IMAGINE

 I was interested to see if Ashe Schow is still writing these days and found myself at the Washington Examiner to have a dekko. I did find this interesting video there which with the media's usual want of perception and true understanding was enough to ruin the day. If you watch the quick video you learn something you might not want to know.

It baldly states that since the inception of the program 28,000 people have graduated from this course of instruction that helps unfit and stupid candidates to pass the most basic military tests after 3 months of super high intensity training. We’re almost talking the old see lightning, hear thunder tests. Imagine that. The military has been lowering its recruiting standards for years and accepts almost anybody as a member and yet they have a 3 month long program for people who fail to meet even that low standard so that they can then go to Boot Camp and be the future warriors the Nation needs. I snicker at the methods used in Ukraine to drag cannon fodder into the ranks but his is simply amazing. We don't really have a lo-tech military anymore. I mean, if you're too stupid you will starve to death trying to tempt MREs out of the wrappers.

The other thing about those numbers graduating? The video claims 28,000 graduates from this dismal course with over a 90% pass rate. Imagine that. You are working with a truly sad herd and yet 90% of them make it over the fence and graduate and then become the platoon commander's nightmare and the Army will turn around in a few years and find that these graduates are all that they have left.  George Carlin springs to mind; "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." The Armed Forces are picking the best of the bottom half and sending them off to pre-boot camp for 3 months hoping that will fix the Army, Navy and Air Force.

What do you think reader? Is that going to work in the short term, mid term or long term? Nah.

It makes you miss those old ads where they were looking for the best young men. I hesitate to mention it but making up shortfalls in the ranks by adding unfit is no way to win a battle or the war. It’s semi-OK to pretend that adding physically weak and weak minded soldiers somehow makes a herd of bodies a lethal war machine but those who have been there know better. This falls into, “the bad drives out the good.” The ones left doing 175% of the heavy lifting for the same pay and benefits as the ones who do nothing aren’t going to persevere because they soon realize that it will always be this way. 

Pretty soon you find nothing but incompetent NCOs, company officers and generals and you soon dimly come to realize that with this mix it is impossible to fight and win wars. For those not following recent events since 1994, that’s where we are today.

WINTER IS COMING

 But for all that it’s still very nice. Helene hasn’t bothered us up here in the heartland.

EVERYDAY SABOTEURS

 I think one of the things that the East got used to after a time was accepting that there were simply saboteurs working in every part of industry, the military and even in things like education and medicine. I have long accepted the fact that they dominate in education these days but it wasn't until the rise and broad acceptance of DIE that I came to accept that the American Hate they have been spewing unchecked for 3 generations now has invariably led to the infiltration of haters at every level in industry and government.

I thought the communists were bad but these people are worse. They took over at the top in Boeing and then those people ensured that at every level the company was penetrated by people indifferent to safety and they proudly underachieved at every task. They simply didn't do proper welding, they didn't do proper QA checks, they skimped on materials ordered and accepted cheap and shoddy substitutes and then they passed it all off as just what Americans deserve.

I accepted a long time ago that American Shipyards were simply the worst shipyards in the world. I don't have much experience since I only suffered through Todd Shipyard in Seattle for 9 miserable months in a yard so uniformly awful and dishonest that we were the very last USN warship that ever pulled in for work. The last government contract was in alongside us in the other drydock and it turns out to be one of the USCG Polar Ice Breakers. That ship was quite broken when it arrived and got knocked over on its beam ends coming into the Strait to get into Seattle and lost a sailor in a fall on the Bridge.

I also spent some months in a Southwest Marine shipyard in San Diego as the Overhaul manager and found that staying on top of them was a 24/7 day job or they'd be happy to burn without firewatches, paint the hull in the rain, sandblast the ship in drydock next to me without mitigating the blast and grit getting into my ship. I compared that to yard appearances in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and the differences were like night and day in terms of professionalism and attitude towards the work and that was a long time ago.

So it now appears that the saboteurs don't merely set fires and burn ships to the waterline, they also deliberately perform inferior welds on things like submarines.

I don't know what it will take to turn this around. If we have reached that level of profound despair and failure that slapped down the Soviet Union then it's going to take some very hard times. As I recall, before the fall the workers there and in the Eastern Bloc used to say, "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." I think we've reached that point now. In the Soviet Union you knew the end was nigh because vodka was almost free and widely available. Here? Well here it is a bit concerning that the most lethal and dangerous substances on earth find their way into drugs that are almost free, widely available and distributed with the help and concurrence of the government and the Karens.

On the other hand, this is the best of all possible worlds. OTGH, I'll probably much less concerned if I stay away from X. Maybe I should do that and not peer too closely at the sausage apparatus. Sweeping world changes don't happen in a vacuum.

NOTING THE COST

 It really does look like the lunatics running the world are intent on reducing the cost of sweeping away all of the old and bringing in the new. Very little of true value and worth exists right now and thus it can be replaced with something new and different for a fraction of the cost of building, maintaining and operating the old stuff. Of course this applies only to insanity that is government and Publicly funded stuff. It's different for people with real and meaningful bottom lines. 

To get some idea of the scale of this consider: Microsoft is swinging a deal that will see 3 Mile Island nuclear reactors come back online solely in order to supply microsoft with power it needs to run data centers. The cost of nuclear power has we've been told, grown too hideously expensive for you and me but microsoft alone can afford to overcome the nuclear regulatory state (without bribes, naturally) and bring back online an OLD NUCLEAR POWER STATION. We the public ordered them shut down in the name of foolish economy and toooooooooo dangerousssssss!

I dare say nobody there even breathed the words, "build a new one." No no.

I recall the days of old when I was but the Engineer on an old ship of ones. Warships have back up capabilities and have redundancies at the start because long experience of naval war has shown that taken into battle many things that are necessary will be killed and destroyed outright while yet the battle must go on. Nevertheles, at height of the Cold War, we had a ship's company that presented me with just a single Sonar Technician, a single Interior Communications Electrician, a single Electronics Technician, a single Hull Technician, a single Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Technician, a single Signalman, a single, well you get the point. That ship got underway around 3 days/week. We were a test platform for this newfangled Global Positioning System. Yep, we were the one and only.

Every time one of the one's decided to go on leave, it reduced the ability of the ship to absorb damage in that area down to zero. Fry a synchro-converter that converted the gyro inputs with the radar bearing information and you would instantly step down from true bearing navigation to relative bearing navigation. Yeah, it's almost the same thing but a pain in the ass when you're navigating a ship channel after dark when coming back into port and both the radar and the gyros still work. However without those particular techs it's very difficult to troubleshoot and repair either system. One can only imagine the hysteria of some of the later ship's CO's if both gyros or the single radar stopped working and we had to do it using just magnetic bearings. Nobody practices that anymore.

I suspect modern ships just self-adhere to the pier when they no longer have the critical skills required to go to sea. For us back then this was not an option. To be honest, how much trouble could you get into just off the coast of San Diego? We would sometimes get underway on one engine, one shaft but, and here's the rub, worst case we'd have to drop the anchor and spend awhile troubleshooting or putting back together things that had been taken apart for maintenance before being rudely interrupted with an order to make space for some other ships at our pier. We learned from that and decided to keep and use a little pier that no other ships could use. It also cut our time at Sea and Anchor Detail by about an hour each way and when you get underway at 0630 and come back into port sometimes at 0430 it matters a lot.

Seriously though, how does the United States Navy get from an oceans spanning fleet of hundreds of ships down to one single solitary oiler to service the Battle Groups in the IO? JUST HTF did that happen?

The lunatics running this place have serially broken and destroyed a near monolithic system of infrastructure and men that could wage war 24/7 across and around the world and now it cannot support a single Battle Group much less 3 or 5 deployed in support of military operations in the Middle East. Do you remember that we used to have 5 Battle Groups operating simultaneously in that area during contingency operations just 20 years ago? Where did all of that go?

Yes I know. It was all discarded one piece at a time by morons that didn't care or know any better who had reached the point where they thought, just one would be enough. Well yeah, I spent some time in that Navy and while I made it look easy I was also extremely fortunate enough to have the best and best qualified young sailors of their generation working with me. They were all smart, motivated and well disciplined. 

How did a USNS oiler run aground off the coast of Oman? I could see it off the coast of Qatar or UAE but it takes a special kind of stupid to run aground off Oman. One assumes from experience that it was taken on food and stores in someplace like Fujairah and somehow 90 giant tankers and cargo ships head into and out of that port every week without incident unless they run afoul of the Iranians. So, just how did our one and only IO oiler run aground? Well, it immediately calls to mind the serial incompetence we have grown to expect from our Navy but which was kind of unexpected from our contract Military Sealift Command sailors. With no exceptions, I found them to be solid professionals. I wonder what changed?

ON MODERN NATIONALISM AND WAR

I spent a few months working closely with one of our allies that sort of started to stand in our corner back when the Iran-Iraq Tanker War surged and the neocons in America and the West united to agree that something must be done to guarantee Europe's oil supply. So, that was a good few years earlier than my last visit there after Desert Storm. In the period of time leading up to the invasion of Kuwait their Emir had spent some money to buy something that looked like a modern day military. It was a hopeless gesture then but almost nobody recognized it as such. I mean ask yourself, how is a tiny nation of absolute hedonists and load-shedders ever going to stand up to a force that was going toe to toe with Persia in the Al Faw Peninsula? Yeah, it wasn't. 

The part that I found amusing and troubling was the after hours conversations in their offices with the middle grade officers of the Kuwait Navy who had all gone in the bag when the Iraqis stormed into Kuwait and captured it overnight. They told me about freezing in the far north in the POW enclosures and of their wives visiting them there as the US got ready to take back Kuwait and kick a little ass and each and every one of them talked about the first night of the invasion as they collectively stood gathered and ready to do something, anything, as the Iraqi forces rolled over Failaka and Bubyon and into Kuwait City and that the orders never came. 

There was never a single peep from the high command and every single one of the officers I talked with assured me that the next time it happened they would give the order, Run Away!! I think this is the reality of war now in what passes for the civilized world. The powers that be have so gutted nationalism and manliness that nobody sees any point in sacrificing their lives for something as gutless and useless as the EU or France or England and certainly not Germany or the Nordic states. There is nothing there anymore that remotely resembles the Warrior Castes of the past. As far as one can tell from over here, every government since 1990 has done its best to stamp out every vestige of nationalism and militarism and crush the military under their pretty socialist loving shoes. But Europe is not alone. 

We have the same vibe going on here and even more so do they have that going on in the Far East. One would think that countries faced with an overwhelming threat would see some cause or justification for pulling together and coming up with some sort of collective defense mechanism like has happened all through history but I'm not seeing it anywhere along the Pacific Rim. 

The current existing flashpoints are just China vs Taiwan and the two Koreas. All the other nation/states along the rim seem to be interested in keeping the boats afloat as the tide comes in and ebbs away. None of them see anything to be gained from challenging the regional superpower about potential resources lying in and below the China Sea. There is no shortage of materials flowing from Africa and these countries now that they have shed their idiotic Social/Communist whining are in the business of making money. They still make it the old fashioned way by building goods other people want to buy, not by selling themselves expensive weapons they never plan or intend to use and which would just give some people bad ideas. 

There is a reason for all this I think and it has something to do with the near universal acceptance of a simple reality that everyone seems to have discovered at about the same time, 'it just doesn't matter.' In Asia everyone knows that China is like the weather. It is not something one can plan to defeat since elemental China will always be there and there in vast numbers. In Europe the Europeans have sold their souls to the EU Commission for Peace in their Minds and have a near fatalistic attitude towards everything. They don't anywhere have even a tiny spark of what made Europe the rulers of the world that spread enlightenment and technology to the rest of the world. 

 I know, you might be asking yourself, what about Africa, South America and the Middle East? The short answer about all of them is that outside of them nobody really gives a damn what they do or how they do it. They make nothing, they don't have nuclear weapons and they squabble over every single pointless and stupid thing. As a case to consider, serious minded people thought they could double their national income by widening the Panama Canal. They never appear to have asked themselves if the original builders had considered first and foremost, how much water did the interior generate from rain that it could then be used as a continuously renewing source of water to float the ships up and down the waterway through the higher elevations. 

That is the simplest and most basic calculation about any talk about expansion and it doesn't look like it ever even crossed their minds before they started building. I'm a little concerned that the neocons are trying to unlock the long range weapons they gave to Ukraine to attack Russia with so that Russia will retaliate in kind and use some of their unstoppable missiles to hit cities or other targets in England and France but I think the lassitude and moral indifference in Europe means that even if Russia did respond in kind NOTHING WOULD HAPPEN. Nothing can happen. Those countries don't have a war machine with which to make war or respond to attacks. There is no hope of mobilizing hundreds of thousands of eager young men to draw weapons and ammunition from the national armories and ammo bunkers and head out to smite bad guys. There are no weapons and their is no ammunition and it isn't that kind of war anymore and people know it now.

What is more, some of them know that all the boundaries in Europe are as fluid as water flowing in a stream and that introducing the idea that nationalism is evil has simply reduced any moral reasoning to wage war in defense of some people somewhere is gone. Flooding all those countries with millions of enemies from Islam and Africa has not simply weakened those countries, it has wrecked them.

 That's too bad really. On the gripping hand, I imagine the entire sweep of history is one of change and at the time very little of it looked like it was going to be good. Yet here we are! 

Panorama of the Great Camp 50th Reunion at Gettysburg. May embiggen.

ONE WAY OR ANOTHER

 I stumbled across this while reading an article found posted on Large Regular. I thought it was amusing based on my own story about learning to ride a bike. I think many people learn in different ways and found that in this case the title of the story applied equally to two entirely different ways of learning to ride a bike. In both cases we shared this:

I learned to ride my older sister's bike while my dad was in Vietnam. I learned how by finding it unattended anywhere in the neighborhood there in Carlisle and taking it away. I would throw myself on it and pedal for all I was worth. As I recall she was, in the earlier attempts, easily able to run me down and take it back and throw in a few punches and scratches. As I became more adept at riding I quickly became more adept at making a clean getaway. As you might imagine, the learning curve on this sort of approach is pretty steep if you mean to ride somebody else's bike.

The clean getaway is something that should be learned at the very youngest age possible. See the rules.

IYKYK

I found this at John Ringo's place. I immediately laughed out loud.

Yep. That would explain it.

NOW HERE IS A QUESTION

I wonder how many pagers blew up in the United States and Europe yesterday? It's a given that dozens or hundreds blew up in Doha and Iran but I'd be curious at the number of pagers that blew up outside Lebanon yesterday.

As to who launched the attack on terrorists it could be anybody really. Some people like to blame the Jews for everything or Mossad but in this case there is a lot of hate out there and it could have been planned and implemented by the Maronites, Druze, Sunni Lebanese or the old standbys, the CIA and KGB. Who else hates the PLO that much? Oh, yeah, just about every other country on earth.

PLANe TO HELL

 We have seen just how broken the SS is in the last few weeks. There isn't much doubt about their massive incompetence and serial indifference to protecting the life of the man both the FBI and inJustice Department are pursuing on a variety of farcical charges but there is perhaps method to the indifferent, lackadaisical, incompetence on display. 

Zelensky is coming to America to make another grovel for advanced weapons he cannot afford, Ukraine cannot maintain or repair and which doesn't have the manpower with the training and background to make use of them. So anyway, mister super PNG with that ogre Putin is going to climb into an aircraft (perhaps a Boeing product?), fly to the United States, grovel, beg and plead all over Washington, DC and other well healed places where the elite live who can scrape billions of $ out of monsters like Zelensky and where he will be ferociously guarded by the SS and others of that stamp and presuming he survives their inattention, will climb back into some airplane and take wing for the Continent.

I really don't know what will happen and neither do I care very much. I see Putin has ordered the Nation to make significant increases to the Red Army and Forces because he sees obvious signs that idiot NATO scum are lining up to attack Russia with long-range weapons and then gasp and pretend that it wasn't them, no, it was Zelensky and Ukraine!!!!!

So the question I have is, does Putin want the war to go on for another year or two or does he want it to end?  The obvious and easiest way to end it would be to tag Zelensky while he's doing his best Kamala imitation in the US. The way things work with the brain-dead DC elite is that a Russian assassin using the cover of the Red Army Chorus or a French marching band could sneak up behind Zelensky and shoot him or just slip him a little dose of polonium with his soup or maybe via the ferule on an umbrella without anybody at all noticing. The Russians are really good at this sort of thing and even if they get caught and held by our doofus hooligan bureaucrats all Putin will need to do to get them back is scrape up another trans athlete visiting Russia with 42 ounces of fentanyl in her bag and offer to trade it back to US for all the Russians involved and even the French marching band if he adopts an aggressive bargaining position that involves some shoe-banging.

I for one would not fly on the same plane as Zelensky, ever. In fact, I wouldn't want to be in the sky within a thousand miles of Zelensky's airplane.

ONE CAN ONLY HOPE

 We're back to the math of tragedies. We are counting on the Secret Service to get it right every single time and the enemy only has to get it right once. That is the kind of thing that leads one to despair. It's like hoping you have some part of the new Boeing that worked even half as well as the old Boeing before it left Seattle.

Intellectually we all know and accept that the Secret Service is there to make it more difficult to shoot the Presidents but we also know that short of the most drastic measures, a determined enemy will always makes it way through to the target. Wasn't that Day of the Jackal and all those other thrillers from the 60's and 70s always showed? It would be nice if the SS put forth more of an effort to protect President Trump than it does to assist the DHS in settling Haitian migrants in little Ohio cities but there is absolutely no evidence of that happening.

The sheer hate and contempt exhibited by the media and democrats for the Republic, for Trump and for the people who happen to dislike what the Left is and are in this country is kind of breathtaking. They seem totally unaware of how they come across to those of us who are sane. They sound evil and malevolent and even were one to catch them and get them to reflect about what they're saying and what they obviously believe, there would be no changing their minds. This is what indoctrination looks like. This is why it is so difficult to pry true believers away from any cult no matter how bizarre it is.

It is amazing that it has come to this. Some organization is setting these vicious losers up to kill. It would be helpful if some trustworthy organization with credibility looked into it and reported back to us.

INSANITY

 I find that there are an awful lot of people that look at the war in Ukraine and think we are perfectly justified in sending our best weapons to Ukraine so that Ukrainians can then shoot them deep into Russia and kill Russians. That's how these simpletons think. They think that this would be 'justice'.

Wars and retaliation are not about 'justice'. War and retaliation has nothing to do with 'justice'. Sending Ukraine our missiles to shoot in our name of justice into Russia for justice is exactly the same thing as us shooting those missiles into Russia. It will be met with instant and fully justified retaliation and unlike Russia which is maintaining to the best of its ability a live and active air defense system, neither the United States nor NATO is doing any such thing as they struggle with contemplating using their weapons to launch long-range attacks on Russian cities.

MAD was about mutual assured destruction and the triggers were readily apparent to even the stupidest politicians and most idiotic generals. In our case it was missiles or bombers coming over the pole to attack cities and other targets in America. Our response was spelled out well in advance and the whole world knew we would retaliate with launch on warning using 100% of our nuclear assets. As soon as we confirmed missiles coming in from the Soviet Union we were going to launch everything we had at them.

What do you imagine our response would be now that we don't know if those missiles now contain nuclear weapons or maybe they're just hi-explosive like the ones we're thinking of shooting into Russia? If it's not flocks of inbound missiles but just a small handful and they're targeting 'demonstration' cities that America doesn't really care about anymore and not Washington, DC, as a warning to US to stop giving Russia's enemy long range weapons from our arsenals to use killing Russians are we still going to salvo the full load of our nukes on Russia?

We DON'T HAVE ANY ACTIVE AIR DEFENSE SYSTEM. It was forbidden by the ABM treaty and we tore that up long ago but we never really invested in building ABM sites all over America to take the place of all those old Nike/Hercules missile sites that we had surrounding every major city in America until we scrapped the lot of them.

ANECDOTALLY

I understand the the Bureau of Covering up the Dismal State of the US Economy had to revise its lying numbers rather drastically a little while ago because about 900,000 of the 1.2 million jobs they said had been created in the Biden economy simply never happened and never existed. I sort of wonder what impact this has on military recruiting but anecdotally what I'm getting is that there are jobs out there if you want them as a job entrant and some of them actually pay pretty damned well. They range from full time to part time and seem to exist if you look hard enough in spite of the damned practice my spy tells me about which is that all those Help Wanted ads one sees taped on the doors of various businesses are just for show and that they're not really hiring anyone.

It occurs to me to wonder if that means that a greater number of our youth are more interested in taking up one of the duties of citizenship and joining the semi-armed forces. I see that the numbers are so dire in the Coast Guard Drug Fishing industry that they have laid up dozens of cutters and boat stations all over the place. They simply cannot find the bodies to throw at the fun problem of driving a rescue boat or maintaining helicopters and boats or in manning marine safety positions. I don't know if it's the truly dismal leadership or the fact that we simply gave up and surrendered in the War on Drugs and it all seems rather pointless now.

The Army and Navy are also having trouble meeting their recruiting and retention goals. I don't like to mock sincere men who talk a big game but watching a Marine General try to explain that the Marines really needed to retain a much larger percentage of their first term enlistees was quite remarkable. You can indeed convince an 18 year old man to do just about any damned fool thing but they grow out of that phase and by the time their 22 or 23 they've grown up and started looking for a life that doesn't involve being treated as a fully disposable clothes rack.

The Army's problems with manpower have grown so severe they've essentially stood down an entire Army Division in numbers and said, 'with our revised recruiting number we're not meeting our new and much reduced manpower requirements. The Navy isn't talking anymore and I stopped believing anything they had to say on the topic of manning right about the time they made the decision to shut down Orlando Naval Training Center and San Diego Naval Training Center in favor of keeping gang infested and controlled Great Lakes Naval Training Center as our sole source of Navy enlisted training. That has to be one of the stupidest unforced errors to ever hit Navy Recruiting. It doesn't help to see that our ships are now extending on 9 and 12 month deployments again instead of the 6 months we wanted and that the number of port calls and visits has been reduced in order to meet Operating Tempo Requirements that keep our ships in the Red Sea and North Arabian Sea. 

Port calls there used to include exciting Brief Stops for Fuel in Aden, Yemen until the terrorists blew up USS Cole when it pulled in for a quickie at the fuel pier. Say what you want about Fat Lenard and the totally bogus Fat Lenard fake scandal of giving a ship's husbanding agent details about the ships' movements well in advance so that arrangements to fuel, resupply and paint them in port could be made in advance, at least none of the ships in the Pacific were blown up by some 'friend of the ship chandler' who knew well in advance what ships would be making stops in Aden and probably knew it long before the guys in Bahrain did.

Other exciting ports of call I recall from my time in the Red Sea included Mombasa (very nice) and Djibouti (a horrible place) and then we were going to visit Mogadishu but we got a message from our Ambassador there who told us the place was dangerous, violent and even the trees have VD and we decided to skip it. (It does pay sometimes to be on the flagship when this sort of question comes up). The great liberty ports on the NAS coast include exciting Khor Fakkan (no), Muscat, and Fujairah. While Muscat was nice there is nothing at all there. Other unmentionables in the Red Sea include Hurgada, Yanbu and Jeddah and no, you don't want to go to any of them either.

If you cross the NAS heading east you can troll the Iranian coast and Jask and maybe find out if the ship's defenses are up to dealing with C-801 and C-802 missiles and whatever other excitement the Iranians have going on and then spend an awful visit pierside in Karachi. I wouldn't recommend it and I don't know if we pay port calls there anymore or not. Pakistan is an insane place.

You don't see any posh liberty ports like Rota, France, Naples, the Adriatic Coast, up the Bosphorus or another charming port call in Turkey or Haifa and I'm guessing nobody is stopping in Alexandria or Beirut. It just doesn't seem to have the old cachet where Navy crews could expect to make port calls in Australia, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, and a score of other nice places and of course the Army still remains the service with the unofficial motto of, join the Army, travel the world, meet interesting exciting people and kill them.' It just doesn't sound the same when you have nothing but ignorant and stupid leaders who never found an African shithole they didn't think was suitable habitat for a couple hundred American soldiers to broaden themselves. They have, as the saying goes, run out of places like that in Asia but that's probably only temporary.

I wonder what the DACOWITS investigators are finding these days about women in the service and what their reports look like. They may now well be every bit as classified as the Navy's Insurv reports are and very closely held. I can't think it's that bad though. After all, we have women in charge or at the very top of all the Armed Forces and the Coast Guard. What could go wrong?

DREADFUL ANNIVERSARY

 Who would have guessed that America would take the decades after 9/11 to completely collapse and leave behind every single one of the ideals that made it great? Not me. I really did see us embarking on a war to punish those guilty of the attack but never in my wildest imaginations did I ever think that we would then remain in those corrupt pustules of Hell on Earth and try to make things better using trillions of dollars we would borrow from China and enriching the plutoctrats everywhere.

Nor did I imagine we would gut our liberties at home in the name of some false security and embrace something as prophetically horrible as the Patriot Act where the TSA roams at will up and down your body and steals your luggage with absolute impunity and even with permission from the Law, the Courts and the powers that don't fly commercial; EVER.

I did not foresee the US Armed Forces dispatching thousands and thousands of soldiers around the world in pointless meaningless charades that never the less made somebody a lot of money and no doubt felt good to the State Department thugs who brought us Victoria Nuland and the neo-con open war with Russia and by extension EVERYBODY ELSE who disagrees with American policy.

I did not foresee the complete collapse of merit as the sole basis of promotion and advancement in the Armed Forces. Nope, I didn't see that happening in a million years and neither did I see the tragic and stupid spread of DIE to the military, legal, medical and teaching professions. They're dead. They're is no return now from this corruption that imputes merit by skin color alone and since the indoctrination of the young on this topic started over 50 years ago we are no different now than the poor subjects in North Korea who thoroughly believe that the Great Leader, Dear Leader et al walked on water and spoke with God's Voice.

I honestly did not think that it was possible to bring up a more entitled bunch of useless drones than the millennials but we somehow did despite most people no longer believing in marriage or having children. By the current evidence they also don't believe in hooking up and practicing anything like self-discipline but there are signs that the latest bunch are finding their feet and that may turn around one day. 

There is an observation that notes:

“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”

Guess where we are in that loop?

I see that Senator Tuberville is holding up the promotion of a thoroughly incompetent man that Lloyd Austin wants to see promoted to General and then made Commander, U.S. Army Pacific. I support the Tuber on this just as I supported him in his last stand against an Army run amok and a Secretary of Defense who decided to  ovethrow the Law and ignore Congress. I am kind of sick of these guys and sick of officers like Lieutenant General Ron Clark who deliberately covered up and hid the fact that Austin was hospitalized for days without actually informing the President or anyone else including his Deputy who was on vacation in Hawaii.

On the one hand I concede just how utterly stupid and useless a billet like Commander, U.S. Army Pacific is but then again there is no justification for promoting this thoroughly incompetent and lethally stupid buffoon to General and giving him any position of authority. He was the SECDEF's advisor on the shameful and awful bugout from Afghanistan and nobody was fired for that. Everyone involved above the rank of Lt. Colonel should have been fired after that fiasco.

I did not foresee that the United States acting alone and all by itself would wield sanctions like a club against any country that failed to hew to the neo-con worldview and then blow up the Russian-Europe gas pipelines to destroy the industrialized nations of Europe and then declare everyone who argued against that sort of approach an enemy and cut them off from OUR World Wide Banking System. I didn't foresee Russia and China deciding that it was a good time then to join forces against US and create their own worldwide Banking System and invite India, Brazil and most of the rest of the World to join them and thus bring about the end of the almighty $ as the World's reserve currency.

Literally every single act since that dismal morning has been a forced error leading to the total destruction of the world as we knew it before 9/11. You know what the only act left undone in that cavalcade of disaster is? Yeah, that's right, another World War.

Honestly did anybody envision the disarmed and disunited and old contemptible governments of western Europe deciding that RIGHT NOW is the time to poke Russia with a stick? Do they not see that all they have it a stick? NATO isn't even a shell of what it was in 1990. There is quite literally nothing left there. There is NO POSSIBILITY OF IT WAGING WAR and yet they carry on as if they have this huge military force backing them up as they line up in increasing numbers of use THEIR WEAPONS to attack Russia DIRECTLY.

It is a world gone mad.

And here in the final bastion of the West we are getting ready to watch and do nothing as the election gets stolen again. The most advanced country on Earth is going to take, in some cities and states, up to a week to count the votes that have been cast since last week for an election that won't happen for 2 months. Look at the works of the NYT and weep for a country that did better than this in 1789.

That is just wrong and there is zero justification for letting this happen. It can only happen because people have decided that they cannot win unless they cheat like hell and this system is designed for just one thing and that is to let them get away with it. I'll end with this, ‘What do we have, a republic or a monarchy?’ Franklin replied, ‘A republic, if you can keep it.’ 

There is nothing at all about the current republic that Ben Franklin would recognize, outside all those things we have now that the Founders fought so hard to end in America.

BOOMER CHECK

 I suppose you know that you’re a boomer when you get up at 0200 to watch a manned space shot and carry on watching until they make it safely into orbit. Nice job by SpaceX. Again. 

OUR SEPOYS ON PARADE

 The really amusing thing is that literally every single man in this photo got all of his training from the United States Army we sent to Afghanistan to train up to do an army job and use all the wrong methods to fight a puny enemy.

So yeah, we trained the very men needed to drive us out 19 years after we should have walked away and admitted that there was no more way to defeat the tribesmen there than there is to defeat China or Russia. 

Good job guys. 

LINING UP ALTERNATIVES

Elon Musk has revealed that he plans to launch the first Starlink landers towards Mars in two years when the next transfer orbit opens up and launch manned missions to Mars in four years if the initial landings are successful. That sounds great to me and I look forward to it. I do wonder if he is lining up alternative space ports to launch from in the event that America falls and the Bureaucratic State steps in and forbids it. I wonder if he's looking at something in Tonga....

On the gripping hand though, if the BS puts the squeeze on launches out of the United States they'll also probably seize the Starship means of production as well. Things generally don't just go a little evil, they tend to go all the way evil all at once and before you know it. 

STANDING INTO DANGER

 I was surprised that the Navy had relieved another Commanding Officer and surprised that this was an officer who has been in command for 5 months prior to deploying and then up until his relief operating in the Middle East. It seems that the 'loss of confidence' in the captain's ability to command had something more to do with a massive failure inside the Navy. Not really a surprise these days. This article at Business Insider describes the Captain's problem was with the steering gear on his ship. This in particular caught my eye:

18 incidents of steering gear failure is not just extremely unlikely, it is ridiculous. The article also stated that the technicians who were looking into the steering gear failure could not get underway on the ship when it left Bahrain. I have no idea how that works but I know that the Engineering System that I was heir to would not have hesitated to put techreps on a warship underway. 

No, when you trouble shoot a system as uncomplex as a steering system and you cannot isolate the failure because it is intermittent or transient or just comes and goes then there is something going on that has nothing to do with the steering gear motors, the hydraulics, the rams, the rudders, the switches that permit shifting steering engine from port to starboard on command from either the bridge or from after steering. All of those can be checked and verified so the problem is almost certainly of human origin.

Knowing how bad things are there are a couple of possibilities. The first is simple sabotage by a crewman who is lashing out at the Navy or persons on the ship. The second possibility is that the fools at NAVSEA allowed for the steering gear system to come under software control and that the software has been corrupted. 

When we had systems that 'energized' themselves and dumped fire fighting twin agents into the helicopter hanger repeatedly it was instantly obvious that someone was activating the fire control system from one of the control stations. Those out of the way places are only manned or occupied when conducting flight operations so they're wide open to saboteurs.

In other words, another Bonhomme Richard case but this time when the ship is deployed. It's the main reason I was happy to leave behind those that announced that they'd be damned if they were deploying or going overseas. It's why as an Engineer I knew and understood why the Chief Engineer wasn't going to permit snipes that had been to Captain's Mast for drugs coming out of Karachi to stand watches in the engine rooms. You can do catastrophic damage by intent or simply by allowing a system to go outside parameters and fail. None of us wanted to experience a Boiler Water Out of Sight High Casualty by learning of it when droplets of moisture hit turbine blades spinning at 25,000 rpm a foot away from us.

The Armed Forces have really gotten themselves into a cleft stick and as far as I can tell there is no way out. They have lowered the standards for recruits in every category and cannot be surprised as they find that this has a dramatic effect on operations and readiness. I don't know how many sailors they're cross-decking to keep the deployed ships operational but I'm willing to bet it's a lot. When we swept mines in the Red Sea we got augmented with about 70 men to fill all the vacant billets. They mostly came from sister ships homeported in Norfolk and were essentially volunteers. None of the guys working for me were unhappy to be there and a few said they preferred it to being in the Yards in Norfolk.

The last 10 years I was on active duty I remember an explosion in the number of senior officers attending special schools and courses to get an MBA type document and how they started talking about business enterprises and stakeholders and started in on making efficiencies and smarter with fewer and I just laughed and shook my head. Once you get down to standing port and starboard watches there is no more fat on the bone and you have to be able to count 100% on 100% of the men standing watches because there is no one to pick up the slack or backstop them. I suspect the Navy reached that point about 10 years ago and it's been getting uglier and uglier for the operating forces since 2010 and the end of Cost of War $ and the purse strings in Congress closing on everything defense related except DIE and equity related crap.

Too bad.

OUR KIND OF WAR

 As I look at the fruits of science and engineering coupled with infinitely cheap and expendable weapons I wonder what our generals and admirals think of the new kind of war. Back when I was just a lowly Ensign we used to practice Damage Control on the Ship with the attitude that reeked of optimism. We would call the blow that inflicted the damage, Hit Alpha and we would then scurry madly from the Repair Lockers to embrace and correct the damage, fight the fires, battle the flooding and end the immediate danger of burning to the waterline or flooding and sinking. It was relatively easy.

Now of course I knew intellectually that our putative enemy was the Soviet Union. We all did. What we studied in schools of higher naval learning was our understanding of Soviet tactics and what we saw of them was that a massive ancient Bear D would appear far far away on our radar horizon and our electronic warfare systems would detect the Downbeat Radar and the Bear Bomber would datalink our location to a Regiment or two of Backfire Bombers and they would flood our vicinity with scores of shipkilling missiles that moved very fast.

Hit Alpha was a sort of misnomer because those who knew suspected that Hit Alpha was going to be followed in rapid succession by Bravo, Charlie and Delta with maybe an Emerson Lake and Palmer thrown in because in war there is no such thing as overkill. Still, we carried on.

That was open ocean and naval war in the littoral and narrow seas. If you throw carrier battle groups into monstrously stupid places like the Persian Gulf the enemy Air Force and Navy are of no account at all. They can destroy every ship and sweep them all from the seas just by firing hundreds of ground launched shore based anti-ship missiles. When you think about it this is not only the correct strategy for Iran but also for both Chinas. There is no need to go to sea and mix it up with the big boys when all they have to do is serve tea and biscuits to the crews manning the hundreds of shore based missile launchers spread up and down the coast and even a few dozen miles inland.

It is a well known hint of madness to even talk about using warships to engage shore batteries. There are two primary reasons for this of course. Firstly, shore batteries don't run out of ammunition anywhere near as rapidly as a ship does and secondly, shore batteries don't catch fire, explode and sink.

There was a kind of ship that we in the naval service used to mention idly and which then the Royal Navy actually used a bit in the Falklands War. You can take any existing merchant hull and bolt or add any number of weapons to it and turn it into a modern Q-ship that can launch devastating attacks. It can't take it but it can dish it out. As I pointed out in the first 3 paragraphs, warships cannot take it either. It's some kind of myth that a properly built Naval He-Ship can shrug off the damage that wounds lesser ships to death and dooms them to sink but it's simply not true. Any hit at all on a modern warship will almost certainly amount to a mission kill if not a total kill.

My world class destroyer was so well designed that all of the ship's computers and fire control and fire direction equipment was lodged in the forward superstructure which would be the main point of aim for just about any radar homing missile. Any hit on that structure and it was fight's over. There was no more gunfire control, underwater battery fire control, anti-air defense or anything else.  That, oddly enough, remains the situation today with all warships I am familiar with.

Naval warfare has boiled down to an essential fact best articulated by Confederate Cavalry Commander, Nathan Bedford Forrest during the First Civil War; "Get their first with the most." The first contender to cycle through the detect to engage sequence will inflict the most devastating blow on the enemy. As long as the missile and drones ripple off successfully it really doesn't matter if they are slower then the enemy's missiles since they will complete the kill. If one side proves too slow to execute the OODA loop and radios for permissions to fire and fires half-heartedly at the enemy then it is over.

On the other hand, deception in war is taken for granted. I used to mock people long ago who swore blind that they would never lie, cheat or steal. I would point out that without practicing the arts of deceit that one would never get very proficient at it and war is unforgiving to those who are slow or dull-witted.

On that note I wonder if there is anyone who writes for the U.S. Naval Institute anymore. A century ago a lot of thoughtful articles would come out of its Proceedings and the same could be said for the War College in Newport. I stopped reading them when all they wanted to embrace was women in the naval service at every level and then DIE and then the sort of puerile nonsense that tried to sell us all on the idea that the Littoral Combat Ship was a stroke of genius and that we'd all be far better off for having bright Admirals who all thought exactly the same and never let a single spec of hesitation mar their glorious path to victory. Yeah, there towards the end it read like all that Soviet literature from right after the war.

It would be nice to think that someone in the United States has been devoting some thought to how we can make really cheap and really expendable munitions that don't need to cost an arm and a leg and that we can make hundreds of thousands of them here in America using parts made in America from parts made in America with software that has undergone full end-to-end testing and been test fired under all circumstances but I don't think we've actually done any of that.

I kind of wonder if the light attack aviation guys have considered the full effects of manpads literally everywhere on the field and if the armor guys have worked out that topdown anti-tank munitions with shaped charged cost under a thousand bucks and are ubiquitous but I really don't think those guys are out there right now at Aberdeen or Yuma testing their current inventory against the suddenly cheap and lethal smart weapons our enemies. have today. I'll bet they haven't even started trying to procure any examples for study and testing yet. 

There are no stars tomorrow for finding your own weapon systems vulnerabilities today.

FOR ITS NEXT TRICK

I listened to the sounds found in the ISS and immediately wondered what Boeing was going to do when their Starliner pulls apart the Space Station as it disconnects in prep for its return to Earth. It was right about then I wondered how the astronauts up their felt knowing as they do that even their existing onboard space suits won't work.

Makes me wonder if anybody at X is looking into just how many people can be crammed into a Dragon for a miserable but survivable return to the fleecy skies and cool green hills of Earth.

You can listen to the woeful noise yourself at the link.

ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES