Bill Buppert | The Libertarian Institute

Ford Follies: The Carrier Grift That Just Keeps Giving

by Bill Buppert | Jul 24, 2024 | Blog

Stop building these things. Even the corporate/access defense media is starting to sound the alarm bells on the multi-billion carrier fiasco that is the USS Ford which is probably causing plenty of public relations professionals in the Navy to go apoplectic. As my readers know (Podcast Episode 034 and Dispatch # 006 on my Substack), I am a long-time critic of the carrier forces thinking that they are the chariot and crossbow of the 21st century in the Earthly realm of war craft. It's sad that the tens of billions the US Navy has utterly wasted on these homages to WWII naval combat continue...

Ticonderoga Leaves the Fleet: The US Surface Navy Continues to Shrink

by Bill Buppert | Jul 23, 2024 | Blog

The US Navy surface fleet continues to shrink. And every surface hull commissioned after the Arleigh Burke class in 1991 has been a failure. The Chinese Navy exceeds the US Navy in total warships deployed. What makes this even more astonishing is that the Chinese maintain a regional naval power with optional blue water projection capabilities (mind you, untested) while the US maintains the fiction of a global capability. The current U.S. fleet is smaller, with more than 280 vessels. The Secretary of the Navy expects that strength to reach 300 in the early 2030s which is a pipe dream...

US Forces Booted Out of Niger

by Bill Buppert | Jul 22, 2024 | Blog

2024 is the end of the ten year lease after expending $110 million to build and $30 million a year to maintain the base. The French forces were booted in October 2023. American troops are leaving now and the German troops will leave in September. The military regimes of Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso marked their divorce from the rest of West Africa 10 July 2024 as they signed a treaty setting up a confederation between them and all pulled out of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) this year. Indeed, ECOWAS might not survive the Nigerien debacle in its current 15-member...

If Pigs Could Fly: The F35 Continues to Miss the Mark

by Bill Buppert | Jul 18, 2024 | Blog

The Pentagon will continue to pay Bugatti prices for Yugos until the morale improves. Software upgrades have haunted this flying circus since its "full operational status" was fabricated years ago. The combination of a severely Sovietized acquisition system married to the trillions spent on "defense" makes for a witches brew of chaos avalanches that keep on giving. And remember, the GAO further highlighted that the defense contractor’s liability cap is $100,000 per F-35 jet, despite each aircraft’s price tag ranging from $82.5 million to $109 million. Not only is the aircraft idling at a...

The Empire Strikes Back: Soldiering and Brain Injury

by Bill Buppert | Jul 17, 2024 | Blog

Whatever empires do abroad eventually comes home. Yet another unintended consequences come home in a tidal wave. This is personal; I was diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injury in 2019. I spent nearly a quarter century in the US military. I know there's a connection. This isn't isolated to the military, concussion in amateur and professional sports is real along with a number of blue collar jobs. The downstream effects of so many soldiers deployed overseas in combat theaters for the first two decades of the 21st century will resonate through American society for generations and even on the...

US Surface Navy is No Longer a Global Force

by Bill Buppert | Jul 16, 2024 | Blog

The US Navy may credibly dominate the Atlantic but the Pacific Ocean is no longer an exclusive US naval domination calculus. The Arctic is still dominated by the Russians and will remain so. The US Navy's ability to build functioning surface ships is compromised beyond repair due to a lack of proper planning, enormous maintenance backlogs, and global "commitments" taking the remaining surface fleet endlessly steaming circles in hulls with limited lifespans. Do hulls have an expiration date? Yes, they do hence the Navy retiring all 22 remaining cruisers in the fleet by 2027. Not to mention...

Ep 047 “Nagorno-Karabakh: A Dark and Robotic Future”

by Bill Buppert | Jul 15, 2024 | Chasing Ghosts Podcast

I discuss the Fall 2020 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the tiny sliver of Nagorno-Karabakh and why I would suggest that it was a glimpse into the future of warfare for the remainder of this century. the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) for the following reasons: Robotics and drones are the new "low tech" answer to the First World's exquisite military platform that are over priced and have the same provenance of battleships planet-wide in January 1942. The electronic emissions environment in future conflicts will be a two-way street that will put any active acquisition sensors and...

US Government Teachers: The Overseas Army of Marxian Educators

by Bill Buppert | Jul 11, 2024 | Blog

When I was active duty and deployed overseas, we thankfully home educated our children because the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) is just as rancid and immoral as the government schools in CONUS. They lied, the DoDEA did not cancel their IED propaganda in the DoD schools. They shifted the funding to a less visible place. As you can imagine, it may be even worse than the NEA/AFT Marxist madrassas that soil the landscape of America in government schooling. The DoDEA refuses to disclose the individual salaries of its staff, unlike government schools nationwide and almost every...

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Israel Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War

by Gary Vogler

Domestic Imperialism: Nine Reasons I Left Progressivism

by Keith Knight

Imagine the Catholic Church (or any person or group of people) doing what the government does every day: Everyone who doesn’t give the Catholic Church 25% of his annual income every year will be put in jail. If he resists the Jesuit officer, the officer has the right...

Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania

by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

FOREWORD BY JAY BHATTACHARYA, MD, PHD Diary of a Psychosis is different from all other books on Covid: it traces the development of the government response as it happened, bit by bit, and subjects it to relentless scrutiny: did any of it do any good? It thereby...