POTUS revealed the latest US naval ship catastrophe, the Mango Emperor-class battleship. Apparently he and his staff did not get the memorandum from 8 December 1941. The US Navy has not built a successful hull since the Arleigh Burke (early 90s) and has had huge problems with the Zumwalt, Little Crappy Ship and the Ford carrier. Did I mention the latest mercifully euthanized USN Constellation frigate program that got cancelled after the Navy sunk nearly $2 billion into the program before cutting it in late 2025, with costs per ship rising from $1B to $1.4B? Those costs would not have been...

The Chasing Ghosts and WarNotes podcasts are on Christmas vacation, next episode will be published on Monday, 5 January 2026.   See you next year. Stay strapped for Christmas...

I love it that the National Health Service (NHS) socialist medical horror show in the UK uses the handle NHSuk on the X. The United Kingdom prides itself on this crown jewel of medical malpractice & incompetence that is a love child of Benny Hill, Trofim Lysenko and Nikolai Alexandrovich Semashko. Yes, it does indeed SUCK.

The foreign purchase entanglement and moral hazard of overspending of the F35 is emblematic of making a two trillion dollar purchase over time where the money is simply wasted but driven to completion by the sheer momentum of the insane and imbecilic US military acquisition system. If you have read my blog here at LI, you know I take the F35 to task all the time because it is a warning for today and far into the future on what NOT to do. The F35 fiasco has literally stripped the US military capability to fight in the 21st century peer combat theaters of this century. The military value of a...

The British Army is in the same crisis mode as the Royal Navy; they're a post-imperial military basket case that could not fight an invasion of Sports Illustrated swimsuit models. They would be defeated. Across the board with the possible exception of the vaunted Special Air Service and the Royal Marines, the British military project is a shambles. It can't float submarines that do the right thing, it can't deploy its conventional-fueled aircraft carriers and it has experienced a steady decline in manpower across the board. Per the Ajax Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV): Health & Safety...

So pardon me for a rather technical discussion that points out yet another flaw in the haunted and ridiculously poorly performing F35 program. Why was Shipborne Rolling Vertical Landing (SRVL) EXTREMELY important for the UK carriers? The SRVL capability needs as little as 10% of the F-35B entire fuel capacity during the landing process. During SRVL, the F-35B nose is pitched up and the fighter glides to a landing by friction on wheels only, with no outside assistance. As good as this capability is at conserving fuel, it is very difficult and dangerous, there is no guarantee SRVL will work...

I suspect the Israeli military force losses are even greater than they let on. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) last won a war in 1973; everything else has been a stalemate or a near-run defeat. This latest massacre machine against defenseless humans may be the last gasp of an always overestimated military entity. During two years of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, the military lost 923 troops and saw 6,399 wounded, while roughly 20,000 soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress, according to Israeli media citing army data. Under heavy military censorship, the army faces accusations of...

2028. The plan is to spend four trillion more before they can deliver on proving where the money is going. You can't make this up. I read the GAO reports so you don't have to. If fraud was a Ferris wheel, it would be shaped like the Pentagon. The Marine Corps is the only organization to complete an audit and they comprise one percent of all DoD spending. One percent. As previously discussed, the Marine Corps was able to obtain and sustain a clean audit opinion in fiscal years 2023 and 2024 largely through a substantive-based audit approach and manual effort. The Marine Corps’ auditor noted...