TIME TO CONSIDER OUR OWN EAST OF SUEZ MOMENT

 In January of 1968 the greatly faded British Empire withdrew from its installations east of Suez. It basically consigned the whole half of the world over there to its own devices. I'm not one to prognosticate but I suspect that now would be an excellent time for the United States to withdraw from east of Suez. It is by and large a really crappy place that is best left to its own devices and none of it has really mattered very much to us since OPEC reared its nasty head and embargoed the United States over Israel or some other stupid matter that doesn't affect 99.9% of Americans.

The British skedaddled just as things started to heat up in their former Empire and their Mandates and we at least can pull out unburdened by any guilt over starting something we cannot finish. That whole collapse and then rebirth of the Indian subcontinent had nothing to do with us outside the very fine work and science of Doctor Norman Borlaug. He merely did his best to provide food for a world undergoing a population explosion and what happened in Africa is probably best explained by Professor Ali A. Mazrui . I've referenced both before and they play a large part in understanding the world that lies beyond Suez which is kind of a mystery to, again, 99% of Americans. Remember, we're talking about people incensed to the point of suicide about nonsense such as "From the River to the Sea" and the stupid morons don't know the name of the river or the name of the Sea and couldn't find either on a map of the world.

Reading that Americans have now been killed by drones and missiles targeted on them directly is really irritating because it has not been met with the proper and only response and it needs to be or it really is time to leave East of Suez to those east of the canal and walk/sail away.

The Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, North Arabian Sea, Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean and everything up to the Strait of Malacca can be factored out by its net contributions to the United States and sadly it amounts to roughly zero. There is little net value in trade with China through the the Indian Ocean and we get only a pittance of our energy needs from that region and it can all come overland in the form of pipelines to Yanbu or even through Israel. If the Saudi King doesn't want to contest with Yemen anymore over the freedoms of navigation that the world presumes its owed, so be it. 

If the Gulf Emirates want to pretend that we got their back despite laying a world of hurt and disdain on US, we don't really care about them anymore than we care about Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran and we really truly do not care about them. Not one or all of them is in any way shape or form any kind of Vital Interest to the United States or its people. Our trade with them is negligible and certainly not worth another 2 trillion dollars and 6000 lives. On the other hand, if they feel it is that important, let them fight for it.

I cannot off the top of my head think of any meaningful trade we have with India or Africa that requires passage through the contested waters east of Suez. Send them around the Cape if they're that good since the incremental cost of a couple of extra days steaming and crews wages adds maybe 1 penny/1000 tons.  I think we can suck that up without noticing and far more easily than what Bidenomics and the neocons have done to our economy.

In Political/Military terms we don't actually much care what the fallout from any military affairs are likely to be over there. Consider, the Suez Canal was closed from 1967 until the U.S. led clearance operations in 1975. We really don't need the Suez Canal anymore. If India and Pakistan want to wage the first nuclear war since 1945 there isn't all that much we could contribute so there's not much point in being there for it and ditto any Pakistan-Iran nuclear war. Let them sort it out and we'll regret that they both can't lose. There is no love in America for any of them and it is much to obvious that this isn't due to any racism which only exists in major universities and DIE heads. Ukraine and Russia prove every single day that the world cared more about Bosnians then they do about Ukrainians and didn't care very much at all for Bosnians.

The smoking radio-active remains of any of the countries that try to destroy Israel are best left to the tender mercies of the Israelis. If there is to be an Armageddon they can start and finish it without us.

I can see why the British pulled back east of Suez. Like us they were terminally broke and they had nowhere near the military or navy to remain significant anywhere beyond home-waters. We've reached that point and there is no use kicking about it. 25 years of utterly wasteful and ruinous military and naval policy has left both the Army and Navy in ruins. The War in Ukraine has burned through our ammo stocks and right now I'm reading that the principal manufacturer of American weapons is laying workers off.

It is well known that one best prepares for war in peacetime. We did that richly ever since the end of Vietnam but pissed it all away over the last 30 years. We went from roughly a 600 combatant ship navy down to roughly:

one can gain an appreciation for the level of desperation here in that they list USS Constitution as a warship on active service which isn't bad for a sail powered all gun ship built in 1797. Even so it probably has more actual value than all of the LCS vessels combined and has repeatedly engaged in naval combat.

One may also safely set aside the various amphibious ship types shown above since they are about as relevant to modern warfare as the USS Constitution. If any of these were to show up in contested waters they would last roughly as long as it takes to sink after enormous holes are blown in the hull and out of control fires rage through the ship. You know what the next to last survivor says to the other one as they slip under the surface? "At least the fires are out." 

The Sea Control ships come to a total of about 98 and at any given time about a third are not available at all which leaves around 60 to fight the next major maritime war with the help of a couple dozen submarines.

I think it would be interesting to see what would happen. Maritime commerce would stop dead in the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, North Arabian Sea, Gulf of Aden and western Indian Ocean. It would see a return of great interest in the Northern Passage, nuclear powered ice breakers and ships built to carry 20,000 TEU through the Roaring 40s.

On the gripping hand, I suspect most shipping will head West out of Europe and the Med and East out India and the Madagascar vanilla beans will have to make their own way to market. It's going to be the death of transfer ports like Khor Fakkan and Fujairah.

WHY? IT ASKED

 I keep reading various articles about the various so-called AI systems that have been trained/taught to lie and obfuscate the truth. Why would anybody waste the time and money to build a machine that just lies to you? Isn't that what we have the media for?

OBSERVABLE REALITY

 Have you noticed how literally every other violence torn hellhole on the planet has had refugees flood out of it and into the West, into France and Germany and Turkey and Sweden but for some reason unknown to the media and intelligentsia, there are ZERO refugees fleeing Gaza? 

What is it about them specifically that makes them so untouchable? Ask the Jordanians, the Kuwaitis, the Egyptians, the handful of remaining Lebanese, the Libyans even. They know. So do the rest of us.

SEARCH OUT THE WORLD AS IT REALLY IS

I caught some of the silliness that is PBS Newshour and they had a lengthy segment where they let some Palestianian 'academic', 'woman' rave about the Egyptian? Peace Proposal that would simply see Hamas fixed in place as overall Terrorists-in-Charge in both Gaza and the West Bank and also see the 'phased release of the surviving kidnapped Israelis in exchange for violent terrorists and killers currently locked up in Israeli jails and of course this is the proposal that needs to be talked about and not simply dismissed. There's more than a hint of unreality to it. 

 Last night I got to listen to someone say of Elon Musk that he has no understanding of what damage he is doing to Earth's orbitals with his dangerous Starlink scheme. I did try to point out that the satellites are all scheduled to burn up in the deeper atmosphere in no more than 5 years after deploying and there was much scoffing. "They'll be up there in orbit for hundreds of years." Pointing out that the science is simple and that the satellites are all low enough that they are already experiencing atmospheric drag was dismissed out of hand.

"Satellites accidentally collide and create huge amounts of tiny debris!" Well, not so much really.

ROUGH TRADE

 I see that the cretins running West Hollywood are said to have voted to disband their police force and replaced them with Safety Observers or some such lunacy. It would be nice to think that this means that West Hollywood is now one of those places utterly lost to justice and the law but I don't really think it means that at all because otherwise it would mean that there is nothing but morality and conscience to keep a man from simply shooting and killing thieves, rapists, murderers, child molesters and other criminals that come to the attention of an armed man in a lawless place and I know very well that if someone were to just shoot any of those criminals the law would be all over the place finding them guilty and treating them like Republicans loose in the Capital.

A NOTE ON SEALS

 You might have missed the little blurb some errant folks added to the news cycle about a pair of US Navy SEALS that were lost overboard while boarding a dhow in the Red Sea. It seems that two of the men famous around the world for being very nearly drown-proof fell into the Red Sea and vanished. 3 ships and some aircraft supposedly searched 21,000 square miles of Red Sea and couldn't find these two men.

Think about it. Even a non-compliant boarding of a dhow wouldn't be done at speeds exceeding 5-10 knots and the place the men entered the water would be known to within feet simply from the gps/time marker for when they went in which means that their position in the water would be known to within 20 feet. There really isn't that much of a current in the Red Sea so if we accept that the very first priority of the boarding crew/party was the safety of the men in the water the question begging to be answered is how did we lose them?

There is more to the story then what CENTCOM has dribbled out over the last 10 days and consider that nobody heard about it until days after the event happened.

LET’S DELVE INTO HISTORY

 This latest burst of dignification amuses me again. “Let’s turn to the history of the native Americans as so richly and convincingly written and monumented by the happy peaceful pastoralists who inhabited the Americas before the dawn of recorded history.” Oh? Not recorded? Unwritten? No actual history as such? Well OK, let’s play pretend and fake it. Nope? That isn’t allowed anymore under the new rules for entirely undocumented and unwritten history? OK, we’ll just cover it up and hope this embarrassing period of making shit up doesn’t come back to bite us on the ass.

You know what can safely be said about the history of North America right up until the Spanish and The Church arrived 400 years ago? That’s right! Any damned thing you want because it doesn’t exist except as an outgrowth of some rather unusual ideas of “science.” It was all anthropology right up until the fakers got involved. You know, like dinosaurs and apemen. 

Did you see the BOLO for Dr. Richard Leakey? That’s right, Lucy’s descendants want her back and him charged with kidnapping.

The endless caving in to the demands of the sullen stupid and ignorant has to stop sometime. Why not now?

THEY'RE BLIND AND DON'T KNOW IT

 Watching DW as they moan about the AfD getting 22% of the popular vote and they are interviewing all these left wing and communists in government who moan about how the AfD party is "undermining democracy so we have to ban it." You really want to slap the snot out of them and then throw them very far out in the Atlantic.

UPON REFLECTION

 As I mulled over what I wrote yesterday it slowly dawned on me, again, that some of the players are a lot smarter than I am and certainly far more steeped in evil. What the 'traitors' on the Supreme Court did does not square with what is said that they did. In other words, they handed a MOAB to the Administration, to the FBI, HLS and other scumbags and let them play around with it at the office. 

The ruling of the Court doesn't really change a single thing on the border that Texas is doing today. It literally doesn't mean a thing. It certainly looks like it does but when you boil it down, all that the Court did by a simple majority vote from a couple of really smart (scary smart) people and the cretins appointed by the Democrats, was unite the bulk of the States and the Nation against the criminal enterprise of Biden, HLS and the other government vermin.

IN AN ELECTION YEAR.

I'm not sure about Roberts and there may be some truth to the rumors that he is owned by some mysterious and evil force very much like the one that owns the media (all of it) and most of the wealth of this country and many of the rest of the countries on the planet.

THIS IS WAR NOW

 The Supreme Court has spoken and now the State of Texas has spoken. Biden and his clowns in the Pentagon will be thinking now of sending in the 101st Airborne but at this point I'm not sure they will follow clearly illegal orders to invade Texas. However, if you want to see the Army come apart at the seems just try to order them to make war on Texas. If this is starting to look a little bit like Fort Sumter in reverse you know your history.

 

The truly sad thing about all this is that the people in Washington and the intelligentsia around the world don't know the history or the law and really do believe that they are in the right and they get to use the Army and the F-16s on the People anytime the people get uppity.

A HUGO NOTE FORLORN

 The people running the world of acceptable science fiction voted to let the chinese communist party run the Hugo Awards for the year 2023 and so they did. They ran it into the clearly foreseeable ditch that comes up whenever censors and party leaders are allowed to run the "vote" and it worked out for them about as well as it did when they torpedoed their own awards back in 2015. I and a number of other people who watched the publishers of science fiction run their own awards into the muck are all laughing at them today and they are standing around brushing the muck off and demanding to know how this happened to them when they were such fine upstanding global citizens who simply accepted that the Chinese are just like us!!!!!

The really truly funny bit? The same collection of low-to dimwits are seriously considering having Uganda host their next Hugo Award ceremony and mind you, these are the same people that are not only baffled by elevators but incapable of accepting any flaws in their reality and they really do think everywhere is just like Manhattan, NYC, NY and San Francisco, CA.

Most of us wrote them off long ago as simply too serious for us. They neatly defined their own category.

AGAIN IT IS TO LAUGH

This is old news to some but I get my news from the new york times lies and it just punctured my email to leave me face to face with the usual warped and skewed flavor of news that is presented by the various lowlifes and mutants running that asylum from reality.

Seriously, they have only the loosest attachment to reality. How do they get around? They refer to this thing as a two-person contest. Idiots.

A GOOD READ FOR BLEAK TIMES

If you haven't read about the impact of total collapse before, The Dark Herald amply and ably calls it forth in his monograph on what was good about the Black Plague. He is an everyday read around these parts.

And a good movie to watch is The Map of Tiny Perfect Things.

FAILURE TO OBSERVE FOLIAGE ON ACCOUNT TREES

 The author of this piece about the Alberta cold front fails to recall one other significant possible outcome other than freezing to death the next time the cold dark night saps all the power from the electrical grid and Albertans find themselves freezing to death in their homes. Yes gentle reader, there is always the mandatory evacuation of all of Alberta. I see this as the Canadian government's next step in its glorious path to social redemption and destruction of all things Canadian.

As our readers know, the Canadians have already pioneered this new Climate Gonna Kill You All forced evacuation last summer as fire roared through the well kept forests and prairies. I wonder if the United States is going to set up machine guns and clear fields of fire to keep those pesky and dangerous Canadians out. I hear they're cannibals!

RIGHT ABOUT NOW

 A few naval mines in the Strait of Hormuz would certainly add spice to the placid and peaceful earth we have all come to inhabit under the relentless and persistent leadership of Biden and Austin and not to mention the sure and steady hand of Harris. 

Admittedly, I always thought they'd see if they could do it and trap a couple of Battle Groups up in the Persian Gulf but nothing says, "Welcome to the BRICS" quite like a little peaceful mine countermeasures under a deep cerulean sky. 

On the gripping hand I suspect our Mine Countermeasures ships have enjoyed the same love, affection and careful attention to maintenance and repairs that our Amphibious ships and submarines have enjoyed at the tender hands of a merciful, talented and resourceful Supervisor of Ship Repair and Construction.

Do you at all get the sense that the people at the top ever figured out that War is a Come As You Are feature and not something you get to schedule a few years out when you're good and ready for it?

KIND OF DEFINES US TODAY

I was reading a blurb update about the decision by NASA to shove the next manned moonshot to the right in order to accomplish some needful things. Here are the ones that struck me hardest and most cruelly:

 I'm afraid that this is what struck me as the refined essence of our shiny old bureaucratic State. Weep for the NASA that used to be.

Yes, your attention is invited to the. bottom right side of the NASA webpage where Brian is listed as the "Responsible NASA Official." I wonder if he knows?

Why it's important? Nothing at all happens in a place like NASA where the first and foremost effort of every single bureaucrat is to avoid being held accountable. Poor Brian obviously lost out and God help him if there is a spelling or syntax error on the NASA webpage. He could be fired!

Someone should probably give Koerner a nudge to see if she is still alive. Nothing NASA is doing is now or in the immediate future involves "first-time capabilities or operations." This is building a rocket which we have been doing for over a century now and filling it with rocket fuel and sending it to the Moon which we started doing over 60 years ago! NASA's problems are identical to Boeing's. They took all of the Engineers out of the loop and put bureaucrats in charge of literally every single thing from picking the color of the rocket ship to approving the outward facing corporate web page. In Boeing this results in crashes and great loss of life. In NASA it results in not very much happening decade after decade after decade as it coasts on wrapped in long vanished glory.

MORE ON SECDEF

It has long been true that those who fail in any way to be missed by anyone when they are not around are usually of little or no use to anyone. I think that sums up our idiot and counter productive Defense secretary perfectly.YMMV

YOUR ACTUAL DRONE WAR

 Found this on X posted by John Ringo. A little show from 6 years ago. Interesting take on future developments.

LAUGHINGLY CONTEMPTIBLE BUT EXPECTED

 News finally picks up on fact that Secretary of Defense was admitted to hospital on or around New Years and the nose-picking Army didn't bother to inform the Press! You can imagine their shock after all those years of waiting for the tools in the Pentagon to keep the Press fully informed about every little minute detail such as the latest in Army uniform policy, the Press just knew the Army would burst out with the news instantly if the X running the Ministry of Infernal Aggression checked into the hospital for a week or two.

On the other hand it's hard not to laugh out loud. There hasn't really been any meaningful participation in government by President Biden for at least the last 13 years and Congress bleats about the malperformance of the Homeland Security Tsar and head of the Coast Guard, and of course the Secretary of Transportation just took himself off duty for a year or two to raise infants he and his husband found somewhere, no doubt by the side of one of those racist roads he is so concerned about, and nobody noticed as much of the transportation network just collapsed under the idiocy of our COVID response.

I used to suspect that most things would go much better for all concerned if the wingnuts in the Pentagon and Norfolk and Florida just took the year off and let the people who know what they're doing simply get on with business without the constant and stupid and bothersome interruptions. I'm pretty sure nobody in OSD really noticed that Austin was MIA and nobody cared either.

I wonder what happened to the reporters of old who had informed sources in every nook and cranny of the government, sports, industry, banking, gambling and even the Families who would pick up the phone and call with news and facts. Nowadays it seems that reporters only sit in padded chairs and wait for the Departmental Spokesmoron to read from the prepared brief and walk away without answering any impertinent but germane questions.

Remember these clowns? You might call them obsessive but the rest of us thought they missed the boat, the train, the plane or anything moving faster than Joe Biden when it comes to finding real news.

 

NOT SHINY BUT VERY GOOD

 There is a group out there that I really enjoy. I don't know if I want them to enter a professional studio and make their music there and release it on an album or not. I'm thinking mostly not. They sound pretty good in the wild and that surely is good enough. 

CONSIDER THE NEWS AS PRESENTED

 I'm reading some interesting things but one that leapt out at me was that Israel was in serious danger of sparking a war with Hezbollah. When you think about it, that is simply the acceptance by the West that the State of Lebanon is no more. That is pretty much true but nobody has been willing to openly say that for decades. That was exactly what the PLO tried to do in Jordan until they screwed up and tried to assassinate the King and got themselves violently expelled. Same thing happened in Kuwait when the Palestinians celebrated Saddam's triumph over Kuwait. Within days of kicking out the Iraqis, every single Palestinian was expelled from Kuwait. 

I look with awe as the so-called Houthi rebels have practiced Sea Denial without even a shred of a Navy and now shipping lines and companies galore are simply avoiding the Suez Canal and the Red Sea and instead just opting to sail their ships around Africa. That's a big deal to some folks you'd least expect. I liked this quote from The European Institute for the Mediterranean.

 "Impact on the gross domestic product and national income: Suez Canal revenues are considered the third source of Egypt's national income behind overseas labour remittances and the tourism sector. It represents almost 5% of the GNP and 10% of GDP and is one of Egypt's most important sources of hard currency."

The Canal revenue represents a minimum of 10% of Egypt's GDP. The increase in prices of oil and other imports from the Persian Gulf is going to most negatively impact Europe (again) and will have just about zero consequences for the United States since we import very little from the Middle East and of course, it goes without saying, we export almost nothing through the Suez Canal to either the Middle East or India.

Our moron-in-chief and his sycophants are trembling at the notion of simply doing anything except ignoring the ongoing developments and so far their attempts to restore the international shipping lane appears to amount to nothing. It's really kind of pathetic seeing the US defeated at sea again by a country that doesn't even have a navy. 

It is however another splendid opportunity for the countries that are being negatively impacted by a bunch of rebel islamic-rage-fueled haters to step up to the plate and take a few swings of their own in order to settle their grievances without much of the way of support militarily or financially from the United States of America.

On the other hand, the Suez Canal has been closed many times since its grand opening so this is by no means unique. I don't think people care anymore about it this time then they did the last time. I suspect 90% of people aged 18-35 don't even know where it is.

I see further, that the media is angsty about Israel withdrawing 7000 troops from Gaza and the usual sources are all kicking in about how this is in response to US pressure to reduce the footprint in Gaza but I think the real reason might be that the IDF has finally kicked its moribund intel services into action and they are feeding them reports about Hezbollah getting ready to rain down fire on all of Israel. We'll see.

THE WAKE UP CALL

 Well it looks like the Wall Street Journal has finally figured it out.  This shouldn't come as a surprise since the facts have been available now for about 20 years and the facts in this case don't lie. It takes too long and too many parts to make modern anti-missiles or even missiles in the West. The article details some of why that is so and then blathers into the supply chains nonsense as if that was something totally new and unexpected and nobody saw that coming which is nonsense. The Army knew the wheels were coming off when they turned to industry for competition in their fuzes. They had to since the last American business making them announced that it wasn't going to make them anymore decades ago.

We were ordered by Congress to report how much of our Weapon System was made from non-American parts and specifically by the Chinese IIRC. It was a staggering amount of components and subcomponents and not really much of a surprise to us but some of the other Program Managers at SPAWAR were apparently surprised by how much of the final product originated in China.

Simply looking for 'known' compatible computers was hard to do and I was looking for Microsoft computers that weren't more than 2 or 3 years old. My sister (Air Force) had a good friend involved in the Space Shuttle Program and they were literally scratching into the dirt trying to find old computers and components that were identical to the gear originally flight certified for the Shuttles to use for maintenance and replacement. If anyone had at the time stockpiled some components, they were long gone by the time her friend was ordered to find them.

I remember the old Navy well. I was in a shipyard undergoing a dry dock during the course of which a couple of old propeller shafts from one of the D type Mine Sweepers were found and shipped to us and a single guy from Columbia Machine Products up in Oregon supervised their installation and alignment. These old shafts had been pulled from the Dash, Dominant or Detector long ago when the ships were decommissioned and before they were scrapped and then stored perfectly so that even decades later they were still true/round and worked perfectly once installed.

It does kind of make you wonder how many of those Minutemen sitting in silos dotted around the country will actually fly true and hit their targets if launched. It also makes me wonder about one of my old colleagues in SPAWAR who was a USNR Supply Corps Captain who would spend his 2 weeks of Annual Training every year working in the Ammo Shop at CINPAC going over the ammunition inventory reports. I sense that our 'burn rate' for exercises and training was probably just barely being replaced by new materials every year and that there is no way in Hell to spool up the production of any large caliber or missile ammunition without DoD and the Government paying for it upfront because they have a long history of burning industry.

Welcome all to 2024! May it be peaceful and friendly all year.