DEEPEST NIGHT TWO

 You have a reputation as a man of great personal integrity. Let us say that somebody decides to throw it on the bench and give it a full and rigorous set of tests to find out just how correct that judgement is and after a set of damned near unendurable tests determines that there is considerable truth to the judgement and let us say that the people who want to know this about you are the same exact people that created a spy service second to none in all of history. 

A measure of their competence is revealed when they somehow manage to almost literally disarm their major northern front enemies by not only convincing them that pagers are more secure for their secret communications but also has created a company that makes explosive pagers and manages to sell them to the Hezbellah terrorists with such good effect that they almost destroy themselves in a single afternoon of frenzied paging. (What happened on 7 October bears looking hard at in this light. There is no way they missed all that so the question remains, how was that allowed to happen?) That was evil.

These guys, having found you may keep a secret, are willing to furnish you with detailed information on a nuclear weapons program being carried out in a country so hostile to yours that they greet every single day by leaping to their feet and screaming "Death to America!" They are willing to show you the actual nuts and bolts which also reveals Sources and Methods and they ask if you 'd like to join them in laying waste to this threat. Their information shows that the enemy is only weeks away from having a working bomb.

I'm sorry, at what point in this recitation do you suddenly decide you have better things to do? I know, I know,  it is time now to second guess those guys and go to the very same intelligence services that framed you and spent the last 10 years fabricating evidence against you to get a second opinion on a program that to your own knowledge they have been denying even exists.

It is always easy in hindsight to say that the response was unwarranted or too severe but we all know that it is not Iran that is the enemy here, it is Islam. Islam has already shown that they will stop at nothing to kill Americans and Jews and take great delight in killing anybody at all in Israel.

Let's examine the wider picture. There is one Islamic Country that has the bomb. This is the very same country that played host and furnished all the hospitality in the world to Osama bin Laden. I'm sure we all remember where he was when the SEALs dropped in on him and blew him away. Those guys in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, to give it its full proper name, have demonstrated a zeal for killing unbelievers unrivaled in history.

But, as the saying goes, wait, there's more! I think there is an excellent chance that the Gulf nations are now and actually have been for some time, interested in getting atomic weapons of their own. I don't know that any of them would use them. For all that they were the initiators of the Caliphate, they don't really have any record of butchery on the scale that indicates they would use nuclear weapons. There is however the small print. As far as I can tell, no arabs anywhere make anything. They do though have scads of money and with enough money one can buy anything. They also have deep vaults and way more than enough money to convince some people to look the other way.

Consider the number of times now that competent people have found unattended thermo-nuclear weapons hanging on the wings of unattended aircraft because some Air Force clowns were actually able to walk into a nuclear weapons magazine and walk out with half a dozen nuclear tipped air to surface missiles. It frankly, boggles the mind.

Six American nuclear weapons are still missing. Nobody actually knows where they are. Take a guess how many Russian nuclear weapons vanished from their magazines and arsenals even before the communist system there collapsed.

I have been told that we have detectors sensitive enough to detect emanations from nuclear weapons miles away and not to worry about it. On the other hand, I used to think we had actual meaningful safeguards in place to prevent the simple taking and walking away with nuclear weapons and I was dead wrong there. I thought the PRP was real. I thought we had an ethical (ish) Civil Service. I was wrong. You could probably walk a nuke into the capital if you felt like it and had a hall pass signed by the right clown.

As with the man in the arena, I cannot fault a man for trying against impossible odds and failing. I'm better than that. When people wonder why we have not got a man in what remains of our White House who can stop the War in Ukraine I always wonder, how fucking stupid can you be to think one man in a white house can stop a thousand year old war using nothing but his tongue? If you look at peace treaties and war conclusions throughout all of history you will find that the war ends when one or both sides decide to quit, when one vanquishes the other or when people just get tired of it and stop. The war in Ukraine has not come anywhere near any of those limits.

Russia will not stop because it cannot. Zelensky cannot stop or he will die, and with Europe propping up Zelensky in the lunatic belief that they are injuring Russia (at the same time they continue to fund his war operations buying his energy), the war will go on until there are no more Ukrainian men or somebody sticks a knife in Zelenksy.

If you look at this in the coldest light you will ever see, both Putin and Zelensky benefit as long as the war goes on because they can point to a threat to national security that demands sacrifice and lets both continue in office and reap the benefits. That said, if you think Putin is a bad man, you aint seen nothing like the man who will take his place if he dies of suddenly. That guy has no limits on power and was never ever loyal to anything.

The good news, I suppose, is that Ukraine is running out of manpower and no lunatics like the Wagner Group appears to be coming to their defense and nuclear weapons fabrication in Iran has been slowed down once again. You know who has nuclear weapon scientists lying around by the score? You know who has score to settle with the people that have kept the war in Ukraine going long past the time it should have faded away in an exasperated but exhausted little puff of smoke? I do. We better hope he's a good enough man for our times or we will see the sun touch the earth again.

IT NEVER CAME UP

 I see that there are reports that Israel is making it clear to its only partner that it is prepared to continue the attack and is less interested in a negotiated solution with an enemy that close and that dangerous who has a couple thousand years of lying about things on its mantle piece. I cannot say I blame them because there is in fact no sign that Iran is giving up or that it is losing influence in the West. If you look at it without the media filters, the West is turning into the most virulent anti-Jew place on the planet right now. Yes yes, I know, the haters all always say its the zionism they hate but we all know what they mean.

So the British earned a little title of their own because they had a very simple foreign policy for ages and ages and they were spectacularly ruthless and lucky implementing it. The English (Perfidious Albion) policy always was that they did not want to see all of Europe under one master. They didn't care whit who that master was, it was better for England and better for all that Europe be a fractured and divided marketplace that would systematically gut the Spanish new world empires, the Dutch empire, the French empire the Italian whossname, and always the Holy Roman Empire. They missed a bet when they let Frederick the Great put things together and create Prussia but it would take a hundred years to see how bad a decision the 7 Years War had been. The British made side deals everywhere to keep Europe fractured.

So there is plucky little Israel engaged in a great war with Iran over  the heads of a half dozen formerly impotent emirates and kingdoms and the Iranians in their rashness decided to treat them all as the enemy. The buffer states of yore are now equally and all of them, the open enemies of Iran. That was something the POLMIL guys saw coming as long ago as 1945 so it comes as no surprise. Only one Gulf country had ambitions beyond its borders and everyone knew it.

Now we have to look at history and did you ever wonder why the Allied position on surrender negotiations with the Germans and Japanese was always that there would be no negotiations? Yes, it is simply because nobody at all trusted the British to negotiate in good faith. With them there was always going to be a poison pill that would blow up relations 20 years downstream. You could set your watch by it.

America's foreign policy people are mostly paler Brits. They also believe in the poison pill negotiation strategy although it never works out that their clever negotiating benefits the United States in 20 years time. Nope. It always seems to leave a mark that just won't buff out. You can see this sort of thing just by looking at both Iraq and Afghanistan. Wars were won in days and we lost the next 20 years in both. Where in the actual Hell did that idiot Bremer come from?

The only remaining hope in the negotiations going forward is that the President knows what he is dealing with and has appointed some savvy negotiators who also know what they're dealing with. In any event it doesn't really matter because the negotiation is always only only a trick to end the shooting so both sides can rearm and regroup. This is not some sneaky koran thing, this is simply the way that all wars end and all negotiations towards that end proceed. It's nothing new.

For a country with no friends at all there is only war and thus a mandate to end such wars with an unassailable position of strength because to do other is to lose. At this remove from the contest I could not even begin to think what would act as the final redoubt in Iran in this war that has to be reduced at all costs in order to gain time to prepare for the next one. It is not the people, it is not the capital, it is not the Head of State or Head of Government, it is not land sacrificed from the mainland and it is not massive disarmament of the surrendering side. I don't see what it could be.

I fought Iran once a long time ago. It was the easiest little war nobody ever heard of. We had a Navy in the Gulf that formed into Surface Action Groups and did everything they could to hunt down and sink every single Iranian warship at sea and also shot up some oil processing platforms. We also had a carrier battle group in the North Arabian Sea that wanted to play and did and when we did all the damage we could in the time allotted for retaliating for the mining of the USS Samuel B. Roberts, we unilaterally declared a cease fire and stopped shooting. Things immediately returned to the status quo ante bellum. 

That's obviously going to be a little more difficult now. Not impossible, simply more difficult. One way to sand off the sharp bits though is to have an "ally" unaccountable to anyone who is prepared and willing to go to just about any lengths at all to secure a meaningful peace while you negotiate.  That might be the only way to do it. 

You can see this trick used all through history too.  

I'M SURE IT HURT

 

How awkward though to be filmed laughing and smiling and enjoying something this awful.

IYKYK

IMPROBABLE WINDOWS, KRAFT AND ME

 So I was hugely successful getting new windows for the Study and they came in looking good and fit perfectly, if I do say so myself. It probably helps in this regard that I took out the old relics and hauled them well south of here and gave them to a solid young window carpenter who did a bang up job replacing them. It took about 5 months longer than projected but despite another winter on the North Coast it was about as warm a winter as I've passed in the Study because I also know a good deal about sealing holes in the vital infrastructure thanks to my extensive Damage Control training and experience. 

With that side of the house done I turned to the front and took out those windows and hauled them down to the same carpenter with an expected delivery of November. I'm cannier than that and I have ordered a roll of Kraft paper to make a good template of the hole in my wall and then I will have a nice plastic window made with a laser cutter and stuff it in the hole. The 3 pieces of high end plastic I used last winter won't serve for this set of windows due to the need to shape them to fit and it turns out that it is true, one cannot cut quarter inch and better high end plastic with a jig saw. That's just right out. 

The old windows only stayed in place because gravity did not work against them. They were so rotten they weighed damned near nothing at all and yet so securely fastened in place (ahem, DC is my game), that not even the winter gales could dislodge them and carry them off. 

I figure if the carpenter and I do our usual jobs (his one of skill and craft and mine more one of Kraft paper and desperation), I can even have a very nice faux winter storm window for that part of the house in years to come. 

The carpenter lives well south of here and there are any number of really superb restaurants and other eateries between here and there that it is really no hardship at all to check on his progress over the coming months. It also happens to be a very relaxing and beautiful bit of Americana to drive through.  

NEWS AT 11

 I think this is actually kind of amusing. A 

and yet the media and everyone else seems gung ho to keep anyone from knowing who this well known extremist group might be. I know, the mind just automatically jumps to the Southern Poverty Law group of extremists or their armed wings in the BLM and NAZI party but it is still beyond laughable that they are hiding the name of the extremists because the only reason to do that is to conceal the identity of the extremists and why on earth would anyone do that?
 

A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE ON THE EASTERN FRONT

 I never studied anything about this gigantic war beyond the devastating losses in the Tannenberg Forest and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. This is eye opening and should put the Ukraine War in perspective. The four empires in the east were completely destroyed and gone by 1918 and almost nobody alive today knows anything about it.

A BIT OF HISTORY

 Those interested should type William Lederer into the search query box above and read about Commodore Joe Fyffe and a little bit more by the more serious Lederer about our Foreign Policy a long time ago. One was, All the Ships At Sea and the other was The Ugly American. I like to reread both every ten years or so.

ON ELECTIONS

Do both parties have observers in the rooms where primary ballots are counted or is that just another one of those shameful election things we’re not supposed to know about, supervise or hold accountable? 

U P D A T E

Well, what do you know, it seems like they were looking most carefully at the crooks, liars and thieves,  How gratifying.

#BREAKING: Lawrence: “…a mystery remains tonight, after the votes were counted in Michigan’s primary election. We know who won, we know who lost, we know who came close to winning, and we know who won the most votes ever cast in a primary election in the state of Michigan, but… pic.twitter.com/kn6D2w3Hq8

— Emoluments Clause (@Emolclause) August 6, 2026

 

A DRIVE INTO THE PAST

 In need of some woodwork that used to be a routine staple of life in the old window environment, we drove about 140 years into the past this afternoon to drop off some ancient wooden windows from the house with a semi-local carpenter we know who replaced other equally ancient windows in the house last year. We are working our way slowly from most damaged by time to the least damaged and I figure we'll definitely finish the job sometime around 40 years from now. I kind of get a kick out of still working ship-to-shop in my retirement and long after the Shore Intermediate Maintenance Activities bit the dust.

Still, it was nice to drive an hour south and over a hundred years into the past and I find that the past really was a nice place. Nobody really needs the internet, tv, electricity or the rest of the labor saving things we've invented if you just have enough children. People have really forgotten that aspect of family life in rural America. 

On the other hand, cheerfully carving out little exceptions to the rule so you can use a donkey engine to run belt powered machine tools is an obvious case of allowing some modern things to creep into the perfect 18th century lifestyle on stealthy little feet. Hell, I did it myself sailing down to old Mexico on a 41 footer and finding a single solar panel was enough to generate the charge for the two or three tiny white lights below deck in a boat that otherwise could have sailed in the 17th century. I'm pretty sure the Atomic 4 dates from the Revolution.

I really enjoy driving through the endless vistas of rural Ohio just south of the Lake. Good roads, nice drivers, excellent ice cream parlors, cool libraries and of course, skilled craftsman who can make you a brand new window, seal it, paint it, put on new hinges and hardware and glaze it for less than $50.00 a window. You have to understand, the price is not the object or the delight, it is finally after years of looking, finding a man who will still make anything you want out of wood and simply ask for pay. 

I don't know about you, but my window shopping has been a pure hell of so-called window contractors that come to the house, estimate what it would take to put their window systems™ in place of my existing windows and all of whom declare that it will run about $7500/window and of course that doesn't count the modifications to my existing window frames to fit their damned window systems™which are otherwise incompatible with a house built over a hundred years ago.

On the gripping hand, you should hear my brother talk about the idiot contractors he has to hire to work on his other family house in Vermont. That house was built in 1839 and uses methods and materials so far removed from current practices they might as well come from the Apollo era.

Still, it was another fine day. 

THE GET UP AND GO

 They all think that if and when their policies turn a place into shit that they can simply and effortlessly get up and go. The amazing thing is that they do and they find a welcome in a new place where they are going to be adamant about imposing the same policies and behaviors that ruined their last place and they get away with it over and over again because they can always get up and go.

You should be mindful of them. Remember, vigilantism starts at home and usually for a damned good reason. 

AFRICA HAS FALLEN

 First it started a long time ago, accelerated during decolonialization and then just burped again a few years ago as French North Africa's colonies finally decided to try independence without the French and now the final European bastion in Africa is gone. 

The way the folks on X are carrying on you would think it was the Moroccan invasion of al Andalus come again. Come on people, it is the collapse of the last vestige of European colonialism in Africa and long overdue. It is exactly what the governments of Morocco and Spain have wanted since 1960 and now it has been done.

Yes, it took them a while to find a willing scapegoat of a Prime Minister but the secret rulers of Spain have been tired of their North Africa outpost for generations and finally they can shed that blot and move on. Best of all, they get to use it all as a huge blow to the socialists and use it to rally the volk arou ..... wait a second. They get to kindle and incite a new "we're all Spanish here now" wave of popular government and throw all the Africans back to their former colonial territory where they obviously come from. No, gentle readers, the truth or untruth of political positions never bothers them or even rears its ugly head.

An invading army of unarmed young men did what centuries of warfare, neglect, decolonization, the UN, and worldwide approbation could not. 

Finally. 

THE DONKEYS

 Did you ever wonder how it was that slavery was illegal in some states but legal in others despite this being one country that supposedly operated under just one set of rules laid out in the Constitution?

Did you ever wonder how it is that carrying a pistol is illegal in some states but legal in others despite this being one country that supposedly operates under just one set of rules laid out in the Constitution?

Did you ever wonder how it was that the Supreme Court of these allegedly United States of America never just stepped up to the bar and did their damned job on either issue? 

Of course, the Supreme Court did have a lash at the slavery issue. Did you know that the Supreme Court's final ruling on the whole issue of slavery was Dred Scott v Sandford in 1857 and it ruled that enslaved people were not citizens of the United States and, therefore, could not expect any protection from the federal government or the courts. The opinion also stated that Congress had no authority to ban slavery from a Federal territory.

You know, now that I think about it, maybe I don't want them to offer a definitive final rule on the 2nd Amendment either. 

THE OBSERVER CAR

 It was easy to foresee that Fauci would instantly seize on the Clinton strategy in front of the Senate Committee currently investigating him for his many crimes over the last 40 years and he did. It comes as no surprise that, acting with the connivance advice of his 6 lawyers, he declined to answer any questions and will never answer for his crime. So, no surprise. The Constitutional scholarclass of nitwits will now hold forth on whether the blanket pardon he accepted deny him his rights against self-incrimination. He'll be dead 80 years before that gets resolved.

The other observation comes from attempting to look into some of the pre-war actions of the Senate and the House in bringing about the greatest effusion of American blood and finding that all questions are immediately dumped into the "slavery did it" category of utter complete and total failure to answer the damned question. I cannot get the google architects of failure to get beyond my total indifference to the issues of slavery as presented by really knowledgeable poseurs on Facebook and give me the source materials from the era. It may come as a surprise but the other really compelling reasons for the War had nothing to do with slavery.

As I recall from my high school studies in Huntsville, AL back in the 70s the War Between the States had a lot to do with the Southern belief that the Northern industrialists owned the Senate lock stock and barrel and were dooming the South to be nothing but a latifundia furnishing tariff revenue to support northern industrial interests like interstate canals and railroads. I'll be damned if I can find any reference to that because all such querries devolve into the ne plus ultra of the damned liberal religion that blames everything on slaves. You know, at some point I thought they would give up but they're just like those people that have spent millennia on blaming the Jews for everything. They will not stop.

I was drawn to look at the latter issue because of the first. When it becomes clear to everyone that there is simply no justice to be found in the law, in the courts, in the government, what naturally happens in any system of government that tolerates that kind of thing? Well, historically it means revolution, secession and war or in the worst cases, it means endless anarchy under an inescapable tyranny. 

BROUGHT TO THIS LOW ESTATE

 It was the 28th of July 1540 when the King of England ordered someone to cut off the head of his Chief Minister. Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, earned this honor from no less a King then old Henry VIII. He had been accused of high treason and heresy so a double damnation and was executed without trial via a simple bill of attainder. It was quite a fall for the Lord Great Chamberlain, Governor of the Isle of Wight, Lord Privy Seal, Master of the Rolls, Principal Secretary, and Chancellor of the Exchequer. The poor headsman probably had to swing a dozen times to get it off. 

On this day under dark and rainy skies I cannot help but think that things in England would be far better today if the King was still allowed to chop off the heads of his ministers who failed him in any tiny particular or detail. I'm OK with defenestration but the Russians have been using that method for generations now and it seems a shame to conflate the death of some worthless men with the deaths of some unfortunate souls who failed to keep their peccadilloes secret. One was simply corrupt and the other was merely caught in the act or dispatched for being in the way.

I won't say that things move more smoothly when the Sword of Damocles hangs directly over the heads of men in office who feel they are untouchable and unaccountable but I'd feel a lot better about how things are run if the sword dropped from time to time on the evil ones. Of course, right now, the great unwashed mass steeped in virtue and humility that comes naturally and by the grace of God to liberals and other demons on the left think they have found just the man to drop a sword on. 

England's path has been steadily downhill since the Tudors and the power of the throne faded away. Still, there are many wonderful books written about the times that came after  and about the faded glory that was the Angevin Empire before the Tudors

Still, Charles old buddy, if you need a list of people who would benefit your kingdom by suddenly being a head shorter, I could help you out. 

HARD TO BELIEVE

I notice that my sister sometimes starts a slow Monday on her blog with a photograph of some elegant cup of coffee she just bought somewhere. Me, not so much. On the other hand, the barista handed me this on my out the door at the coffee shop many years ago and it serves very well for my daily needs and rarely shows so much as a hint of foam or swirl of hidden meaning. I'm actually kind of impressed that the thing still transforms to full color even after 9 years when hot liquid is added.

CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC

 This is the whole of the thing that matters today:

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

—Theodore Roosevelt
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

I think that deserves some thoughtful consideration as we contemplate the caliber of the Citizens in this State who are standing up not just for public office but for the very highest office in the land. If you watch this clip then ask yourself, where are the Citizens of the State that you would find equal to the task they are seeking to take on? Why aren't those people running for Senator? Do such even exist?

 I have to admit, the Senate never impressed me very much since it was largely a body of tools and scum but I always had the sense that there were some people there who would belong in a really important branch of our government who had the skills, education, background, gumption and integrity to make this the best possible country for its citizens. Not the best in the world, just a nice place where Americans could be born, educated, work, live, raise a family, aspire and leave their families and their country better off when they moved on.

I'm afraid CSPAN dashed my hopes for that pretty thoroughly although I suppose if I was a stupid moron I wouldn't mind having so many stupid morons running and working in the Senate. All I can say about these four candidates for Maine is that I am sure that the Machine cannot wait to get their hooks into them and have them toe the line for the rest of their lives.  And yes, they amaze me.

THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH

 I wonder if all the voices calling for America to arm itself so that it can be busy and fruitful in the coming war with China have taken note of the power of the Land in resisting a sea power with no particular expeditionary forces to lay claim to. I don't think they have noticed that the impact of virtually unrestrained air war against a supine and defenseless enemy has just about the same outcome against determined enemies as it always did, which is to say, no effect at all.

Let us say that China is 6 times larger than Iran and has some fiendishly dense population centers and infrastructure you could ride to the moon and back and yet those people over, in and around the heart of the old Confederacy, want us to spend trillions of dollars to build a huge powerful navy for the sole purpose of taking on the Chinese. Nobody ever tells them that they are crazy or challenges their idiotic notions and demands. They are forever wrong and yet they persist. They're like picnic wasps and never go away.

Everyday now there is another proposal to occupy some minor slice of Iran with troops. They always want to get their damned boots on the ground so they have a foot in the door so they can demand that we accept their idiotic notion that there can be no withdrawal now without surrender. These buffoons do this over and over again and the boobs in DC always fall for it.

Fortunately, we are the heirs of the most disabling and destructive military policy you did not authorize or approve to hit us since the Army generals gutted the Army after Vietnam and put 100% of the sustainment capabilities and its manpower in the National Guard or Reserve so that the Army would not again be tossed into a rice paddy to sink or swim forever. Nope, you cannot deploy an Army without logistic support and support troops that push forward all the fuel, oil, ammo, food, medical support, engineers and base support. They showed us all exactly how that worked when the Army had to mobilize the Guard and Reserve in order to even think about going into Iraq. The forces could not move forward without the Guard and Reserve and thus the full support of the country.

Well, the admirals and the generals worked hand in hand with the democrats to purge the entire officer corps of the entire US Military of every Expeditionary leader and capability that it had. It demolished the USMC as our premier entry force by taking away all the things that gave the Marines the firepower and sustainment to wade ashore anywhere there was a good beach and take the battle to the enemy. They destroyed and scrapped the Amphibious ships that carried the Marine Task Forces and they completely gutted the frigates that were supposed to be there to provide some protection for the ships at sea. Everything that made the Marine Air Ground Task Force a significant force was deliberately thrown away.

Every admiral was complicit as the amphibious ships got larger and more complex and less survivable and the maintenance backlog was repeatedly deferred for year after year until the existing ships basically fell apart. As you can see here at Navy Times the figures and death wriggling look particularly severe this year.

The report will also help inform the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps’ plans to sustain amphibious ships across their 40 year service life, with hopes of pushing it to 50, to bolster the service’s military readiness. 

The Wasp’s new lease on life is an example of what the Navy and Marine Corps would like to do with other ships, but the services have yet to analyze what exactly that would look like, Meyer said. The Navy’s amphibious fleet has faced numerous issues during its service life. Three Wasp-class amphibious warships encountered engineering problems at sea in 2024, with the USS Wasp itself having a deployment delayed as a result of mechanical failures. 

The fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act signed into law a requirement for the Navy to maintain at least 31 amphibious ships, including 10 amphibious assault ships. The Navy holds an inventory of 32 amphibious warfare ships, but half of the fleet is in poor condition and poorly maintained, according to a 2024 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. 

A defense official told Military Times in August 2025 that the readiness rate of amphibious ships had dropped to 41% despite the Marine Corps previously stating that the amphibious readiness rate needed to remain at 80% or higher to complete missions. 

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said at the 2026 Sea-Air-Space exposition that the current number of amphibious ships is not sufficient enough to meet requirements set forth by combatant commanders. He spoke of extending the service life of ships to help address concerns over lacking fleet size. 

Four amphibious ships are deployed across the globe currently, including the USS Tripoli and USS Boxer, which are stationed in the Middle East in support of Operation Epic Fury.

 One of the amusing things we see as we get longer in the tooth is the constant blather about extending the service life of various classes of warships. If you have been here long enough you know we spent hundreds of millions of dollars extending the life spans and capabilities and the Spruance Class Destroyers and scrapped all of them almost over night after spending all that money. That was roughly the same thing we did when we spent even more money putting our cruisers through a New Threat Upgrade Overhaul and upgrade and then scrapping them days after they came out of the shipyards. 

If you got together with your pals in the Army, Marines, Air Force and Navy and sat down to a good steak dinner and gabfest about how to make absolutely sure that the US would never again be in a position to deploy a regime like Saddam's in the future you would basically adopt every single strategy that the Pentagon adopted over the last 20 years. Hell, they didn't just put things in the Reserve or Guard, they decided that they'd fire all those guys and sell all that capability and rely 100% on contractors to do that sort of thing.

The first LCS, FREEDOM was launched in Marinette, Wisconsin almost 20 years ago today. The Navy brass had given it optimal crew manning which meant it would never be fit to sail in harm's way and then made doubly sure of that by giving it a 57mm gun and nothing else. No missiles at all, no sonar, no torpedoes, no anti-ship, no anti-aircraft and no anti-submarine capabilities AT ALL. Nothing. And then they launched another 34 that were a little like it but no better equipped or manned.

I think Iran's rulers and the various satraps running the military districts of Iran know what our leaders did which means they are not afraid of any expeditionary army coming and laying waste to their country and digging them out of their holes only to bury them all again. They know that they can survive the combined power of the entire world for years and survive just fine and so do the Chinese.

That being so, why are we maintaining this huge standing army and global presence? Whose purpose does any of that serve? This isn't a call for our own withdrawal East of Suez, nope, I'm suggesting we make our withdrawal from East of The Pillars of Hercules. They're all grown ups over there and can run things to suit themselves as they most tyrannically and idiotically do now. Allow them the pleasure of doing it without us.

RIDING THE SCREE

 The backpocket revolution in being was always there in the small towns and cities in the middle east where the lesser muslims lived lives determined by the elite rulers and the differences between crazy and violently insane. The security forces in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia worked overtime to make sure that things stayed peaceful and the shiite followers of the Ayatollahs were kept out of mischief. Sometimes, public order broke down and the security forces had to go to town and even call on the Saudis for some muscular military assistance. That was 20 years ago and I wonder how things are developing in the lands of sunni minority led emirates and kingdoms who have born witness to the fates of those like them who ruled restive masses of shiites and other ne'er-do-wells. It wasn't pretty in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan or even Oman. It's a powder keg the Ayatollahs have been doing everything they could to set alight for over 40 years.

So I wonder, how peacefully do the Kings and Emirs sleep over there in the Gulf tonight. Are the imported natives, restless? You'd never know or find out if you relied on our fake media and the rulers are doing everything in their considerable power to make sure that nobody at all delves into the goings on that don't fare well when exposed to the full light of day.

On the gripping hand, I'm pretty sure that anybody who has been even a minor thorn in the side has been rounded up and locked up for the good of the realm, and a good night's sleep. 

FUN WHILE IT LASTED

 It was Great Satan's Girlfriend and it smoothly captured the zeitgeist of the Endless War era. It was an amusing part of the day that included so many charming blogs it was hard to keep track of them.

THAT SUDDEN RAIN OF FIRE

 I think it was General B.B. Bell who took on the aspect of Commander, United Nations Command, Commander, Combined Forces Command, Commander, United States Forces Korea who came up with the slogan all those guys promptly adopted as their own, if you believe them, that asked, "what if we had to fight tonight!?" He thought it was a wake up call to a combined force of thousands who rotated into and off of the Korean Peninsula every year to prepare to fight the North Koreans.

Oddly enough, as powerful as the message might have been to the Army and the Air Force it had just about no meaning to the United States Navy. It didn't really apply to the naval forces ashore or to the staff in Seoul and there was a reason for that. The U.S. Navy in Korea was not really there to fight a war, it was there to prepare for a war. Every scrap of war fighting naval stuff was located away from the Korean Peninsula with some of it nearby in Japan but the naval forces in Korea filled a role similar to that of the  maître d’ in your fine dining establishment.

It occurs to me that my days on the staff at NAVCENT were never really tortured by inept Admirals coming in and telling us that we needed to be able to fight tonight. We too were akin to the maître d’s. Our role was to plan for the war but the tactical execution of it was going to be, in the first moments of war, totally up to the Battle Group Commanders in the Gulf and those just outside. It never even occurred to us what would happen in the event things got spicier than, say, Praying Mantis which was the last time we waxed Iran's tail in a straight up naval war nobody here ever heard of or knew about.

There wasn't a single ground based missile launcher anywhere and the role of Aegis in defense was probably disposed of when Bahrain declined to punch holes into the last remaining aquifer by dredging the navigation channel to permit Aegis ships to enter the port.  I suspect Aegis would do well enough at Sitrah or even out by the Bahrain Bell.

I'm trying to remember all my ARCENT briefs from JTF A in Cairo but I cannot recall if there were any missile defenses in the Kingdom or anywhere else in the Gulf. I don't think there were. Aegis was about all there was back then except for a handful of Patriot batteries and IHawk batteries. I'm not even sure we were selling that stuff to the Saudis or the Gulf emirates outside of Kuwait.

The long standing difference between the Navy and the other Armed Forces is that the Navy is, on deployment, always prepared to fight at the drop of a hat. It has been that way for a very long time. In areas where armed attacks are a possibility, the ship mans its weapons 24/7 underway and inport. Where the danger is nonexistent the ships are still prepared to fight for their lives because fire is a constant risk and an all consuming hazard that ship's companies fight just about every single day.

As I read the tiny bits that make it out about the Iranian missile attacks on places like NAVCENT Headquarters in Bahrain I wonder if they had any time in the 18 years since the last time I was there, actually taken any steps at all to shore up their air defenses beyond the scope of Aegis in Sitrah. I wonder if the King did either. 

At the end of the day there is still a significant difference between the Army and the Navy's readiness. Unlike Korea where the Army has large tactical formations that should be prepared to fight instantly on warning, the only thing like that in the Middle East might be the Air Defense Artillery and maybe the ATACMS guys if they're still around. 

I wonder if the Commander's of the force formerly known as ARCENT had psychologically prepped their forward deployed forces to be ready to fight tonight. Maintaining a heightened tactical readiness places great demands on manpower and weapons and sensors. Operating sensors from fixed locations in a hostile environment is an invitation to anti-radiation missiles. I wonder how that worked out for them. It seems to be a huge weakness in the Russian air defense forces. The thing is, all the planners around the world know that among the very first targets in a shooting war are the air defense sensors and weapons. How Ground Based Air Defense Systems in a 'non-hostile' neighborhood make the leap to full readiness with fixed sensors is a bit of a mystery.

On the gripping hand, we are moving closer to the "uncommanded sea and skies" mentioned by the great naval strategist, Sir Julian Corbett. A true revolution in military affairs right in front of your eyes. 

HONORABLE DEALING WITH THE ENEMY

 i see some idiots are mad at Vice President Vance because he led the team of negotiators that President Trump dispatched to negotiate an end to hostilities with Iran. They seem to think JD is a buffoon who literally didn't know how stupid this was. I wish they would all dry up and blow away. Things have to happen and they have to be seen to happen and the order is very important.

President Trump knows that his own Party would backstab him on the War Powers Resolution and rather than put it to the test he decided to negotiate in good faith and seek to find a deal that would allow us to end hostilities in Iran and reopen the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping. A man of unquestionable integrity had to lead the negotiators and the negotiators had to be our very best and most importantly, the deal they sought had be one that President Trump could sign and follow through on. That is Step ONE.

It may surprise you to learn that not one single soul at those negotiations had any real reason to believe that any arrangements agreed to would be followed and yet still good men persisted and did try to find a way to bridge the gap between the 7th century and America. Both sides knew beyond any doubt that any treaty or Memorandum of Understanding was doomed from the start because Iran's leaders had broken the country into multiple military regions and appointed fanatics to lead each of them independently and to carry out the final orders of the Ayatollah despite anything coming from Tehran. Some damned fanatic was ALWAYS going to open fire and keep on shooting as long as he had breath in his body and any weapons at all. That's the nature of muslim fanatics.

So there is poor Vice President Vance doing his very best to get a solid treaty agreeable to all parties and knowing it's doomed to failure and sure enough, the damned Iranians opened fire the instant they heard about it and they didn't stop shooting. This neatly abrogated the idiots in Congress who were demanding the President obey them by using the club we call the War Powers Resolution and left President Trump free to carpet bomb the Iranians into oblivion. That, sadly, is what it is going to take. The Peace was there and the Iranians broke it, End of Step TWO. Everyone saw that we did our best for a peaceful ending.

Now the war moves on to the deliberate phase in the Plan and the Air Force and others start destroying each of the targets on the integrated Priority List. One by one or ten by ten, the bridges and tunnels will be destroyed, the power plants or distribution networks, the oil pumping and transfer facilities and the water supplies. Now America pressures the people of Iran to toss the fanatics off the high points and seek peace.

No, I don't think that will work all that well either but it's always nice to think it would. What it looks like we're going to do is shatter Iran. That probably looked like a good idea to some guys working in offices in Tampa but it won't work out as well as they hope. For all that it is a fanatical failed state, it is the last remaining real power in the Middle East. When it shatters it will be torn apart like Lebanon and Syria and it won't be pretty. The only thing that will grown there is fanatical hatred for America and the region already has enough of that.

I just wanted to say that those who think that events have proven JD Vance was naive and gullible are very wrong. He did what he was asked to do, did it in good faith and accomplished something very important. The world, and more importantly, the idiot leftists in America had to see that Peace was attempted and it only failed because Iran proved faithless. That is behind us now.

I think Congress is stupid and vicious enough to try to knock him down with their mighty War Powers Club but they don't seem to understand that is another one of those blindingly stupid weapons that has no real power because the Constitution gives the Executive all the power to defend the country and Congress cannot take it away from him and Trump will prevail if it goes to Court.

But if you like nightmare scenarios, imagine that President Trump loses in Court and Congress does get to "fix" things as they see fit. You know what happened the last time they did that? Yeah, that was what caused the actual fall of the Republic of Vietnam. Congress did that. The Democrats did that. I don't know how any sane person can tell our Gulf allies that they are on their own now against Iran because Schumer and the other poltroons are running things if that happens. 

On that note, did you see how in Hungary the new government threw out the President because he did nothing wrong except was usually found to be in agreement with the previous Prime Minister? These marvelous anti-democratic follies and coup d'etats are getting wonderfully predictable in the 4th Reich.

And finally, I'm really impressed with the savvy cunning and straight dealing we’re seeing from the top echelons of this government. It is such a welcome change from the idiotic and sleazy ministers we had under Obama and Biden. I trust they all have their Presidential Pardons locked up safe because they will sure as Hell need them if JD or Marco don't win the next Presidential elections.

POST WAR WONDERMENT

 You know all those billions of dollars worth of military vehicles and weapons that we left behind in Afghanistan when we lost the war there? It didn't really accomplish very much, did it? Not really worth bringing home when you think about it.

So if the stuff was no good, why was it there?

If the stuff is no good, why do we still have it in our current inventories as frontline combat gear?

Does anybody have the Afghan War version of: On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, by Harry G. Summers? It would make fascinating reading.

A LAUNCH LIKE NO OTHER

 Well, I was sorry to see the fizzle on the pad yesterday as Starship blasted off for the 13th time. It kind of brought back memories long repressed as a young Fire Control Officer, for a missile system that was famous for its own failure to launch. The RIM-7H NATO SEA SPARROW was a wonderment back then and the wonder came from the fact that almost half the time, it never left the rail after committed to launch. You can imagine the disappointment in it if this was one of the 8 air defense missiles you had to shoot at an incoming raid launched by a full regiment of Backfire bombers or the loadout of an Echo-II submarine.

Fingers crossed Starship will do better on the next attempt. 

GIRDING MY LOINS

 Steeling myself, getting ready in all ways and making all overt and obvious preps to sit out going to see The Odyssey in the theater. I know, I know, it will be their loss but I am prepared to make this sacrifice so that they will learn better and maybe even take the lesson home, write it down a thousand times and remember it for the next time. I am sick of directors and film makers making movies that have already been done to death and ignoring all the new things that pop up every day that would make a killer movie. The Odyssey has been done 33 times! I'll admit that I really enjoyed, "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? but I have to admit, that was a fluke.

When the only thing people talk about in your daring "new" movie is your wacky casting, you just may have a problem with your latest. b l o c k b u s t e r. It sounds really dull and boring and everybody knows how it ends anyway.

Anyway, there are hundreds of books and stories that would make great movies because they are entertaining, interesting and even fascinating. Why not make those movies? 

ON REPAIRS

 Some people think that the military and Navy's problem with self repair is that we simply gapped the structural manpower with the necessary training, education and skill to carry out troubleshooting, maintenance and repair of complex everyday systems on our ships and combat vehicles. Sadly, that is part of the problem but it is not the problem. The problem is one of spares and access to them.

One of the sad realities of life starting in the 90s was that we made many fewer same type systems and also decided to save money by not buying or budgeting for spare parts. I'm not kidding. The $ used to procure the actual hardware that was given to the Fleet or the FMF was Procurement $ and those could only be used to purchase an initial allowance of spare parts and even then we cheated outrageously to try to buy as many parts as we could because we in the Program Office knew for a fact that there was no, and never would be, a budget line to buy spares for these new systems.

Spares are essential but they don't happen in the right Congressional District and so they cannot find a sponsor who reliably pokes and prods his peers into seeing to it that enough money is put into spares every year in the out years so that there will always be spares. The system was initially designed to run this way but then the bottom fell out of the Procurement Bonanza and the spares became unreasonably expensive.

There was also the problem that as systems reached their end of service in the Fleet we had Logistics types who maintained warehouses bulging with spare parts for thoroughly obsolete weapons and weapon systems. They were spending good money looking after billions of $ of spare parts for F-14's that left the service a decade or two ago. The stories were common and not unfounded. [Iran was paying good money under the table for those spares! It's not like they were going completely to waste.]

As the LCS hit the fleet the trail of tears spares was just a trickle compared to what was to come. Absolutely nobody put their career on the line to line up invulnerable supplies of critical spares and long lead replacement items for infernally complex ships. They just didn't do it. This is why you see Admirals who seriously decided it was more economical to scrap the brand new but broken and fundamentally useless $500,000,000 ship rather than replace the engines and combiner gear. First, they had no replacement engines and Second, they had no replacement combiner reduction gears. Simplest solution? Shitcan it.

That's the endgame of buying war machines without the tail to support them. We have been doing that now since Vietnam. That's a long time to screw up that badly. How many submarines have we scrapped because we cannot fix them inside of 9 years? How many cruisers went to the bottom because we could not repair them? 

The Admirals always claim they are saving money and that savings will be applied to the follow on new ships and aircraft. That never happens. It never happens because we never 'save' any money by scrapping irreplaceable ships. We simply grind up and spit out existing ships and aircraft much faster than they were designed to last.

On the other hand, I'd say from here, that it looks like the DDG guys all did their jobs very well indeed.  BZ!