Bill Buppert | The Libertarian Institute

Freedom of Navigation? US Navy Continues to Fail

by Bill Buppert | Aug 28, 2024 | Blog

It appears the US Navy and the NATO midgets continue to be thwarted in trying to secure safe passage through the Red Sea arterials against a foe which has no navy to speak of. If the data is correct, the Yemeni Houthis have no vessels beyond the size of a patrol boat with a provenance newer than 1973. You US Navy dollars at work. None of these efforts were helped when the EU formed a splinter coalition called Aspides so as not to associate with the US posture in Israel. The West’s inability to agree on how to perform a relatively basic task did not go unnoticed by potential adversaries. It...

Collision Alarm: Terror on the Horizon

by Bill Buppert | Aug 27, 2024 | Blog

"I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell." -William Tecumseh Sherman I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. The indicators and warnings on the board are lighting up more often now than in the past. I did a series this year called Storming America (Episodes 37, 41-43, 49-50) on the Chasing Ghosts podcast where I laid out the probabilities and architecture of an up-scaled 7 October 2023 Gaza-Israel complex...

Sealift Takes a Dump: The US Navy Continues to Degrade

by Bill Buppert | Aug 26, 2024 | Blog

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...

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

by Bill Buppert | Aug 26, 2024 | Chasing Ghosts Podcast

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...

Broken: The American Shipbuilding Crisis

by Bill Buppert | Aug 22, 2024 | Blog

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...

Surprise! Ukrainian Aid is Mismanaged

by Bill Buppert | Aug 21, 2024 | Blog

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...

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

by Bill Buppert | Aug 20, 2024 | Blog

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...

Sig P320/M17/18: MILSPEC is Overrated

by Bill Buppert | Aug 19, 2024 | Blog

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...