Blog 33 | The Libertarian Institute

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The SANDF is a Military Dumpster Fire

by Bill Buppert | Nov 22, 2024 | Blog

The South African National Defense Force (SANDF) is in tatters.

The SA Navy is also in the hazard. One glaring example is the MTU 1163 propulsion engine. Grimms was paid R55 million for a W6 engine overhaul, yet the engine has still not undergone a dyno test or no measure reports are made available as per OEM specifications. Ironically, Grimms claims to operate the largest dyno testing facility in Sub-Saharan Africa. The engine, sarcastically dubbed the “22-ton anchor,” is prominently displayed on their shop floor. For context, a brand-new 1163 engine at that time would have cost just R32 million.

Why hasn’t Grimms been investigated for such blatant corruption? The answer seems clear: the issue is being suppressed at the highest levels, and Grimms continues to secure lucrative contracts. For example, Grimms is poised to win the submarine contract, having earlier this year accompanied Armscor Dockyard and senior Navy officials on a trip to Turkey, where they were hosted by the Turks and who paid for this trip and was it approved by the DOD? If this isn’t corruption at the highest level, then what is?

“Whether on ground, in the air or at sea, the SANDF sits helpless,” is National Council of Provinces (NCOP) member of the Select Committee on Security and Justice (SCSJ) Nicholas Gotsell’s summary of the current state of the SA National Defence Force (SANDF).

He notes in a statement that the Department of Defence (DoD), home to the SANDF, spends over 68% of its R51 billion budget on salaries and wages “yet sits with aged and unskilled personnel”.

According to him the SA Air Force (SAAF) cannot defend South Africa’s skies as only two of 26 Gripens are operational and none of its C-130BZ Hercules are airworthy. (Four Gripens were, however, operational at the September Africa Aerospace and Defence exhibition.) In the wake of last week’s oversight visit to Simons Town “our maritime defence capacity is also shocking”. The SA Navy, he maintains, has one frigate and a lone MMIPV (multi-mission inshore patrol vessel) operational with none of the three Heroine Class Type 209 submarines functional. (Two MMIPVs have been accepted by the Navy, and a third is due for handover this year.)

SANDF fleet at ‘all-time low’ as the military ‘sits helpless’

Terrestrial Speed Demon: Non-Nuclear Throw-Weight Comes of Age

by Bill Buppert | Nov 21, 2024 | Blog

Russians play chess and the West plays Naked Twister.

ICBMs and IRBMs have been hyper-sonic since the 1950s.

Replace the warhead with a terrestrial-launched Rod from God and you have a very effective non-nuclear option to reach anywhere in the northern hemisphere with no nuclear fallout at terminus.

The west evens refers to the Soviet/Russian SS-18 as Satan.

Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me

Macgregor Steps Up to the Plate

by Bill Buppert | Nov 21, 2024 | Blog

COL Douglas Macgregor shows the stark choices ahead a defense establishment in the US and the west that is inexorably grinding to a halt in effectiveness and incompetence.

The incoming President has three choices:

1. Allow service bureaucracies or external events to drive outcomes, resulting in few or no savings. This is akin to letting the ship drift aimlessly, at the mercy of the storm.

2. Make marginal adjustments to the defense status quo, avoiding conflicts but achieving little change and only modest savings. This is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic—it won’t save the ship.

3. Leverage the fiscal crisis to reduce overhead, streamline defense investment, and reset the force structure, increasing capability and promising major savings. This is the bold course correction needed to navigate the storm safely.

The senior ranks have become so bloated and filled with ineffectual leaders that organizational entropy is inevitable.

It is now painfully obvious that American fighting forces have declined in strength and numbers, but four-star overhead has grown out of all proportion to the nation’s security needs. Reducing the numbers of serving four-star generals and admirals along with their large and expensive headquarters is more vital than ever. In a perverse way, the expansion of general officer headquarters overhead follows Boyle’s gas law (also referred to as the Boyle–Mariotte law). When contained, gas will always expand to the limits of the container. So will headquarters and the flag officers they serve.

He concludes:

Compelling change in U.S. national defense is tantamount to war. Bold, new initiatives can succeed. Moving to the point of least resistance leads to failure and no change. There is no time to lose. The Department of Defense is cannibalizing itself to meet operational demands, and, in the process, we are getting older faster and destroying our most precious resource—human capital. Bold changes are necessary now.

If the American People are ever to rectify the abysmal record of the American military in action in the last three decades, shrink, then replace the senior ranks. Change in organization and culture will not result in streamlined unified military command structures and more fighting power without new senior military leadership. Modern warfare will demand much more than PowerPoint slides or dominating weak opponents with overwhelming firepower.

The clock is ticking and the point of no return is fast approaching.

I have embarked on a multi-part series on my new podcast, WarNotes, to offer a plan to stop the madness and re-frame the DoD to military sobriety.

Stay tuned.

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/navigating-the-fiscal-storm-a-new-course-for-u-s-national-defense/

My Substack

Email at cgpodcast@pm.me

Mr Jarfart

by Kym Robinson | Nov 20, 2024 | Blog

Just think about this, whatever your child or your niece, nephew and some strangers kids are feeding their eyes with is likely attached to a clown or maybe a cynical conglomerate that knows social media and children fed algorithms will make them rich. Those little eyes looking for comfort, or simplistic entertainment and viral content are creating the future millionaires, perhaps billionaires given inflation.

In the past television had dedicated time spots and channels for children, then the internet and the many devices gave us access to so much media that ignorance should be impossible. Rather, we stopped searching and seeking out things and instead allow the algorithm to dribble before our eyes, liking and on sharing these micro clips or memes to others with a vapid fascination. It’s entertaining. Now imagine you are a child.

The average attention span of the adult…who am I kidding, reading over five hundred words in one sitting is almost impossible for many grown men now, let alone boys. The girls and women are still reading but that tends to meander into paranormal romance, self help and the mental health diatribe. We understand the dangers of gorging ourselves on junk food, over eating and not exercising. It is still fashionable to shame the obese, it is after all most of them expressing a choice and a lifestyle. Exceptions exist.

As for those who have mental obesity, that is celebrated. Why are those who are wilfully ignorant celebrating it? The disdain for books and reading is not a glorious feat, sitting through three hour long shitfests sold as cinema but having no time to read a book, or anything is a rather fascinating statement. Maybe making a model kit, or indulging in crafts or something alternative to what one would ordinarily do to challenge the mind. Those little kids, they absorb and see. They can’t hear you over what you are doing.

And as much as you may find Mr Beast, Destiny, Ninja, the Pauls and well I just can’t keep up, odd and not the best of role models. What are you doing to counter those influences. When Mr Jarfart starts spitting out his content to the delight of little children being babysat for much of their day from devices, in a decade or so time he will become rich and influential. Politics and influence will attach to his brand and in the age where the Hollywood celebrity is waning through arrogant suicide, they will be replaced by social media miscellaneous. You are in control of who becomes that next big thing.

Free Trade Facts Don’t Matter to Democrats or Republicans

by Jeremy R. Hammond | Nov 19, 2024 | Blog

Elon Musk must think it is hilarious that he has been tasked by Donald Trump to head up a new “Department of Government Efficiency”, which bears the acronym of “DOGE”.

Musk, who bought Twitter and changed its name to “X”, once temporarily replaced the familiar Twitter icon of a blue bird with the dog logo of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that started as a joke and seems to greatly amuse Musk.

The Dogecoin logo is based on a dog meme based on a photo of a Shina Inus (or Shibes), a dog breed from Japan. The cryptocurrency’s name is based on an episode of a puppet show video on YouTube from “Homestar Runner” in which one of the characters misspells dog “d-o-g-e”.

In an article about the DOGE, which Trump tasked Musk to run along with Vivek Ramaswamy, the New York Times criticizes the latter’s suggestion that one easy way to achieve a major cut in government spending would be to fire 75 percent of federal employees. Showing a chart of the data, the Times shoots back that the proportion of the US population working for the federal government is “lower now than when President Reagan was in office.”

Therefore, the Times argues, “overstaffing should not be the first thing on the agenda” of the DOGE.

“If anything,” the Times continues, “the problem may more often be understaffing in key positions: The federal government doesn’t have the people it needs to adequately monitor and vet its enormous streams of payments to defense contractors, hospitals and individuals.”

The Government Had to Bankrupt Spirit Airlines to Save It

by Jeremy R. Hammond | Nov 19, 2024 | Blog

The US government is very good at destroying things on the pretense that its actions are required to save the things destroyed.

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” an unnamed major was famously quoted as saying in 1968 in reference to the indiscriminate bombing of the provincial capital of Bến Tre in southern Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

The government destroys the economy in the name of saving it and harms consumers in the name of protecting them, too.

The New York Times, which is ever in favor of massive government interventionism into the economy, provides an example of the government harming consumers with ostensibly benevolent intent by reporting that Spirit Airlines has filed for bankruptcy.

Paul Krugman: The Dollar Can’t Collapse! Unless…

by Jeremy R. Hammond | Nov 19, 2024 | Blog

In the New York Times, columnist and Nobel-Prize-Winning Keynesian economist Paul Krugman pooh-poohs the idea that the US dollar system could collapse. His reasoning for the strength of the dollar is that it continues to serve as the world’s reserve currency. He writes,

I’ve spent more or less my entire professional career being bombarded with dire warnings that the dollar’s global status was at imminent risk of collapse, and with it American power. Even if such a collapse were likely, it would matter much less than people think; America certainly derives some advantages from what was once called the “exorbitant privilege” of issuing the world’s dominant currency, but they’re not that big.

In any case, predictions of the dollar’s demise generally fail to appreciate the extent to which the dollar’s role is a result of network externalities that no potential rival offers. International banks make payments in dollars because dollar markets are huge, largely because the dollar is used so widely. Importers and exporters write contracts in dollars because everyone else does and hold dollar balances to make those payments. And so on.

In typical Krugman fashion, though, there’s an important caveat. The US dollar certainly could collapse, under certain conditions:

Taking It for Granted

by Sheldon Richman | Nov 19, 2024 | Blog, Economics

“Capitalism, says Marx, unthinkingly repeating the fables of the eulogists of the Middle Ages, has an inevitable tendency to impoverish the workers more and more. The truth is that capitalism has poured a horn of plenty upon the masses of wage earners who frequently did all they could to sabotage the adoption of those innovations which render their life more agreeable. How uneasy an American worker would be if he were forced to live in the style of a medieval lord and to miss the plumbing facilities and the other gadgets he simply takes for granted!” —Ludwig von Mises, Human Action