Keeping an Eye on the Long Game: Part XCIII

the harvest from inattention and maladministration

It is behind the WSJ paywall, but the first blurb tells you really what you need to know;

President Biden says he’ll boost defense spending next year because the world is more dangerous. But the budget details don’t match his rhetoric, and Exhibit A is the bleak outlook for the Navy. The bill for decades of complacency and neglect is coming due at a dangerous moment, as China ramps up its fleet.

The almost malicious intent behind the intentional shrinking of our inheritance of being the worlds' premier Navy by inattention of the Executive and Legislative Branches of government is only matched by the distracted maladministration inside the lifetimes by a series of sub-optimal senior leaders.

You can read a lot, but in the Long Game series we've been running for over a decade and a half - be try to look down the road at the big pixels.

Friend to the blog Claude Berube has been very good on providing visuals on the relative power curves of the USN vs. the PLAN, and Thomas Shugart has as well. Shugart's latest graph, slightly modified, is in the WSJ editorial and in a screencap he was kind enough to get some verbiage to go with it.

It kind of speaks for itself;

I'll be clear here; China did not take away our maritime overmatch, we gave it away. The leaders we elected promoted the people who decided the stewardship of their inheritance purchased with the lives of hundreds of thousands of their countrymen of prior generations was less important than ... well ... you know the story from here.

Behold the harvest of that which had sown.