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Sealift Takes a Dump: The US Navy Continues to Degrade

by | Aug 26, 2024 |

Another USN ship disaster in the offing. Contrary to what one would first think, this is tangential to the "IED* recruiting crisis." This is due to a separate recruiting crisis in Military Sealift Command (MSC) caused by the extreme workloads the civilian mariners who crew these ships are subjected to - far in excess of what military sailors or mariners working in the civilian sector are expected to do. The US Navy is, of course, not looking to the future and treating the oversight and incompetence as simply more tens of millions of dollars they can write off. All 12 currently-active...

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Ep 050 “Storming America: TTP to Make you Free (Part II)”

Ep 050 “Storming America: TTP to Make you Free (Part II)”

by | Aug 26, 2024 |

My Storming America Series covers the gamut of what the spontaneous attack in the US will look like when terror cells launch a simultaneous attack on the US homeland. I cover it in Episodes 37, 41-43 and 49-50 of my Chasing Ghosts podcast. This is an episode to examine what you can do about the coming civil unrest in America. I discuss some of the tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) the free range human can employ to prepare and protect themselves for the coming unpleasantness. I further discuss weapons, kit, preps and training to prepare for what I consider the inevitable conflict...

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Broken: The American Shipbuilding Crisis

by | Aug 22, 2024 |

USS The Sullivans sinking in New York in 2022. Over the decades, the destroyers have fallen into various states of disrepair. In April 2022, The Sullivans suffered a hull breach and partially sank at the Buffalo and Erie County Naval & Military Park in Buffalo, New York. The vessel had previously been observed taking on water. Despite undergoing repairs in the immediate aftermath of the sinking, additional work is required to make The Sullivans safe.  The US can't build ships that work. The US can't build ships that don't work in volume. The USS The Sullivans (DD-537) above is one the...

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Surprise! Ukrainian Aid is Mismanaged

by | Aug 21, 2024 |

One discovers that war-making by the West after WWII around the world started to see a trend that Smedley Butler would knowingly nod at as the sophisticated money-laundering complex to provide weapons and assistance in hundreds of conflicts.The tracking and auditing of these weapons transfers have not always been up to the standards one would expect responsible providers and agencies to employ to provision arms and assistance. Well, the latest GAO report is out and the findings are not pretty and I think they underestimate the graft and criminality not only in the end use delivery in the...

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The Emperor Has No Clothes: Stealth Technology is Sexy and Useless

by | Aug 20, 2024 |

On 27 March 1999, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, a Yugoslav Army unit (3rd Battalion of the 250th Air Defense Missile Brigade, which was under the leadership of Colonel Zoltán Dani) shot down an F-117 Nighthawk stealth aircraft of the United States Air Force by firing a S-125 Neva/Pechora surface-to-air missile. It was the first ever shootdown of a stealth technology airplane. The F-117, which entered service with the U.S. Air Force in 1983 was the first operational aircraft to be designed using stealth technology; by comparison, the Yugoslav air defenses were considered relatively...

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Sig P320/M17/18: MILSPEC is Overrated

by | Aug 19, 2024 |

A negligent discharge (ND) in a weapon is when the operator strokes the trigger that results in the firing of the weapon. In my time, the lion's share of these are NDs but actual mechanical (unintentional, accidental or "uncommanded") discharges were rare and then the SIG-Sauer P320 arrives and now it becomes the Accidental Discharge (AD) king in the SIG pistol. NDs are a training issue and AD is a mechanical issue that causes it to fire. SIG settled two cases out of court but Robert Zimmerman just prevailed in winning a court case that may start the train on finally resolving this. I...

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Bang for Your Buck: Breaking the Bank to Upgrade the Nuclear Arsenal (Part II)

by | Aug 16, 2024 |

In Part I, I discussed and critiqued an overview of the new efforts to update the US nuclear arsenal. Here, we'll chat (again) about the Sentinel which is the improved replacement for the aging Minuteman III ICBM and it is already in trouble with the schedule sliding to the right and the costs increasing (surprise). The first test flight has slipped from 2025 to 2026. It will continue to slip if history is a judge. The complexity of the Sentinel program has been emphasized by the Secretary of the Air Force, who characterized it as “struggling” with “unknown unknowns.” Acknowledged as one of...

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Bang for Your Buck: Breaking the Bank to Upgrade the Nuclear Arsenal (Part I)

by | Aug 15, 2024 |

The United States is on track to spend the equivalent of more than two Manhattan projects per year in one of the most expensive nuclear arms races in history. The US has not done a recorded air breathing nuclear detonation since 1992 (the last US test, Julin-Divider, was on September 23, 1992). Almost 50 years and over 1000 tests in the USA alone and its nuclear warhead inventory and the energetics needed to loft them via rocket-borne means for the submarine and ground-launched missile programs is ancient and sclerotic. Although nuclear explosions have not been conducted in the USA since...

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ZeroGov: Limited Government, Unicorns and Other Mythological Creatures Kindle Edition

ZeroGov: A Vision for an Unshackled Humanity: Volume II

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