Word. The Zumwalt-class destroyer will never be the battleship of the twenty-first century. It’s the U.S. Navy’s version of the Russian Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier. Yet another multi-billion dollar failure. Yet, the instant that the Zumwalt-class appears to conduct strikes against enemy ground targets, they can be visually spotted by an enemy scout wielding binoculars. The reduced radar cross-section provides little protection for the warship when operating within the visual range of the enemy.  What’s more, the moment the Zumwalt fired its payload its stealth would be gone, as the...

One billion dollars for twisted metal for ten F35 crashes, soon you're talking real money. The incident rate with respect the US Air Force (USAF) has continued to decline since the 1950s as safety practices have increased and technology has matured. During the 1950s, approximately 23.6 aircraft were destroyed per 100,000 flying hours, this continually declined through to 1960s when the number of aircraft destroyed per 100,000 flying hours dropped to approximately 4.3. That's an impressive record. And then the F35 stumbles on the stage. And remember, this is peacetime and not wartime. Ten...

A crashed RN F35 on the seafloor.* My readers knew all of this already; the Royal Navy will not be mission effective as a blue water navy after 2030 and the era of aircraft carriers is over. Eight billion dollars for future fish apartments. Eight billion dollars. Kit Klarenberg goes into exquisite and painful detail on the lack of planning, shortsightedness and criminal negligence in being complete unaware of the Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMA) that are foreshadowing surface navies quickly demolished and sunk by munitions a fraction of the cost of these doomed capital ships. Western...

COL John Boyd was a singular mind in military matters and had a terrific impact on shattering some of the myths that have made the American military art since 1945 so awful and mired in defeat. Boyd was a heavy intellectual lifter in innovative ideas and one of the design inspirations for the F16. Like COL Douglas Macgregor, he was such a maverick, they had no chance of getting into the august flag ranks because they possessed innovative martial imagination, a mastery of their craft and did not care to spend their professional waking hours in Machiavellian whispers and palace intrigue. It is...

Me contemplating the Herculean task before me... I will be pausing Chasing Ghosts from its fortnightly cadence of issuance for the remainder of the year. I am taking the time to regroup and focus on the new occasional podcast, WarNotes: A Conflict Podcast as a companion podcast focusing on conventional conflict and strategic thought. My first WarNotes series will be a comprehensive survey of how to fix the broken, shattered and most expensive paper tiger in the history of the world, the US military complex. The Fixing Fight Club series will be weekly until I finish the survey. I think the...