I really enjoyed this poem. It is incredibly evocative. On the other hand, can't you picture the captains and crews of the boats now burned and kicking the rocks up on the beach in a fit of fury because they sure as hell hadn't signed on to be infantry in the Conquest of Mexico. I find it odd that so many dyed-in-the-wool liberal/progs are always eager to join in chanting, "follow your dream!" but never stop and consider the dreams of men like Cortez.
Certain parts of the world, the less important parts, seem to be going up in flames these days and that is probably largely due to the incomparable incompetence of the people that secretly run the government of the United States of America. They act like Neocons most of the time but then cannot seem to pull the US into any of their very carefully stage-managed war opportunities. So far their incompetence and idiocy has resulted in the strange case of vaunted Israel and its IDF failing in a soul-searing way to notice 2000 Hamas terrorists practicing and bleating about launching an attack on a suddenly and strangely completely defenseless and supine Israel. Strike One.
The PTB encouraged the vicious and idiotic madmen of Yemen to attack EVERYTHING in the Red Sea and North Arabian Sea and strike with abandon and without warning. So they did and yet the United States failed to dither and shilly-shally and send $200,000,000 of Tomahawk missiles into Yemen, (oh wait, yeah they did that) but anyway they didn't start launching Alfa Strikes off the carrier battle groups and bombing helpless innocent womens, childrens, hospitals and schools (all that they have or build in arab lands) and so we refrained from War by despicably not doing it, again! Strike Two.
You all know the big one is raging in a radioactive dumping ground and seething mass of corruption known as Ukraine. It has pretty girls and stupid men and it spent most of every day of its independent existence doing its lackadaisical incompetent but nazi inspired best to harass the ethnic Russians living there into picking up their crap and moving back to Russia. This worked so well that Russia decided to reclaim the only important bit of independent Ukraine and take back the massive naval base and Crimean Peninsula. The PTB were incensed and have been trying their very best to whip up a brisk little (always good for business) war between the pathetic gas station with a bomb known as Russia and the devastating might of NATO or OTAN as the frogs like to call it. Somehow the indifference of Americans to this blighted the neocons best efforts to whip up a war frenzy and so we are sunk, nay, mired in peace. Strike Three.
It's not going well for the neocons here on the home front either. The People United just don't seem interested in voting for the brain dead incompetent sleaze bag personally selected by Soros and the other leaders of the degenerate left and that leaves us with some lingering feeling of optimism that we will no doubt see dashed when we learn that the 27.8 million voters in Detroit were able to swing the state Democrat again and likewise the 201,000,000 voters in Philadelphia that do that same thing for Pennsylvania. We will see the same astronimical and unbelievable numbers of votes pouring out of the scuppers in Baltimore, Minneapolis and other strongholds of gibbering stupidity.
And yes dear reader, astronimical is my new word of the day.
I spotted this somewhere in the blogroll in the last couple of days. It struck a chord that resonates with me. Watching one of the many videos available reflecting on our dismal armed forces recruiting numbers also made me think of end of times Western Roman Empire when they literally could not find any citizens of Rome willing to fight for it anymore. One of them made the point that it was the behavior and actions of the governments of Rome that decided its fate. They simply ran out of citizens willing to fight in order to continue the dismal State. I think the liberals have done that all over the West in spades. Nobody at all speaks of joining up to preserve our way of life or to expand our writ of civilization. Nope. It never even comes up.
I'm from the tail end of the Baby Boom here in the US and I think that is reflected in my world view which shares little resemblance to the Boom's follow-on generations. What we had was a world that was more or less fixed in the Pax America and we have almost no experience with global flux. The world is now all flux and ripe for the toppling of empires and with it the end of Pax America. In other words dammit, interesting times.
I was just reading about a 'functional military-dominated oligarchy' and the first response to that idea was, "functional, I mean art, literature, science industry.....They don't usually function well under a junta."
Left to my own devices and history I would have to say that a large part of the rest of the world seems to functioning rather well under that regime and all those aspects of higher civilization are turning to shit under the new liberal order of the West where the art and literature suck so bad it's not worth looking at and where industry and science are not just dead and moribund but are having active warfare waged against them at every level not just by activists and courts but now by every level of government.
This is not the West that the Baby Boom grew up with but rather the one that it created. What that suddenly meant to me was the endless possibilities for growth in decent, nice enjoyable art, literature and science as it existed between The Great War and 1939 before the Avant-garde and modernism. What an awesome time to be young and alive! Just think! There's a whole bunch of young Hemingways getting ready to drive ambulances in the coming wars as the old states collapse and make way for the rise of new States and then they'll start writing books and making good movies again. OK, it's a dream.
Everything we know from our own experience is on its way out and what the new world will bring is a great deal of pain and suffering but perhaps something new along the lines of the Industrial Revolution. Something that reshapes the whole world in a way that the Digital revolution didn't even begin to touch. It will be interesting to see the spin-off effects of the Wizard War but I probably won't be around for that.
I'd recommend to my readers, A Small Colonial War because it really captures the essence we see as the world suddenly discovers the secrets to waging war with small, cheap and thoroughly expendable robots. There are also small, cheap and thoroughly effective means of removing populations now on a scale that nobody dreamed about. Thank you all you liberal progressives who paved the way for the Zombie Apocalypse and the new way of total war. It'll give 'annihilation' a whole new spin.
On the gripping hand there is the wonder that was The Diamond Age. That's also a fascinating read. Both branches of potential new futures involve significant departures from the current Pax. To be honest, I did not think that the highest echelons of the United States would be so complicit in bringing about its destruction. It's a little mind boggling to read serious articles from places like Forbes that tell us that the US only has a $35 trillion debt. Honesty is lost on those people.
You ever wonder why Elon Musk is so eager to set up some patches of humanity on Mars?
Putin has been doing everything but dragging naked women along the border with Ukraine trying to induce them into crossing the actual Russian frontier in some sort of ground invasion since the war began and the idiots in Kiev finally fell into the trap. All along Putin has been telling the Russians that the Ukraine NAZI regime/war party was a menace and active danger to the Rodina and they just made his point blindingly clear. Voila! A masterpiece of cunning trickery that sort of calls to mind the beginning of Red Storm Rising when you think about it.
Look at it. Just look at it. 2 countries locked in a gritty murderous war for 2 years and the frontier a couple dozen miles from the active military front is guarded by police and border guards. That's it. There is no combat capability to be seen within 50 miles of the border with an enemy power. Is that truly the way you think warring nations behave?
No. It was a trap and the Ukrainians were stupid enough to fall for it or a second or third level of deception was launched. Changing gear….Consider the High Command is given impossible orders and conditions. In the East they are going to die in place because there is no retreat. In the West the invaders can be lashed with a simple spoiling attack that will consume the lion's share of the resources left to the War Machine which will bring the enemy closer and faster to Berlin than if the resources had been husbanded and used in building up impregnable defenses that would slow the Allies. But what officer of the High Command could fail to see that the Soviets were going to destroy Germany while it was still possible to bargain some sort of surrender with the US and UK. If, OTOH, he wasted the resources then the war would end sooner and the Russians would not get all of Germany as its due.
Likewise, the top echelon in Kiev High Command might have looked at launching a similar spoiling attack into Russia and leaving the Donbass virtually undefendable which could bring about a far more speedy end to the conflict.
What would you do?
War is supposed to be all about deception and deceit. It's a great pity Liberals ever got the idea that they were better at it then anybody else in history. Ever.
Kind of makes you think about how Roosevelt left our entire Pacific Fleet Battle Line exposed all the way out there in the middle of nowhere doesn't it?
Looking at the general readiness of all our military equipment that is/was allegedly front line service ready and which took months to bring up to mission capable let alone fully mission capable status, aren't you glad that nuclear weapons are not front line weapon systems and therefore probably something like less than 10% of them will actually, you know, work? You do know that Starliner is not a fluke, right? SpaceX is a fluke but Boeing is industry standard these days and the standard is jarringly low.
Enjoy the weekend.
When you do think about it, SpaceX is a privately owned Orbital Bombardment System. The New Dawn missions will reveal how far above the equator his orbital reach can target.
No no. What was I thinking. That's like imagining that all the Secret Master's of the Web would suddenly turn into lock-step fascists who want to control all things digital and even in real life......
Would you be so sanguine about it if George Soros controlled something along the lines of SpaceX?
There was much enjoyment and anticipation in reading the books I liked as a youngster and seeing them rack up awards or at least show up in the column of books likely to receive an award but the people that ran the awards changed over the years into a tiny clique of like-minded degenerates and the awards lost all meaning to me long before they were challenged by the Sad & Rabid puppies. Their campaigns were fun to watch, doomed to failure and led to the complete trivialization of all awards in that genre. Hell, they even tried to change the names because they suddenly found themselves too woke to tolerate the foibles of men and women long dead.
I thought it was interesting when the degenerates all suddenly decided to hold their next round of award proclamizing in one of the last Totalitarian States that still matters north of the Equator. Yes, they decided that the thing for a bunch of supposedly future looking individuals was to hie off to Red China and vote for the best works in the genre. They had of course, to weed out all those that their hosts felt were unworthy and so they did without fanfare or actually telling anyone. It was a disaster.
The decided to hold their next great awards meeting in an almost English Speaking Country that very few Americans can find on a map, on account of its not on most maps and this time the awards judges didn't winnow through the authors and throw them out. Nope, they winnowed through the votes and tossed out over 300 votes as somehow 'unworthy'. So, nothing really new.
What stabbed me in the eye and left me with a headache though was when I realized just a couple of hours ago that I so failed to pay attention to the stupid awards that I didn't even know what book 'won' this years accolades for best Science Fiction Novel of the Year. So I looked. God help me, I looked.
If you're interested you can see what the real book with that title was about here.
Some Desperate Glory is the diary of a British officer (Edwin Campion Vaughan), written during the first eight months of 1917 while he was deployed near the Cambrai sector and then moved up in late July to Ypres at the start of the Battle of Passchendaele. The diary was published posthumously in 1981 by Henry Holt and Company. Writing in the Wall Street Journal in 2006, James J. Cramer cites Some Desperate Glory as one of the five best books on war: “Vaughan describes the screams of the wounded who had sought refuge in the freshly gouged holes only to find themselves slowly drowning as rain fell and the water level rose. A relentlessly stark account of the war's bloodiest, most futile battle.”[1] Vaughan ended his diary on August 28, reflecting the futility of Passchendaele with: " So this was the end of 'D' Company. Feeling sick and lonely, I returned to my tent to write out my casualty report; but instead I sat on the floor and drank whisky after whisky as I gazed into a black and empty future."[2]
While playing cards last night I mentioned that while I read an enormous amount of history I had never read much of anything about the history of Central and Eastern Europe. As I turned my attention that way during the night I can see why I must have initially resisted the idea of reading too much about it. Yes, a good deal of my reluctance comes from early years in education when the school libraries still contained massive amounts of first hand documentation about the Holocaust and the war in the East. I didn't want to read that.
Having done a little more reading and remembering too the ethnic cleansing of all Germans out of all Europe lying to the East of the Soviet Zone I don't wonder that anyone familiar with the history is rabid in their efforts to control it and stuff any ethnic discussions of European boundaries and hate into a bag and then drown it. The current unpleasantness in Ukraine is raising the ghosts that the apparatchiks running the EU thought they had buried with the founding of the EU. I think they were both wrong and misguided.
It does give one a real appreciation for how almost all History has been erased from American education. The socialists running public education want the little kids to feel sympathy only for the victims that the socialists want them to see and know anything about. They stamped out EVERYTHING having to do with the history of Eastern and Central Europe. It was never taught to me at any of the 8 schools I attended. The entire subject never came up at all in school systems ranging from Leavenworth, Kansas, Newport, Rhode Island, Huntsville, Alabama or any schools in between.
That's here in America. I suspect that the kids educated in Poland, Estonia, Russia and all the counties in Central and Eastern Europe outside the original NATO boundaries studied a lot of the history of the last century in their neighborhood and perhaps even the centuries before that. Here in America I studied the discovery and development of British civilization in New England, a little bit about the history of Alabama and the native tribes that lived there and very little else. That was the deliberate destruction of memory and history. I knew more about the City States of Ancient Greece then I did about the events leading to the Treaty of Westphalia or the Industrial Revolution and the events that coalesced Italy and Germany into Kingdoms of almost unrivaled size.
I can see why Europe wants to forget. Their traditional history of genocide didn't begin or end with the Jews in the Holocaust and they want everyone to forget it and all be good little EUsubjects but the Nationalists remember and they want to make you remember. It will be fascinating to watch the Splintering of Europe as it once again turns on itself and consumes itself with an idiotic passion not seen since......oh, the breakup of Yugoslavia. Remember that set of wars that turned neighbors into the most vicious and amoral killers you ever saw since the Red Army hit Berlin?
No wonder Russian novelists are such a dismal and awful read.
The most effete generation is filled with news of war in Kursk and seem convinced of everything they so cunningly report about the antics of a pithed frog. I don’t like to be that guy that constantly points out the weakness or invisibility of their strategic and operational experience and background or their inexperience with actual war but every time they crow about Ukrainians dropping the bridges leading to Kursk it must occur to them that Ukraine itself is rendering all aspects of the “invasion” moot. As observed by the master and commander, “well, they aren’t going anywhere” and so they won’t. It’s the most intense and useless burn of soldiers and material since Dien Bien Phu. It’s literally watching the reinforcement of retreat in real time.
Is anyone else out there rooting for the cannibals to tear through the fences and eat the new evil bad guys in Chicago? Just wondering....
Does anyone ever ask the Greens and the other ECO-Justice and anti-humanity crowd if their intent is simply to keep every species alive until the next Extinction Event that is beyond human control?
According to a widely accepted theory, the mass extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary was triggered by the impact of an asteroid at least 10 kilometres in diameter near Chicxulub on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.
So, yet another dire thing originating south of the border.....
So the first Starliner mission was a failure due to, it is alleged, software induced timing failure.
Second Starliner mission is partially successful but with a new software load.
Third Starliner mission is a failure with yet another very different and crappy software load.
Just who in hell is signing off on all these mission critical and different software mods and why do they still work at NASA?
I'm amazed at how many times every year I see something like the President of Columbia resigns because of the furor over her inability to simply be or appear to be nothing more than a decent human being. Along with her went 3 Deans of that school who also failed a simple routine habit of higher civilization; appear to be a human being. It's no wonder a lot of people believe that Bill Gates and all the people running Google are aliens. They no longer even try to fake it anymore.
These people have jobs with enormously prestigious titles, houses, salaries and command the respect of the respectable merely by having the titles they do and they can't hold it together long enough to come across as human.
I accept that an awful lot of us are getting a little ragged around the edges these days but then 99% of us will never have to testify before a Congressional Committee or live in the limelight. Still, all of the nominally civilized people on the planet know and accept some rules and limitations. Liberals and democrats don't. They honestly cannot conceive that anything they do is subject to public approbation. They're not stupid, just evil.
Gullible or stupid is a question I often ask myself when I look at any authorized news source or outlet and then I default to embrace the power of both. Why do people out there believe the media when what they know actually runs counter to what they hear or read in the news? The media gushes over every Hamas pronouncement of targets and casualties as if they are absolute fact and yet they always climb down after every sensational headline and are forced by someone to admit that, "no. once again we were gulled by the hamas minister of health into believing one of his statements."
The media have the same uncharming attitude about. repeating any and every statement of pure imagination as the unvarnished truth when it comes to reporting on developments in the war in Ukraine. None of them has ever picked up and read a single military textbook and they simply accept that if side A advances rapidly into side B that A is winning decisively and really putting the hurt on side B. Any real military historian or tactician could refer them to anything from the Battle of Cannae (216 BC) to fire sacks and yet the media will rabbit on endlessly absent any real facts or input from the ground about how things are sure looking dire now for evil overlord rascal. It even has it's own illustration!
I find it interesting that the fire breathing Credentialist Class or the Ubermen all firmly believe in establishing a credentialing system for every type of human activity but they unanimously reject any sort of credentialing for journalists. It is rather interesting when one thinks about it. They would be outraged if some uncredentialed myrmidon performed any sort of Art Criticism but they will refuse to accept any limits on what their Ivy League Class of journalists can "report" on in military affairs, weapons, tactics or strategy.
On the gripping hand they will all rush to assure us that we are quite wrong. They do indeed go to "top men" in the field to get their input on these military matters they know so little of themselves. Top Men will be interviewed by the credentialed and their viewpoints solicited in the politest manner possible. Of course these Top Men are exactly the same as the 54 Intelligence Community Leadership officials that denounced the Hunter Biden laptop as pure Russian propaganda. The military officers they go to all have a stick to grind like Eugene Carroll or are all the 3 and 4 star wanks that got their batons from Obama and Clinton and the sort of men that saw no problems at all with our evacuation of Afghanistan that was conducted no better than Elphinstone's own fiasco of 1842.
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| Only one European survived the retreat from Kabul to arrive at Jalalabad:
a Dr William Brydon, who made it to safety on a lame pony. |
I for one am saddened by the collapse of Britain into fascism and tyranny, again. In a conversation this morning it was allowed as how Britain has no Constitution and no documents at all that lay out the limits on State power or outlines the rights of the people who live in the UK. A minor reference to the usual Britisher trope that their constitution is unwritten but anyway they also have their Magna Carta simply invites the contempt it deserves. The Barons are such a shocking waste of everything that now diseased criminal old politicians are tapped for the honor 3 or 4 times every year. The Barons were the subjects of the King who had their rights laid out in writing at Runnymede but the one that had all the rights was the sovereign King and that's been a massive joke since Oliver Cromwell was dug up and dragged around London. The ordinary man in England got absolutely nothing out of the Great Charter.
I first saw this 30 years ago but it absolutely defines the existing condition of State Fascism and tyranny. There is no other way out of tyranny then revolution because nobody votes themselves out of Tyranny once it takes control. You have only to look at Venezuela's latest election. What have we heard about that lately? Crickets.
Wikipedia
I find it interesting how the wikipedia description baldly informs us that the State took armed guards, heavy construction machinery and had notified the landowner ahead of time that they meant to simply enter his land and knock down his building and they thought there was no further argument to be made or entertained by the State. Dryden was probably the last Englishman left in that doleful kingdom. Thanks to the sagacity, determination and fortitude of America's founders, we also reserve to ourselves that which was once the sole authority of Kings.
I thought our fellow English speaking European neighbors could use a little help with their current problem with the demons running their governments at every level.
The following words did wonders for us over here for the longest time.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It's a simple enough concept and it's so easy even an Englishman can do it. Here goes, Write down your rights in a plain and easy to understand form so that you can keep the jackboot of Government and the cops off your neck and out of your homes.
On the other hand, just about every Englishman with a spine departed those shores generations ago and only comes back to visit a bit before heading back to the better places that they carved out of the wilderness.
You can apply to the French for a long term solution to the problems posed by disaffected members of the former ruling class.
Congress should pass a law that demands that every time any bureaucratic law gets overturned or tossed out by any Court in this country that the head bureaucrat, his/her number two and the entire legal staff of that bureau be fired on the spot and be ineligible for rehire anywhere in the Government.
I think we are all tired of having to wage constant lawfare against all of the out of control government jerkoffs simply because they have an agenda antithetical to both our rights and interests and our Constitution.
If we really want to get the bureaucratic state under control again Congress should pass and enforce a law that requires that 25% of any bureaucratic organization's government funding will be cut from every Congressional appropriation and from any Continuing Resolutions in the future every time they lose a case in court. Let the damned bureaucrats be the ones that worry about their continuing relationship with the People and the Country. After all, their run amok bureaucrats with agendas are the ones creating all the problems and making life more difficult for everyday Americans.
Yeah this would make some serious changes to the FBI, ATF, CDC and all the rest of them that wage war on Americans.
After the dismal performance of the President Trump in-close assassination supervisory team do you think people like Hillary and Bill are still happy being guarded by the same pool of stupid vicious clowns? I imagine they used to get through each day feeling well loved but at least Hillary was dimly aware that there was some sort of vast conspiracy that wants her dead.
Perhaps Obama is a little concerned now too?
To be honest I used to give the SS a great deal of credit but then I was watching when that idiot tried to murder Ronald Reagan.
Every single thing being run by the Deep State Imbecilic Left now under performs massively except those that involve massive, uninterrupted, ongoing fraud against the government. Those parts of our government are really going swell. I mean, you don't really think we sent those losers in Ukraine or Gaza any real money do you?
I was a young Engineer on a little ship based in San Diego a long time ago when a new Commanding Officer with the management and leadership skills we have come to expect from Kamala Harris reported aboard. Things were a little hectic as we had about 70 of the crew out of the country and not due back anytime soon. The new Man had an idea early on that we needed to update the instructions on the ship. The ship itself was about 30 years old at that point and nothing had really changed in the last 20 years or so. Nevertheless, the order of the Day was to draft a new ship's instruction for refueling the ship.
I broke out the existing 3 page (with diagrams) instruction and retyped it and added a few words about fuel and things like that and ran it by the ship's office, Executive Officer and then the Commanding Officer. We had a little chat later that day. The new draft instruction was not complete and it was nowhere near long enough or thorough enough to cover the complex undertaking of actually refueling the ship.
I explained as how we had actually refueled the ship several hundred times using the instruction and never had a problem but that was not good enough. Another lash at redrafting the instruction was required and so it was done. As you might suspect, the new CO had played football for the Naval Academy. As far as I can tell that was his sole claim to fame. The new draft was liked no more than the first draft or the original. More work was necessary!
I had a brainstorm while over visiting a friend of mine on his wonderful brand new Cruiser that had just arrived in its very first homeport. He commiserated about my problems but then he observed that all of his ship's wonderful and thoroughly detailed instructions existed in digital form on computer disks. I borrowed the fueling instruction for USS Lake Champlain (CG-57) and ran a find and replace on it and inserted USS PLUCK (MSO-464) as needed throughout the 67 page fueling instruction and then printed it out as it was.
I submitted it through the ship's office, XO and to the CO the next morning. Never heard another word about it. I mean they probably started to smell a rat when the saw the various diagrams showing dozens of fuel tanks and compared it with the meager four that we had aboard but maybe not.
Reading this brought back the memory of pointless insanity on too little sleep.
Do you get the feeling you could eat a handful of titanium filings and puke a better spaceship?
Well, maybe a fantasy continent.... Can you believe people actually talk about and even believe that Kamala Harris chose Walz as her Veep? Who in the world do they think has been running the Biden administration since 2021? Do they think that the secret powers stepped out for a quickie and left her alone in a room with a working phone?
Take a look at the people in her entourage. Can you see the guy with the staple gun and duct tape? The guy behind him carries a crow bar in case stronger measures are required to keep her quiet.
When I first arrived in metroparkcentralis it was to find a major urban area with a somewhat flimsy retail local power provider. The power in that first year here went out a dozen times over the summer and left me a little concerned about what winter would bring. As it happened though, everything thermal ran on gas and that was 100% reliable. The electric power would go off for hours. Not so today with our brisk little storm. The power in this house went off for about 10 seconds. Hallelujah!
It is kind of fascinating to see that the strong winds here are not the mountains of air that I was used to in the Persian Gulf or in SOCAL. What we get here are microbursts that are intensely destructive to trees and appear to sheer trees and limbs in something like a 60 foot radius and otherwise just carpet the streets and lawns with leaves and twigs. The microbursts though, snap trees in half and sheer limbs up to a foot across off the trees.
I'm glad I sat this one out and waited to head out until after the tornado warnings had expired.
I moved here to house sit for my sister when they went out of the country for a year. I did it because I was recently retired from the Navy and there was a major slow-down in my company as the COW money dried up almost overnight. I came here to experience the weather. I missed it living in SOCAL all those decades. I stayed for another reason entirely. I still enjoy the weather though. Maybe someday I'll buy a coat.
naah.
As you read more about the attempted assassination of President Trump it becomes more and more clear that the Deep State will stop at nothing to kill or end the man. The evidence is overwhelming that the Secret Service was there in Butler, Pennsylvania solely in order to monitor the murder of Donald Trump, not to stop or prevent it.
I no longer live by the sea and haven't for over many years. I wonder how the sea services are doing these days and there is nothing online that I find particularly believable on that which doesn't speak well of the world we live in today. I lost faith in all the institutions and sadly the military was the last of the ones that had retained any credibility and that's gone now too.
I see ongoing signs that recruiting everywhere is missing a significant metric but that is all I see. Nobody ever goes so far as to wonder, what happened to all those missing young men and where did they go and what are they doing now in lieu of going to college, joining the Armed Forces and finding work in the trades?
I see their attendance and induction numbers dwindle year after year and nobody mentions what happened to them. Back when I was in the Navy when we were suffering a manpower shortage it was no joke and shortages were acute. My first ship had just about every watch underway manned port and starboard. The only people in more than 2 watches underway were the officers. When we got the boot after almost a month in Diego Garcia we headed back to our Operating Area in the Persian Gulf at the height of the Tanker War and we were about 60% manned. Just as we reached the equator we were called back because an entire planeload of men arrived to fill all of our gapped billets.
My old mine sweeper in San Diego was down to getting underway for NAVSEA testing of sweep gear when we were at about 25% peacetime manning. I was the only qualified Engineer Officer of the Watch onboard and we were steaming nonstop for 24 hours a day for 4 days of Exercise Gallant Eagle/Gallant Knight. Who doesn't think I was sleeping on watch in Main Control? In the Persian Gulf while conducting MCM operations we had a crew in excess of 100. In peacetime our normal crew was about 45. We were still getting underway with 17.
I suspect that the Navy today is suffering from similar manpower shortages but is able to eke out ongoing operations because so many of its warships are welded to the piers and unable to get underway. Sailors are fungible and more-so when a Navy only has 5 different types of ship classes all of which are near enough to identical as to allow cross-decking sailors from broken ships to operational ships in the Pacific and Middle East. That means however that there is zero surge capability and when those ships break down or come home that there isn't a ship and crew trained and ready to take their place.
Have you noticed just how few ships we have out there operationally deployed and underway despite waging some kind of shadow war against Yemen and 'deterring' Iran? Where are the 11 Carrier Battle Groups and all the Expeditionary Strike Groups that used to be deployed all over the world?
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| Expeditionary Strike Group 3 in 2014 |
I think we can say the same sort of thing about the Army and the Air Force. We now have Pentagon spokeswogs stating that 2 bombers have been deployed to X for contingency operations. Think about it. 2 bombers flew to join a couple others ones based in Guam or Diego Garcia. We used to rotate whole divisions of Army troops (sure by the subunits but we're talking tens of thousands of soldiers and their equipment). Where are they?
I used to live and breath the air in a number of places that are almost gone now. How many deployable soldiers does the First Infantry Division actually have? How many of their battalions, brigades and Brigade Combat Teams are C1 in Readiness, Training, Personnel and Material? Ditto the 2nd, 3rd ID.
I was surprised a few months ago to read that the Coast Guard was either laying up or discarding a large number of its ships. It seems they no longer have sufficient manpower to crew those ships so they're just welding them to the piers somewhere like Coast Guard Island in Alameda or some similar port on the Atlantic seaboard.
As a reasonable confidence building measure, perhaps the Secretary of Defense could tell us how many operational aircraft carriers, attack submarines, ballistic missile submarines, cruisers and destroyers we have left now and what the plans are to restore the rest to operational condition. I don't think he knows to be honest.
The filthy dirty rotten secret of course is that the Chinese know. So do the Russians. So do the Iranians. So do the Israelis. The only people who have no clue are you and me. I don't believe an honest word has dribbled out of Lloyd Austin's mouth in the last 20 years and I don't think I believe anybody that speaks for the Department of Defense anymore. The truth is not in them. Just look at the link and see what his priorities are and ponder the realities that face this country with him more or less at the helm.
By now it is pretty clear that the world of war as we have known it since the end of the 19th century is over. As usual, the military will always be the last ones to know it. Consider that right up until the beginning of World War I we still had massive cavalry formations and the military used to wonder about the proper mix of Uhlans and Dragoons to Cuirassiers and the sabre/pistol armed version that the US Army had come up with instead.
1914 German Uhlan ready to tear up the trenches
1914 French Cuirassiers ready to hack apart some Uhlans
What we need to see now is a fundamental and radical change in weapons development, procurement and fielding. We have seen from the exchange of fires in Ukraine that the helicopter and the air mobile soldiers day is done. They cannot survive on the modern battlefield and only a fool would think that the missiles that waste them in Europe won't be in the hands of islamic and other terrorists before tomorrow's dawn.
The Pentagon's flawed weapons acquisition and development system is broken and has been since World War II. There is no fixing it. It needs to be thrown out entirely and a brand new system put into place with people running it who know and will/can make changes as necessary on the fly without sending it to committees of "STAKEHOLDERS" to lard it with fresh pork for contractors and jobs for old soldiers and sailors.
The entire combat drone issue needs to be put into the hands of real artillery men who understand that 2 rounds a minute out the barrel is the minimum requirement and build drones to match that kind of usage rate. That will never happen of course because the Operational Requirement Document will be written in such a way that the drone must be 100% reusable, 100% common with NATO drones, 100% commonality of parts with all other military drones, etc. The first thing they ORD drafters will get rid of is the very idea that they are tasked with building a 100% expendable warhead.
A sad case in point. The USN built a whole class of Destroyers that they called, for a time, Land Attack Destroyers. We know of them as the very sad and mostly useless Zumwalt Class destroyers. (Sorry Sarge). The ships were armed when constructed and commissioned with a cannon that fired very long range artillery shells that each cost roughly as much as a Tomahawk missile. The significant difference between a Tomahawk missile and a piece of unguided ordnance is that the Tomahawk usually hits its target and does so with a variety of warheads. Artillery? Not so much.
Surveillance drones are a little bit different from artillery drones but they should still be the purview of the artillery because otherwise the flyboys will get involved and decide that it has to be so gold-plated with stealth, commonality, maybe room for a pilot or observer with the obvious introduction of systems to incorporate them and of course it must be totally reusable the way SpaceX rockets are. What they are going to lose sight of instantly is that an unmanned expendable surveillance drone that has thousands of equally cheap buddies can be used over any battlefield and still be wildly effective even with high attrition compared with a tiny and extremely expensive handful of hideously expensive and ridiculously overbuilt/overdeisgned 'compromises'. Again, a comparison of SpaceX and that hideous thing NASA built with ULA that costs billions to launch and is only useable once and was forced by Congress to incorporate all the old STS rocket engines is eye-popping.
I know, the ready reader will wonder how can I slang off at artillery while proposing to put the hands of our future massive drone fleets in their hands? It's pretty simple. Artillery men buy a few varieties of cannons and an enormous, even shocking amount of ammunition to fire from them. The ammo they want is usually cheap and it is always 100% expendable. We need that. The last time I saw anything like that out of the USN was the sonobuoys we used all through the Cold War and entire squadrons of P3 patrol aircraft would drop thousands of them every day during some of our more ambitious operations hunting down and riding herd on Soviet ballistic missile submarines. The Navy, in its wisdom ended production of them and decided, as they did with the Tomahawk production lines that they shuttered, that they had enough and didn't ever need any more.
The best contract minds need to pair with the best ORD drafters and signers to get a contract that is both IDIQ and has fixed numbers of annual procurement of thousands of killer drones every year from now on. The contract has to take into account that the drones will be effectively obsolete within a couple of years of fielding and the process to design and build better and more dangerous drones is one that must not languish in some ridiculous government lab. This is where the guys from Robot Wars can make a buck or two.
We have lost effective control or command of the seas to drones. We won't get it back unless we start to consider some really radical ideas that will make the flag and general officers sick and will lead to some impressive startup companies prepared to enter the ridiculous world of Defense Contracting. If the youngsters are very smart though they'll read the small print and take advantage of the pre-DEI crapworld that decided that offers would go first to small, minority owned, disadvantaged, veteran and women owned companies. I'm sure no amount of reality will ever change that ludicrous idea.
