I find some of my correspondents gently berate me for being overwhelmingly negative so I am going to offer insights on occasion into tales of the human spirit that will cause you pause. So dear reader, first, the negativity the modern navy deserves. The floating dumpster fire known as the Littoral Combat Ship continues to cost billions for no maritime combat return whatsoever. I can't imagine receiving orders to command one of these buckets. The real littoral combat vessel should have been an American renaissance in creating a whole new fleet of diesel electric submarines leaning heavily on...

You recall that a rather spendy jet flew on its own for approx 11 minutes in 2023. The pilot of an F-35 fighter jet that briefly went missing in September 2023 before crashing made an "inappropriate" decision in ejecting from the aircraft, a Marine Corps investigation concluded.  The report released Thursday blamed the crash of the roughly $100 million aircraft on pilot error because "the pilot incorrectly diagnosed an out-of-controlled flight emergency and ejected from a flyable aircraft, albeit under extremely challenging cognitive and flight conditions."  On September 17, 2023, the pilot...

The grift that keeps on giving and the poor performance across the board of the aircraft and the sticker shock of the high price for that mediocrity. I am going to say out loud: stealth is over-rated, the ea of manned combat aircraft is coming to a close and this particular air-frame is not aging well. Two Trillion Debt Bucks. The F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter is the Department of Defense’s most ambitious weapons program and plays a crucial role in DOD’s ability to meet current and future U.S. national security goals. At the same time, the F-35 has been plagued by mounting costs and...

Not only can they not float a portable pier [Gaza] (at a cool burn rate of 335 million debt-bucks) but they can't maintain an aging fleet of maritime connectors. The Army continues to trip over itself in most missions. Maybe they could reach zero by 2028 in the current trend-line. No one will be fired nor held accountable. Reducing your mission capable rate from near 75% to 35% is quite a feat; the pursuit of bureaucratic excellence continues. Maybe they can revise the governance framework before 2050... The report highlights a stark decline in the operational readiness of the Army’s...

The six-thousand-ton INS Arihant sank in 2017 and remained out of service at the docks while the water was pumped out, and the pipes replaced. The entire process took ten months. Imagine not only not having the sea sense to seal your boat before diving but having no systems in place to either warn you or lock out the attempt. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/how-sink-3-billion-dollar-nuclear-submarine-leave-hatch-open-208170 Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me

The German Empire arranged passage for Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in 1917, joined by 29 other Russian exiles, a Pole and a Swiss, to Russia to try to seize power from the government. They traveled on an armored train through Germany then took a ship to Sweden where they then crossed the border into Finland and on to Petrograd. The Germans wanted to inject the communist virus into the body politic of Russia and knock them out of the war. It worked and the USSR was born. That yellow school bus transporting children to government schools has had the same effect. Those government schools are...

I often quip to the TSA slack-jawed shamblers at the airport when I fly that I am happy the TSA exists because think of how much more homelessness there would in the USA if the unemployable weren't in shitty government jobs hassling peaceful travelers. The DoD has never passed an audit and in concert with programs at DoE, the budget item is approx one trillion dollars. The chaos avalanche continues. And with all this money spent, the US armed forces are not a long sustainment peer competitor in a hot war. The Pentagon’s accounting records are so convoluted that billions of dollars cannot be...