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Doubling Down on Failure: Ford Fiasco Follies

by | Aug 8, 2024 |

A new updated CRS report dated 5 August 2024 is out on the USS Ford debacle. I read these reports so you don't have to. For plenty of reasons, the carrier is the crossbow and chariot of the 21st century. Yet the US insists on spending tens of billions of dollars on these obsolete and antiquated exquisite platforms that are more vulnerable now than ship at sea in the history of mankind. Of course, the US is building five of these proven failures. Let's do easy math and suspend our disbelief and price these colossal strategic blunders at 20 billion each for procurement but inflation and...

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The Royal Navy Submarine Force Remains Surfaced

by | Aug 7, 2024 |

The Royal Navy is experiencing readiness and maintenance shortfalls in its submarine force that is similar to the throughput problems for the US nuclear submarine forces. The logistical tail for exquisite platforms like nuclear submarines is enormous and a first world nation is the only entity capable of deploying these boats. The Royal Navy is not up to the task. Here is my forecast: the Royal Navy will never be a blue water fleet action war machine again for the remainder of this century (if the UK lasts that long). Especially when you take the one third rule into account for peacetime...

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The F35 Follies: Britannia Rules a Little

by | Aug 6, 2024 |

My recommendation to the British MoD: don't buy anymore of these flying failure factories. U.K. planned to buy138 F-35s, bought 48, delivered 35, aims at 75 by 2025. Judging from the delays and failures universally in the program, achieving a delivery of all functional fighters is probably a pipe dream. Since the readiness rate for the F35B (carrier-borne) in US hands is below 20 percent, one can imagine the the British will not be able to keep that percentage aloft. Do the math and single digits of these aircraft still functional in five years is not a sure bet. Not to mention the two new...

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Corruption-A-Go-Go: Taliban Continues to Receive US Funding

by | Aug 5, 2024 |

The US State Department needs to be disbanded and all overseas embassies should be converted to ATM-style kiosks. The Taliban has just received 239 million debt-bucks in US State Department aid. 239 millions dollars. The disaster in Afghanistan continues to cascade forward and is now underwritten by unborn taxpayers. The government watchdog, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), issued a July 2024 report identifying at least 29 grants where the Taliban may have erroneously received counterterrorism funds. But the funds have already been distributed despite...

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Raptor Woes Continue to Plague the Air Force

by | Aug 2, 2024 |

More mismanagement and strategic deficit disorder at the Pentagon. The F22 Raptor is a very capable late 20th century aircraft and arguably superior to the much more expensive and increasingly anachronistic  F35; it is being put out to pasture early because of planning missteps, acquisition problems, maintenance issues, software difficulties and a distinctly dysfunctional strategic environment that is not prepared for the near-peer and peer fight ahead. Both the F22 and the F35 are maintenance hogs and expensive to maintain over their lifetimes. If the Air Force and the US Congress don’t...

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Is the Medal of Honor Now Subject to Woke Revisionism?

by | Jul 31, 2024 |

Note: We just returned from a short vacation visiting new grandchildren hence the brief interregnum of posting. The Medal of Honor is the highest citation for combat action in the US military. It's premature to say exactly what direction this is going because the DoD is being hazy and coy about what this is all about. If it turns out the reassessment is determining whether extraordinary single combat actions on the part of soldiers was exaggerated, it may hold water but if it is the curious chronological conceit that haunts the historians in academia today, the woke virus may reach back...

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Ep 048 “CG Excursion: Peer Strike ISR Complex: The Need for Rational Fires Coordination”

Ep 048 “CG Excursion: Peer Strike ISR Complex: The Need for Rational Fires Coordination”

by | Jul 29, 2024 |

Link to episode on RSS Feed. Fires synchronization is the effective coordination of sensors and effectors in near-real time or real time in a hostile non-permissive combat environment. The West has no working system to coordinate its artillery, air and Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) assets in a peer or near-peer fight that works. The Russians do. The Russian Strike Reconnaissance Complex has come of age and the Russians have one of the most effective fires synchronization modalities on Earth. The system is now battle proven in the first near-peer and peer conflict of the 21st...

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Ford Follies: The Carrier Grift That Just Keeps Giving

by | Jul 24, 2024 |

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...

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