SPOT THE TREND EARLY

 We like to imagine ourselves as living in the post-industrial age and like it that way. There is a little tiny drawback to this notion and it defines civilization. A society unable to create and maintain the tools of modern war is quickly displaced by those that do. It is amazing that so many countries that think of themselves as in the First World don't appreciate it to the point that they are truly ignorant of it and if told about it would be violently opposed to any planned action by industry to rearm themselves. OTAN springs to mind

I don't really feel any concern or worry about supplying weapons to other countries. It's an industry and we used to be very good at making high quality weapons that other people wanted to have. We started losing focus after Vietnam and totally lost focus by 1990 when even Congress woke up and started asking both the Defense Department and the Defense Industries, just how much of our weapon systems are made in the United States of America and the answers they did get were not at all reassuring. A vast number of components and sub-assemblies for our weapon systems were coming from the offshored manufacturers we created in China, Vietnam and other prompt 3rd World kind of places that were just starting to industrialize.

When I see Joe Biden boldly (for a soggy Ritz cracker) insubtleate that he is turning off the weapons to Israel if they actually boldly go forth and destroy their enemies (and ours) I'm not consumed with guilt or passion because only morons living on the edge of destruction outsource their arms and ammo production to morons like Joe and the Democratic party lackies. Only an ignorant moron would be ignorant of how the Democrats in Congress voted to terminate all aid to the Republic of South Vietnam after they signed the peace treaty with the communists in the north. Vietnam was gutted by democrats as was most of the rest of world. There is literally nothing so awful that the democrats cannot by either action or inaction make much worse.

I don't worry much about Ukraine both because they had it coming and because there is not and never was anything that we could do about it. Ukraine, a border rethuglic on Russia's border is involved in direct conflict with the x-Soviet Union and to step into a war like that is to invite the immediate repercussions contingent on waging direct war on the Soviet Union. Only a madman would even talk about risking nuclear war by going to bat for Burisma and Joe Biden's criminal enterprises in Ukraine.

But I wonder why Ukraine, home to more than one major nuclear power plant, doesn't have its own manufacturing and factories producing the weapons of war at even so basic a level as ammunition, artillery, artillery ammo and rockets, SAMs and mines? Sure the Russians would/will blow the doors off such factories but there is no sign that Ukraine had any of these things at the outset of a war that anyone could see on the horizon after Russia took back its principal warm water naval base in Crimea and still the thugs in Kiev kept attacking the ethnic Russians living in the industrialized parts of Ukraine facing Russia.

I say this with a bit of hesitation but it looks like even the idiots running things in what's left of Europe have started to awaken and notice that there is nobody left but them. There is no giant shock army of the West to counter even a single Guards Division and they don't operate as single formations unless you count Shock Armies as formations which I suppose old hands who remember the British Army of the Rhine probably do but they're in their 60's and older now and nobody hears them anymore. All of European NATO combined cannot scrape up even one single tank division except Poland and they're probably looking over their shoulders wondering who is standing behind them. I can't even imagine us loading up the 2nd Armored or First Infantry and sending it via strategic sealift to ports on the continent in less than 4 months.

I think that the clowns running things here might have started to notice that they made a terrible mistake about 20 years ago that there is no recovery from. They let in actively encouraged angry, ignorant, anti-American haters to enlist in the U.S. military and even sent them to West Point where the increasingly radical and hate-America professors and instructors have destroyed most of the underpinnings of Service to the State that used to be a calling for men like Eisenhower, Patton, Grant, Lee, Marshall and a hundred thousand others.

Technical means of war are complex but they can be reduced to ruin by a match. We used to trust but verify (see my leadership notes) but I don't really think there is any trust anymore. I remember the no-lone zones and those were ONLY the nuclear weapons spaces on ships. Then, after Walker we got the Two Person Integrity for Cryptographic Communication Materials so another no-lone zone. In the Gulf some of us without girls onboard laughed at our counterparts wearing khaki that would tell use about the roving sex patrols (boy/girl) that roamed the topside spaces after dark and the rest of the ship in pairs trying to keep the human reproduction opportunities as limited as possible. They still haven't quite grasped that the system simply does not work in the cold light of reality.

These days I wonder if Sounding and Security Watches stand watch in pairs and never proceed to open the access to a space like lower sound unless there is another person with them. Who escorts who in the main engineering spaces? Or the Auxiliary engineering spaces with little things like the ship's steering gear, fire pumps, emergency diesels and switchboards.....

The USS Boxer has returned to San Diego shortly before deployment to the Western Pacific because a 'rudder bearing' failed. I never heard of that but at least it wasn't on fire.

Who knows? 致命的時刻