THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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