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...

The next to last floating dumpster of the Little Crappy Ship (LCS), USS Beloit, was launched, yet another future fish apartment complex; the USS Cleveland, the final ship of the Freedom class, is under construction and will be delivered in 2025 (don't hold your breath). The only thing an LCS can do is go fast (when it's engines and reduction gear are working) and none of the mission modules have become deployable which was the entire reason the class was built. Each LCS now has a standard ASuW capability although it's woefully short of what the original module called for so, yeah, there's a...

I often bag on the US Navy surface fleet as a sad shadow of the fleet that used to be. The nuclear submarine fleet is joining that maritime house of woe. U.S. Navy Captain Jerry Hendrix, who in a recent assessment observed: “In fact, production of new submarines dropped from two to just over one per year at the very point when the Navy’s thirty-year shipbuilding plan called for industry to ramp up production to three fast-attack submarines and one ballistic missile submarine per year.” The math is cold and real and the clicking of ruby red slippers will not fix this. Part of this problem is...

The KC46A is the replacement for the renowned KC135 refueling bird which had the last production aircraft rolled out in 1965. The KC46A is plagued with problems to include the bone-headed notion to put the refueling crew in the cockpit instead of the rear of the aircraft at the boom and, wait for it, fuel leakage. Just another Boeing aerospace project plagued by quality issues fore and aft. The aircraft has been in development since Feb. 24, 2011, and its initial flight occurred in Dec. 2014. The current contract, with options, provides Air Mobility Command an inventory of 179 KC-46A tankers...

That New Zealand naval ship that ran aground, foundered, caught fire and capsized with the DEI Captain commanding was an ocean survey and mapping ship. HMNZS Manawanui was a dive and hydrographic vessel of the Royal New Zealand Navy (RNZN). It was one of five vessels active in the Royal New Zealand Navy. A dive and hydro-graphic ship. An ocean floor survey vessel. A dive and hydro-graphic ship. An ocean floor survey vessel. A dive and hydro-graphic ship. An ocean floor survey vessel! It ran aground. Aground. Then it caught fire but no one is responsible, it just happened. They had one job......