If we could give the DEI folk life support and all their "knowledge" for transfer to the enemy, it could work better than throwing plague-ridden cows into a castle.
You make it a joke but DEI manuals have their place. If it is widely perceived in November that the election was stolen, a lot of officers won't want to fight. The DEI manuals helped weed out the most extreme among them already. The officers who continued their careers despite DEI will be willing to fight even if they think the election was stolen.
A production rate of 12 per year is crafting, not industrial production.
“Lovingly hand crafted from artisanal aluminum, free trade copper wiring, and boutique semiconductors, these pieces of art are the perfect addition to the discriminating collector’s modern art display…”
But practicing with an empty container doesn't = combat capability with live rounds.
And for the life of me I cannot understanding broadcasting to our world enemies the pitiful procurement we have to defend against the greatest threat. Geez Louise, it's like "Here's your Glock 19, and here's your 2 rounds of hollow points, make every round count, no more until next year and good luck".
I think we need a heavy emphasis on guided missile cruisers. For too long the U.S. has depended on carriers for both air supremacy and strike. With ballistic missiles and hypersonic missiles, anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic missiles are increasingly important. Also, for strike, cruise missiles offer better ability against an enemy with a significant investment in anti-aircraft missiles.
From the Arsenal of Democracy to this in a little over two generations. Thank you, "smartest" people in the room. And by smartest I mean overly credentialed. Globalization: the gift that keeps on giving.
Tell your kids and grandkids to learn Mandarin Chinese.
Building enough birds on an industrial scale is the first part of the problem. Getting them into ships' empty magazines is the second. Too bad we decommed our tenders with at-sea reloading capability.
The real problem was tender captains knew more about real logistics than Airedales so they were potentially going to get flag positions because they could answer congressional questions without a PP briefing.
That's why tenders had to go. Their captains had to be smarter than carrier captains and that was a threat to the Airedales controlling all the flag ranks.
Also why SW was gutted. It's all about protecting the careers of the Airedales.
They cost so much because we only buy 12. If we buy them in quantity there are all sorts of ways to make production more efficient and cost less. The first one cost a fortune. The 1,000-th one should cost a whole lot less.
Interesting idea. Look at the Starlink satellite project. There are thousands of them in orbit and they just work. He has an relatively cheap and effective system to launch them. NASA just looks stupid. From reading Cdr Sal, it sounds like the Pentagon is a purchasing catastrophe. Buy missiles from the guy without all of the "military industrial complex" and see how fast and cheap he can do it. I wonder how bad it has to get before we got all of that crap out of the way and let people like Musk build stuff.
US Navy needs to go offensive instead of throwing more money on defense with a tight deadlines and budget.
The best defense is offense.
There need to be realistic tradeoff and balance between defense and offense like 80% offense and 20% defense.
That's why Cold War nuclear MAD is effective.
That means ramping up production of offensive missiles. Lots of it.
The PRC also knows that they have weaker or non-existence defense against US missiles.
The only reason for an anti-ballistic missile defense is to live another day for further offense by protecting enough ability left to retaliate significantly.
We are not a serious Navy. We have no one with the influence or panache or the credibility to move the chains on this issue. It’s simple: we need the fucking missiles.
I’m betting that our batteries are not even filled to 100% at sea and we have no visibility on the casreps of the mk41 launchers.
Sounds about right on CASREPS. I've heard from sailors about ships having all sorts of material issues but still going to sea. Nothing I can prove, but they get me to thank my lucky stars I was onboard SSBNs when active duty.
Mind you, that's nothing new in some ways. I remember a retired CWO who worked for PSNS as a test engineer say he'd kept his MK 112 ASROC launcher (special weapons capable!) working with beer can aluminum on the hydraulics systems for pinhole leaks in the 1970s (1). I think we need to end the presumption of equal need between the services unless there's going to be a massive money infusion across the board. Our coasting off the 1980's build up is ending, and the recapitalization is expensive, but less expensive than defeat.
(1) Sea story: The engineer said they had a drug and alcohol problem in that era, to the point where he found a shipmate's pot stash in the special tools locker, and found out who it belonged to by pitching it overboard. The guy who brought it was not happy. That's why we all get the whiz quiz...
My CWO had me and my shop take apart every component with visible damage in a system whenever we had a fire or flooded. Once the system was repaired and back on line, the box of charred/salted pieces would come back to the workbench and be stripped down to individual components (resistors, springs in contactors, etc.) If they were still functional they would be labeled and stored in the Vidmars. He was big on having "backups" outside of the supply system. Got us back up quickly a time or two. Amazing how paranoid CWOs used to be!
We still are. I had my Chief stock up on shit paper. He couldn’t figure out why. We traded that shit paper on cruise for onion skin (chart paper) with the flag staff and coffee from the CAG staff.
On my first ship, a DE, we ran out of toilet paper on the return from a NorLant deployment. We Radarmen had a plentiful supply of Maneuvering Board (H.O. 2665-10) and DRT paper (onion skin). It got traded for pastries from the galley, and IOU's for future favors from shipmates. We never turned down an Officer or Chief, not that many asked. But when one did we acted prudently. It was 1967...R. still H.I.P. Most of those IOU's were honored. And there's always a few toads, orcs and trolls on any ship. They got to use their socks.
On our 1983-84 deployment on FFG-9 I stowed away 10 rolls of premium, pink, quilted, multi-ply, ultra soft and fluffy toilet paper. About mid-cruise I'd take a roll to the head to take my morning dump during rush hour...0900-1000 as you sea duty types will know. "Geebus, Flowers. Where did you get that?" some LT or department head might ask me. "Oh this? I have a roll or two and didn't want it to go bad. You want it? It's new, untouched. I'm OK using shit paper with an NSN. Warrant Officers have cast iron asses. Here, take it." Dale Carnegie was a genius.
Shit paper is and always will be a precious commodity at sea. I learned this during the Desert Storm deployment on a Knox class as a young second class. I carried that lesson 10 years later as a CWO division officer. We spent a lot of our supply optar on shit paper and stored in the overhead and deck spaces. We never ran out.. my Sailors kept their mouths shut and we had real coffee when other divisions had Banka. I think recall we got a pizza delivery in the PG for a trade of a few rolls to the Helo squadron operations officer.
The art of cumshaw. Our Knox class Frigate went into drydock in Pearl Harbor. Our S.E.A./Mess President, a BTCS, befriended a 60 year old Portagee Shop 99 guy and made him an honorary Chief...gave him a ballcap too. For the duration of our SRA we had running water in the Chief's Mess, our kitchen sink, urinals and sinks in the head drained, and we had air conditioning piped in. Our new honorary Chief got to play backgammon and pinochle in the mess, take naps on the plush couch, had free run of the reefer and grill. Win-win for him and us. Lord, in the Yokosuka SRF you could get anything done without paperwork for a 20 lbs tin of coffee. But it was always the snoopy SUPPO trying to kibosh the good deals. The 1110's had a better grasp of economics. Did you, Mr. T, ever encounter a SUPPO who analyzed your coffee mess using a slide rule and a Pecksniffian sense of righteousness who refused an issue of coffee when you were almost out? Or opened the tin and issued only 13.7 lbs instead of the whole 20 because "that's all you're allowed". But, God bless the Supply guys. King Neptune and the C.O. have a way of nurturing them. Most of them, anyway. I always wanted to take a peek at the NSCS curriculum in Athens to satisfy my WTF-ian curiosity.
In the 80's, I had a sailor who stashed his hash in the balloon inflation room on the Nimitz (back aft stbd where the landing light thingy is now) .. he would hide it in the angle iron stiffeners about 10 feet up .. no zone inspector ever reached up there :)
Hah! We had a clever MAA (a GMGC) on one of the Frigates I served on in the 70s during the Navy's big drug problem. He'd look for and find small stashes of drugs in places like overhead wire bundles. Rather than report it to the CO/XO he'd toss it over the side and then look for sailors having fistfights. Back then the penalty for drug use was the "Party Pack", 2 weeks restriction and extra duty, $50 fine and a suspended bust. The MAA thought that a beating of a druggie by a suspicious and vindictive druggie shipmate was better. It didn't decrease drug use, but I think the Chief was on to something. It took a gutsy CNO, Adm. Hayward, to kibosh the drug problem circa 1982. We lost 10% of the crew on our FFG to OTH discharges. We got our Navy back. Where is a gutsy CNO now when we need one? Arms need to be twisted, people yelled at.
If I wasn't held down by the family, I'd be looking to move for finding a job at a production facility. Like a twitter post from David Larter yesterday on strategic weapons modernization, this has been a long time coming, and there's a lot of people who see it as priority. We're working off the 1980's defense build up, and the time for recapitalization should have started 10 years ago, but it hasn't. Thank the Lord we haven't had to start paying dane-geld!
O/T but apropos, apparently there have been sustained nightly visits by exceptionally large drones over east coast bases.
If leadership can't deal with an immediate active threat within conus, how can you expect them to be intellectually capable of dealing with something as complex as replenishment analysis.
Just heard about this....for two weeks straight they were over the Langley/Norfolk-area, not a single air-search radar or any Aegis equip'd shipped was able to get its SPY-1 up and running? FOGO leadership's only response is '..they're baffled'
Then there's the Chinese student who was flying his drone over Newport...later discovered with a one-way airplane ticket to, Beijing.
Back in the 60s in Norfolk onboard a DDG we Radarmen did not stand a Quarterdeck watch but instead stood a CIC watch inport 24 hours a day for a Plan Zulu drill. The drill could come at any time and the duty Radarman had to plot an incoming Pearl Harbor style air raid (read from a script over a UHF circuit) on the DRT, inform the CDO and first thing on the morning after turn in the plot to some office on D&S piers. There were no real aircraft involved and I don't recall us ever having to light off radars for the drill. But if it was not a drill the CDO would have gone as GQ as a duty section could. God forbid some Radarman was asleep at the switch.
I’m now quite sure the first two weeks will be more painful, or at least as painful as Pearl Harbour. And the next 3 to 36 months even more painful.
And if there are still people who will care and be in charge after 5 years, investigations will find, to no one’s surprise, about malicious influence and received bribes all the way back to 2000? 2010? that caused all this.
I think what we have now is an unrecognised Cold War, with bits of actual hot war in some places. But only the CCP actually knows and behaves like it is so.
It appears that if China moves on Taiwan, it's theirs's for the taking. It seems fairly clear from the briefings of CDRs Salamander and McGrath that our posture is so backfooted that we cannot go toe to toe with China.
I'd be curious to know our VLS throw weight after we get finished with the AEGIS cruiser drawdown. That's a problem that is imminent. The lack of missiles and lack of interest in producing replacements is another. Both are critical points of failure. Combined with the lopsided deficit spending use of multi-million dollar missiles to defend against numerous cheap threat drone / missile platforms reeks of deliberately planning to fail. But, we're executing that plan flawlessly, so there's that.
Excellent article. Just wondering if the THAAD deployment to Israel is some sort of bribe to the Israelis on their future target choices in Iran. Yeah, I'm cynical.
Captain Mongo: You are not cynical. You are paying attention. Deploying a THAAD battery to Israel undermines Israel's deterrence, making it more likely, not less likely, that Iran or another actor will fire more capable ballistic missiles at Israel, and making Israel more reliant on US military "assistance." Congress will jump on board, using aid to Israel as a wedge issue. Plus, there will be US boots on the ground in Israel, further underscoring Israel's dependency on the US military. Israel needs more offensive capabilities, including increased, home-built supplies of conventional munitions and systems.
Netanyahu has to honor the threat that Biden presents. No one hates depending on another country more than Bibi, but for now, Israel is dependent upon the U.S. I read that Israel is doing what it can, under the circumstances, to reduce that dependence. But for now...
If the Germans could figure out how to rearm and refuel U-Boats off our east coast 80 years ago then we should be able to do the same with our VLS cells west of Wake.
If we had an adequate number of ships we would not need to reload at sea. A ship on station would go to a port and be replaced by another one on station.
Of course. The great circle distance from Guam to the rough center of the SCS is ~1600 nm. About 3.5 days transit at 20 kts. Wiki list the range of an AB DDG at about 4500 nm at 20 kts, so 2/3 of the bunkers burned for a round trip. The PI and Japan would be nice but close enough to be readily attacked.
We are an incredibly unserious country. We and the entirety of NATO can’t make enough munitions and weapons to match Russia output. We blew through a years production worth of sea-based interceptors in one engagement in the middle east. And yet we are contemplating having a naval war with China in their hemisphere.
19th Century pirates, any pirates are far scarier to me than latter-day Ming Dynasty land brigands. Pirates first, sand crabs second. But maybe I've read too much naval fiction.
With our dysfunctional NAVSEA, we would not be able to repair or replace any damaged/sunk ships for years. We would run out of munitions in a week or two, again not being able to replace that ammo for years. Fighting China at the end of our supply line (to the extent it exists) and basically within sight of China's shores is a suckers bet.
Agree. I won’t criticize NAVSEA, but it’s obvious that in a naval war in China’s “backyard”, we would quickly run out of munitions, and our shipbuilding capacities are puny which means our repair capacity is puny.
My understanding is that we have an almost unlimited supply of DEI manuals.
Our almost unlimited supply of HR reps can throw those manuals at the enemy.
How many launchable DEI-manual-equipped HR Reps can they fit into an Arleigh Burke class’s VLS cells?
Trebuchets. See my post above.
LOL .. I had ChatGPT create an image of a DEI person being launched from a Terebuchet .. hillarious ..
My suggestion would be to throw the HR DEI crowd at the enemy, using trebuchets, because going medieval isn't always bad.
If we could give the DEI folk life support and all their "knowledge" for transfer to the enemy, it could work better than throwing plague-ridden cows into a castle.
Diversity is our strength and will more than make up for the lack of missiles and ships.
You make it a joke but DEI manuals have their place. If it is widely perceived in November that the election was stolen, a lot of officers won't want to fight. The DEI manuals helped weed out the most extreme among them already. The officers who continued their careers despite DEI will be willing to fight even if they think the election was stolen.
DEI manuals are useful if you have a new puppy.
To be fair, if you have one, you have a surplus already
A production rate of 12 per year is crafting, not industrial production.
“Lovingly hand crafted from artisanal aluminum, free trade copper wiring, and boutique semiconductors, these pieces of art are the perfect addition to the discriminating collector’s modern art display…”
Only if those artisans were chosen with equity as the primary goal.
Wrapped in rich Corinthian leather…
Picked dew fresh in Iraq...
Not on a 'War Footing' . . . that is for sure. This Must Be Escalated NOW!
Here's a question: What's the max rate that they can be built at? Is it so intricate that it take 2 weeks per missile?
To who?
War Zone just had article on reloading VLS: https://www.twz.com/news-features/navy-just-demonstrated-reloading-vertical-launch-system-at-sea-for-the-first-time
But practicing with an empty container doesn't = combat capability with live rounds.
And for the life of me I cannot understanding broadcasting to our world enemies the pitiful procurement we have to defend against the greatest threat. Geez Louise, it's like "Here's your Glock 19, and here's your 2 rounds of hollow points, make every round count, no more until next year and good luck".
Nice sea state. Good place to start though. https://www.dvidshub.net/image/8695239/uss-chosin-cg-65-and-usns-washington-chambers-t-ake-11-conduct-transferrable-rearming-mechanism-tram
It’s a start
I think we need a heavy emphasis on guided missile cruisers. For too long the U.S. has depended on carriers for both air supremacy and strike. With ballistic missiles and hypersonic missiles, anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic missiles are increasingly important. Also, for strike, cruise missiles offer better ability against an enemy with a significant investment in anti-aircraft missiles.
Bonhomme Richard?
The latest DDG(x) program does just that. The crux of course is getting it all planned-out, funded then can a yard build it...on-time.
From the Arsenal of Democracy to this in a little over two generations. Thank you, "smartest" people in the room. And by smartest I mean overly credentialed. Globalization: the gift that keeps on giving.
Tell your kids and grandkids to learn Mandarin Chinese.
You can, however, find a wide variety of goods at low prices at Wal Mart.
Building enough birds on an industrial scale is the first part of the problem. Getting them into ships' empty magazines is the second. Too bad we decommed our tenders with at-sea reloading capability.
Tenders are the opposite of "transformational."
The real problem was tender captains knew more about real logistics than Airedales so they were potentially going to get flag positions because they could answer congressional questions without a PP briefing.
That's why tenders had to go. Their captains had to be smarter than carrier captains and that was a threat to the Airedales controlling all the flag ranks.
Also why SW was gutted. It's all about protecting the careers of the Airedales.
We better start getting our SM-3 production up to about 3000 a year then.
They cost so much because we only buy 12. If we buy them in quantity there are all sorts of ways to make production more efficient and cost less. The first one cost a fortune. The 1,000-th one should cost a whole lot less.
Only if we put Elon Musk in charge of building them.
Interesting idea. Look at the Starlink satellite project. There are thousands of them in orbit and they just work. He has an relatively cheap and effective system to launch them. NASA just looks stupid. From reading Cdr Sal, it sounds like the Pentagon is a purchasing catastrophe. Buy missiles from the guy without all of the "military industrial complex" and see how fast and cheap he can do it. I wonder how bad it has to get before we got all of that crap out of the way and let people like Musk build stuff.
US Navy needs to go offensive instead of throwing more money on defense with a tight deadlines and budget.
The best defense is offense.
There need to be realistic tradeoff and balance between defense and offense like 80% offense and 20% defense.
That's why Cold War nuclear MAD is effective.
That means ramping up production of offensive missiles. Lots of it.
The PRC also knows that they have weaker or non-existence defense against US missiles.
The only reason for an anti-ballistic missile defense is to live another day for further offense by protecting enough ability left to retaliate significantly.
We are not a serious Navy. We have no one with the influence or panache or the credibility to move the chains on this issue. It’s simple: we need the fucking missiles.
I’m betting that our batteries are not even filled to 100% at sea and we have no visibility on the casreps of the mk41 launchers.
Sounds about right on CASREPS. I've heard from sailors about ships having all sorts of material issues but still going to sea. Nothing I can prove, but they get me to thank my lucky stars I was onboard SSBNs when active duty.
Mind you, that's nothing new in some ways. I remember a retired CWO who worked for PSNS as a test engineer say he'd kept his MK 112 ASROC launcher (special weapons capable!) working with beer can aluminum on the hydraulics systems for pinhole leaks in the 1970s (1). I think we need to end the presumption of equal need between the services unless there's going to be a massive money infusion across the board. Our coasting off the 1980's build up is ending, and the recapitalization is expensive, but less expensive than defeat.
(1) Sea story: The engineer said they had a drug and alcohol problem in that era, to the point where he found a shipmate's pot stash in the special tools locker, and found out who it belonged to by pitching it overboard. The guy who brought it was not happy. That's why we all get the whiz quiz...
My CWO had me and my shop take apart every component with visible damage in a system whenever we had a fire or flooded. Once the system was repaired and back on line, the box of charred/salted pieces would come back to the workbench and be stripped down to individual components (resistors, springs in contactors, etc.) If they were still functional they would be labeled and stored in the Vidmars. He was big on having "backups" outside of the supply system. Got us back up quickly a time or two. Amazing how paranoid CWOs used to be!
We still are. I had my Chief stock up on shit paper. He couldn’t figure out why. We traded that shit paper on cruise for onion skin (chart paper) with the flag staff and coffee from the CAG staff.
Like in the 1960's novel, The Ship With The Flat Tire!
On my first ship, a DE, we ran out of toilet paper on the return from a NorLant deployment. We Radarmen had a plentiful supply of Maneuvering Board (H.O. 2665-10) and DRT paper (onion skin). It got traded for pastries from the galley, and IOU's for future favors from shipmates. We never turned down an Officer or Chief, not that many asked. But when one did we acted prudently. It was 1967...R. still H.I.P. Most of those IOU's were honored. And there's always a few toads, orcs and trolls on any ship. They got to use their socks.
On our 1983-84 deployment on FFG-9 I stowed away 10 rolls of premium, pink, quilted, multi-ply, ultra soft and fluffy toilet paper. About mid-cruise I'd take a roll to the head to take my morning dump during rush hour...0900-1000 as you sea duty types will know. "Geebus, Flowers. Where did you get that?" some LT or department head might ask me. "Oh this? I have a roll or two and didn't want it to go bad. You want it? It's new, untouched. I'm OK using shit paper with an NSN. Warrant Officers have cast iron asses. Here, take it." Dale Carnegie was a genius.
Shit paper is and always will be a precious commodity at sea. I learned this during the Desert Storm deployment on a Knox class as a young second class. I carried that lesson 10 years later as a CWO division officer. We spent a lot of our supply optar on shit paper and stored in the overhead and deck spaces. We never ran out.. my Sailors kept their mouths shut and we had real coffee when other divisions had Banka. I think recall we got a pizza delivery in the PG for a trade of a few rolls to the Helo squadron operations officer.
The art of cumshaw. Our Knox class Frigate went into drydock in Pearl Harbor. Our S.E.A./Mess President, a BTCS, befriended a 60 year old Portagee Shop 99 guy and made him an honorary Chief...gave him a ballcap too. For the duration of our SRA we had running water in the Chief's Mess, our kitchen sink, urinals and sinks in the head drained, and we had air conditioning piped in. Our new honorary Chief got to play backgammon and pinochle in the mess, take naps on the plush couch, had free run of the reefer and grill. Win-win for him and us. Lord, in the Yokosuka SRF you could get anything done without paperwork for a 20 lbs tin of coffee. But it was always the snoopy SUPPO trying to kibosh the good deals. The 1110's had a better grasp of economics. Did you, Mr. T, ever encounter a SUPPO who analyzed your coffee mess using a slide rule and a Pecksniffian sense of righteousness who refused an issue of coffee when you were almost out? Or opened the tin and issued only 13.7 lbs instead of the whole 20 because "that's all you're allowed". But, God bless the Supply guys. King Neptune and the C.O. have a way of nurturing them. Most of them, anyway. I always wanted to take a peek at the NSCS curriculum in Athens to satisfy my WTF-ian curiosity.
In the 80's, I had a sailor who stashed his hash in the balloon inflation room on the Nimitz (back aft stbd where the landing light thingy is now) .. he would hide it in the angle iron stiffeners about 10 feet up .. no zone inspector ever reached up there :)
One person shits their pants, we all wear a diaper.
Hah! We had a clever MAA (a GMGC) on one of the Frigates I served on in the 70s during the Navy's big drug problem. He'd look for and find small stashes of drugs in places like overhead wire bundles. Rather than report it to the CO/XO he'd toss it over the side and then look for sailors having fistfights. Back then the penalty for drug use was the "Party Pack", 2 weeks restriction and extra duty, $50 fine and a suspended bust. The MAA thought that a beating of a druggie by a suspicious and vindictive druggie shipmate was better. It didn't decrease drug use, but I think the Chief was on to something. It took a gutsy CNO, Adm. Hayward, to kibosh the drug problem circa 1982. We lost 10% of the crew on our FFG to OTH discharges. We got our Navy back. Where is a gutsy CNO now when we need one? Arms need to be twisted, people yelled at.
Sadly, the New Zealand Navy leadership no longer looks serious either. They appear to have deid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_0X7lXh5pc
If I wasn't held down by the family, I'd be looking to move for finding a job at a production facility. Like a twitter post from David Larter yesterday on strategic weapons modernization, this has been a long time coming, and there's a lot of people who see it as priority. We're working off the 1980's defense build up, and the time for recapitalization should have started 10 years ago, but it hasn't. Thank the Lord we haven't had to start paying dane-geld!
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_danegeld.htm
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_dykes.htm
O/T but apropos, apparently there have been sustained nightly visits by exceptionally large drones over east coast bases.
If leadership can't deal with an immediate active threat within conus, how can you expect them to be intellectually capable of dealing with something as complex as replenishment analysis.
Just heard about this....for two weeks straight they were over the Langley/Norfolk-area, not a single air-search radar or any Aegis equip'd shipped was able to get its SPY-1 up and running? FOGO leadership's only response is '..they're baffled'
Then there's the Chinese student who was flying his drone over Newport...later discovered with a one-way airplane ticket to, Beijing.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/12/24197356/chinese-national-graduate-student-espionage-act-drone-navy-shipyard-plea-guilty
Back in the 60s in Norfolk onboard a DDG we Radarmen did not stand a Quarterdeck watch but instead stood a CIC watch inport 24 hours a day for a Plan Zulu drill. The drill could come at any time and the duty Radarman had to plot an incoming Pearl Harbor style air raid (read from a script over a UHF circuit) on the DRT, inform the CDO and first thing on the morning after turn in the plot to some office on D&S piers. There were no real aircraft involved and I don't recall us ever having to light off radars for the drill. But if it was not a drill the CDO would have gone as GQ as a duty section could. God forbid some Radarman was asleep at the switch.
I'm sure there's more to the recent air incursions than what's being led on
And if there is anything potentially embarrassing about it, it'll get classified and black-holed.
Most certainly.
I'd like to think this is some Red Cell EX but...knowing how .gov operates or, doesn't, there's a LOT of gaps/shadows to exploit.
I’m now quite sure the first two weeks will be more painful, or at least as painful as Pearl Harbour. And the next 3 to 36 months even more painful.
And if there are still people who will care and be in charge after 5 years, investigations will find, to no one’s surprise, about malicious influence and received bribes all the way back to 2000? 2010? that caused all this.
I think what we have now is an unrecognised Cold War, with bits of actual hot war in some places. But only the CCP actually knows and behaves like it is so.
Visit Taiwan while you still can.
I have, thankfully.
It appears that if China moves on Taiwan, it's theirs's for the taking. It seems fairly clear from the briefings of CDRs Salamander and McGrath that our posture is so backfooted that we cannot go toe to toe with China.
Yep, exactly. I think Taiwan is basically lost, unless the west (not only US) course corrects, well, yesterday.
In Taiwan they think America is lost.
I'd be curious to know our VLS throw weight after we get finished with the AEGIS cruiser drawdown. That's a problem that is imminent. The lack of missiles and lack of interest in producing replacements is another. Both are critical points of failure. Combined with the lopsided deficit spending use of multi-million dollar missiles to defend against numerous cheap threat drone / missile platforms reeks of deliberately planning to fail. But, we're executing that plan flawlessly, so there's that.
I care more about number of rounds and speed we can bring them to a target. VLS slows that process down so far as I am concerned.
Excellent article. Just wondering if the THAAD deployment to Israel is some sort of bribe to the Israelis on their future target choices in Iran. Yeah, I'm cynical.
Either that or the “Big Green Machine” wanting some air time and visibility for their kinetic defenses…my cynicism showing…
Captain Mongo: You are not cynical. You are paying attention. Deploying a THAAD battery to Israel undermines Israel's deterrence, making it more likely, not less likely, that Iran or another actor will fire more capable ballistic missiles at Israel, and making Israel more reliant on US military "assistance." Congress will jump on board, using aid to Israel as a wedge issue. Plus, there will be US boots on the ground in Israel, further underscoring Israel's dependency on the US military. Israel needs more offensive capabilities, including increased, home-built supplies of conventional munitions and systems.
More boots on the ground means more hatred of the U.S. in the Middle East. As if we don't have enough already.
Netanyahu has to honor the threat that Biden presents. No one hates depending on another country more than Bibi, but for now, Israel is dependent upon the U.S. I read that Israel is doing what it can, under the circumstances, to reduce that dependence. But for now...
Biden made Bibi support Ukraine thereby giving up the cordial relations that he and Putin had.
The result was 10/7. Iran would never have allowed HAMAS to carry out that attack without get the OK from its big brothers in Moscow and Beijing.
“No training time outs in war.” 🎯
No participation 🏆 either.
If the Germans could figure out how to rearm and refuel U-Boats off our east coast 80 years ago then we should be able to do the same with our VLS cells west of Wake.
https://naval-encyclopedia.com/ww2/germany/type-xiv-u-boats.php
If we had an adequate number of ships we would not need to reload at sea. A ship on station would go to a port and be replaced by another one on station.
Of course. The great circle distance from Guam to the rough center of the SCS is ~1600 nm. About 3.5 days transit at 20 kts. Wiki list the range of an AB DDG at about 4500 nm at 20 kts, so 2/3 of the bunkers burned for a round trip. The PI and Japan would be nice but close enough to be readily attacked.
We are an incredibly unserious country. We and the entirety of NATO can’t make enough munitions and weapons to match Russia output. We blew through a years production worth of sea-based interceptors in one engagement in the middle east. And yet we are contemplating having a naval war with China in their hemisphere.
Aaron: One engagement in the Middle East, against early 19th Century pirates equipped with motor boats, missiles and UAVs.
19th Century pirates, any pirates are far scarier to me than latter-day Ming Dynasty land brigands. Pirates first, sand crabs second. But maybe I've read too much naval fiction.
The more I learn, the less I think that we will go to war against China on their home turf. We would lose.
We probably would lose, or at least lose a lot of ships and see Taiwan get pummeled.
With our dysfunctional NAVSEA, we would not be able to repair or replace any damaged/sunk ships for years. We would run out of munitions in a week or two, again not being able to replace that ammo for years. Fighting China at the end of our supply line (to the extent it exists) and basically within sight of China's shores is a suckers bet.
Agree. I won’t criticize NAVSEA, but it’s obvious that in a naval war in China’s “backyard”, we would quickly run out of munitions, and our shipbuilding capacities are puny which means our repair capacity is puny.
The Left is very serious about DEI and CRT. They see people like us as the enemy. Thye think Party not country.
Recall Hongkong? Next Taiwan, entirely up to Chinese timing.
That’s the most likely outcome