Navigation is fundamental. Every ship in the USN should do this yearly. Advanced, hand-computed celestial navigation is a full-time job. It required both of us to be on (or near) the bridge for approximately 18 hours a day, especially during the morning and evening star fixes. Performing sight reduction by hand required approximately three to four hours per day. Navigators who aspire to conduct a similar voyage may use STELLA to avoid cumbersome hand computations. The surface warfare junior officers and quartermasters loved this evolution. No longer able to stare at the VMS screen, they were...

Force Design 2030 murdered the USMC. The Marines are struggling to keep more than one Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) forward deployed at a time. Sometimes, two are forward deployed but only for limited periods. Each MEU has about two weeks of sustainment. Unless quickly reinforced, the MEU is out of action. The Navy has reduced the number of Maritime Prepositioning Ships from 20 in three strategic locations in 2018 to seven in two locations today, so rapid reinforcement is also a thing of the past. Bottom line: the MEU will contribute virtually nothing to major theater war. TLAMs, SM-6s,...

Pig can fly on occasion as the F35 Porkulus Project continues to bleed oceans of money. Welcome to Clown World: the F-35 requires nearly 9 million lines of computer code. Meanwhile, Apollo 11's Lunar Lander needed only 145,000 lines of code. There are three variants of F-35: conventional take-off and landing capability in the A, one for some customers with vertical lift capability in the B, and one for safe arrested aircraft carrier landings in the C. For the B, the A’s extra fuel behind the cockpit was replaced with a lift fan to provide vertical lift to support short take-off and vertical...

I just spent my last podcast episode making the case to dismantle and eliminate the US Marine Corps and they are doing a splendid job of sealing the deal through their latest acquisition fiascos and the Osprey aircraft follies continuing to fall down on the job. "Two-high profile amphib failures this year showcased the real-world consequences of the fleet’s ongoing issues. The Boxer ARG, composed of USS Boxer (LHD-4), USS Somerset (LPD-25) and USS Harpers Ferry (LSD-49), all experienced maintenance delays and were unable to deploy as planned in September 2023. Boxer couldn’t go until April...

  Yesterday I discussed the reasons why we need to dismantle and close down the United States Marine Corps. One of those reasons is the Light Amphibious Warship (now called the Landing Ship, Medium, LSM), a small landing ship which would ferry small Marine units among the first island chain islands, enable relocation, and conduct resupply. All of a sudden, costs are spiraling and tripling and I would expect if history is an indicator, the costs will be even higher, the delivery will be even more delayed than anticipated and the quality will be uniformly subpar. Yet another ship-building...

Knowledge and Decisions by Thomas Sowell This new year, please take the time to read this book, one of the most important books for my thinking in my lifetime. It speaks to my observation on war being a collision of complex adaptive systems informed by “institutional mechanics”, the systems they have in place before collision. And humans are built on incentives. Here’s a great review. Besides resting on a backbone of the Hayekian understanding of the use and role of knowledge in economies and societies more generally and Alchian’s evolutionary framing of economic issues and phenomena; the...