hiding out in military housing on military bases. I've never been to Fort McNair but I have been to several other bases in the National Capital Region and this might be the time to mention that if you thought our nation's elementary schools were hostile territory, free fire zones and rabidly gun free you ain't seen nothing yet because there are even fewer guns on military bases. They're simply not allowed. Military Police and them only when on duty are allowed to carry weapons. For all the rest you might as well be at school.

I spent a lot of time on military bases and schools and I'll take the army posts any day of the week but there is that quirk of assumptions. People like me of a certain age and era think that the bases and posts are much the way they were 50 years ago and I suspect that just isn't true. I'll bet the modern military post is awash with private guns and rabid little trolls ready willing and able to use them on anyone they run across on base.

Let's remember that physician Major Nidal Hasan didn't have any trouble at all shooting 30 people on Fort Hood and killing 15 of them when he gave in to his perfectly predictable anger and inclination to terrorism.

Perhaps military housing and military bases are not as safe as Homeland Security and other Federal Agencies such as the War Department imagine they are. Still, if the neighbors complain about security, blocked streets, loud generators and vehicles running 24/7 right outside their bedroom windows, who cares. They're just military families. Tell you what though, none of them are likely to care if you fly one of the flags of our Revolution except maybe to ask you where they can buy one too.

RIGHT WING FAIL

So we are watching all these formerly seemingly sane and rational organs of the right shrieking into the darkness because Tucker Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes. Formerly sane people are screaming that the Heritage Foundation must disown and burn down Tucker and his studio and throttle him in his sleep for daring to ask a foaming-at-the-mouth crazy loon questions on his show.

It's probably just as well I never listened to or read to much of these idiots who post at places like Instapundit because otherwise I'd be disturbed that their big guns are out there demanding that Tucker be condemned, thrown into the outer dark, silenced and CANCELED because they don't like what he did. Honestly, do they ever listen to themselves? 

The right wing lunatics (aka the right wing of the right wing) want to cancel a journalist because he dared to  interview somebody they hate with a burning passion dislike. Did they never sense that perhaps some of the journalists who interviewed Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Kennedy (any of them), Kissinger, et al, didn't like them but interviewing them was laying the foundations to let others know just how vile they are/were? 

Did I ever foresee idiots of the right demanding the cancellation of a journalist or anyone at all? I'd be lying if I said I never saw that coming. Still, I'm kind of alarmed at how quickly they forget. We don't cancel people. We like to maneuver them into the light and let them speak for themselves and show everyone else just how crazy they are.