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
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Earlier this month, Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit published a documentary documenting Israel’s systematic use of indiscriminate attacks during its ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip. A remarkable feature of the investigation is that, to document Israel’s war crimes, it largely relies on evidence published on social media by Israeli soldiers or the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) itself.
War crimes documented in the video include wanton destruction, abuse of Palestinian detainees including torture, and the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields by Israeli forces. Watch it here:
Also this month, the organization Airwars in collaboration with Sky News published an investigation similarly relying on video evidence published to X by Israeli forces themselves to document 17 indiscriminate Israeli strikes in which collectively more than 400 Palestinian civilians were killed.
An interactive map of the murderous attacks is published at Airwars. Watch their 20-minute video of the investigation’s findings here:
Yesterday, Drop Site, a Substack publication spearheaded by journalists Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim published an investigation into the conduct of the IDF’s 749 Combat Engineering Battalion, whose self-described job has been “to flatten Gaza”. Once again, the documentation of brazen war crimes relies heavily on photos and videos posted to social media by Israel’s own armed forces.
Anyone still claiming that Israel is “targeting Hamas” and that Palestinian civilians have only been dying because Hamas uses them as “human shields” cannot possibly still believe that. Maybe at one point early into Israel’s assault on Gaza, some apologists for the Jewish supremacist state actually managed to convinced themselves of their own propaganda. But with Israel’s genocide ongoing now for over a year and being livestreamed on social media, including gleefully by Israel’s own military forces, it is inconceivable that any of the genocide apologists actually believe that Israel has been acting in accordance with international humanitarian law.
All one needs to do to see the truth that Israel has been perpetrating the crime of genocide — with the full backing of the US government — is to open one’s eyes.
Cross-posted from JeremyRHammond.com.
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 Marxist madrassas with a heavy pedophilia chaser in the curriculum now. There is no greater threat to Western civilization than government subsidized education. The victims here are the children.
Stop all government subsidy to K-PhD and communism as an idea in the West is dead in a generation.
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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 accounted for, charges a new government report.
In fact, no major part of the Department of Defense (DOD) has ever passed an audit, according to recent congressional testimony by the non-partisan U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress. The Pentagon admitted that flawed business systems and practices are common within the agency and said it would take decades to get all of the agency books in order. Accounting problems led the GAO in 1995 to put DOD financial management on GAO’s list of agencies that are at high-risk of waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement.
Some of the GAO’s findings are astonishing:
About 58 percent of the material the Pentagon possesses ($36.9 billion worth) are items it does not need.
Over the past three years, the Navy lost track of $3 billion in equipment and other items.
At one distribution center for the Navy, there was a backlog of over 122,000 items that had not been properly processed, leading the Navy to purchase items it didn’t need.
The $600 billion Pentagon inventory of weapons systems and other items failed to include nearly $6 billion in Army communications defense equipment, $7.6 billion in Navy aircraft engines and about $7 billion in Air Force electronic pods that attach to warplanes.
Is national bankruptcy the sole solution to stop the malpractice and fiscal bleeding.
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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 standard Anti-surface warfare (ASuW) fit but it’s nothing to write home about. The Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) module has been cancelled and abandoned. The Navy was unable to make the ASW module work and dropped the capability from the LCS. There is no ASW module or capability anymore.
The first Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) commissioned was the USS Freedom (LCS-1), on November 8, 2008 and the Navy has failed to deliver working modules since promised when the designs were approved by the gullible knuckleheads in Congress.
The service had already spent “at least $3.3 billion” to operate and support 17 LCS since 2008, and in 2011 the Navy estimated a cost of $38 billion to operate and support 35 ships for their planned service lives of 25 years. By the end of 2018, the service’s estimate had nearly doubled to more than $60 billion.
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2024/3/26/littoral-combat-ship-still-fighting-to-prove-its-worth
The US Navy embarked the first Mine Countermeasures Mission Package (MCM MP) aboard USS Canberra (LCS 30), April 18,2024. I have no confidence it will work correctly and smart mines are the poor man’s weapon against first world surface fleets. Yet another reason the flag officers in the US Navy are so bad at their jobs.
But the USS Freedom lasted just thirteen years. The USS Independence lasted just eleven. The USS Detroit served for just seven years before being decommissioned last September. The USS Sioux City five years. The USS Sioux City cost taxpayers $362 million. Five years for $362 million is a bad investment.
The program has just been a mess, especially concerning the propulsion system. “High speed required a complex propulsion system that, two decades on, breaks so often…the type struggles to complete a deployment,” Forbes reported.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/littoral-combat-ship-navys-giant-warship-mistake-213130
The US Navy missed the bubble at the turn of the century by not designing the littoral combat ship as a new diesel submarine class making the US Navy competitive on the world stage.
It’s too late and no possibility of that coming to pass. The US Navy is struggling to maintain the submarine fleet they have now.
“LCS 29 is equipped with the Freedom-class combining gear correction, which will enable unrestricted operations. This correction addresses a class-wide issue that was identified as the Fleet deployed Freedom-variant LCS in greater numbers,” the Navy stated in a press release.
“The LCS class consists of fast, optimally manned, mission-tailored small surface combatants capable of operating in both near-shore and open-ocean environments to address twenty-first-century coastal threats,” the Navy stated.
But one of the benefits of the LCS warships is that they are easy to make and require a small crew, between seventy-five and 115)
“Beloit completed her Acceptance Trials in August 2024, marking the final milestone before delivery to the Navy. During these trials, the Navy conducted comprehensive testing of LCS 29’s systems across multiple functional areas essential to performance at sea, including combat systems, main propulsion, auxiliaries, and electrical systems,” the Navy added.
The USS Cleveland, the next and final ship of the Freedom class, is under construction and will be delivered in 2025.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/us-navys-littoral-combat-ship-just-wont-go-away-213126
Those acceptance trials should be revealing if they make the results public.
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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 American Navy wedding itself to the nuclear submarine exclusively and not adopting the incredible technological advancements in diesel submarine technology like the world class German D214 which costs approx 500 million versus the current cost of four billion plus for Virginia class submarines if the US even has the shipbuilding throughput to do that.
So the US submarine fleet is joining the US Navy surface fleet in sinking to new depths of incompetence, maintenance shortfalls and capability to crash at the bottom tier of first world navies planet-wide.
Hendrix noted that the U.S. also lacked sufficient shipyards to maintain its submarine fleet, with the ten dry docks at naval shipyards and three dry docks at commercial shipyards able to perform maintenance all being full to capacity and suffering for delays. The retired captain’s assessment was published at a time of growing concerns surrounding American nuclear submarine capabilities, with Representative Ken Calvert having summarized September: “In a word, these programs are in crisis,” with submarine programs reaching a staggering $17 billion over budget while construction faced delays of up to three years. “Without exception they are falling behind,” he stated, stressing that “increasingly they are over budget. Absent today’s intervention I have zero confidence that Navy shipbuilding will get back on track.” The lawmaker at the time slammed the Navy leadership for having “withheld information on costs and delays,” claiming that the service’s “plans to address” the crisis “are primarily aspirational.” This echoed concerns widely raised by lawmakers, officials and analysts. Both China and Russia have revolutionized their nuclear strategic and attack submarine fleets with large scale shipbuilding programs introducing new generations of highly sophisticated warships, with this remaining one of the few areas where Russia has quantitatively and technologically remained a world leader since the USSR’s disintegration due to the perceived central importance of such submarines to the ability to wage a great power war.
https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/far-behind-navy-nuclear-submarines
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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 with production eventually ramping up to 15 tankers a year. Today, 398 KC-135 Stratotankers are serving with the USAF, of which 156 are in service with the USAF, 70 with the Air Force Reserve, and 172 with the Air National Guard.
Here the latest Category 1 design flaw identified:
The latest deficiency, designated a Category 1 issue based on the degree of risk and operational restrictions it imposes on the aircraft or its operator, involves a faulty fuel pump. Boeing, the company building the tanker, noticed this spring that vibrations from a KC-46 fuel pump were damaging air ducts in its bleed air system.
Oh, and more design flaws:
Among the more high-profile issues involves the tanker’s remote vision system, or RVS — a camera system that tanker operators use to a refuel a receiver aircraft. After years of delay and rework, the Air Force in 2022 approved a redesign of Boeing’s design, dubbed RVS 2.0, that addresses image distortion and shadowing issues in the previous version.
RVS 2.0 was supposed to be delivered this year, but that timeline has since shifted to 2026. Stamey said a recent schedule risk assessment indicates that spring of that year is the target for that delivery.
Apparently, they never talked to the folks with decades of experience from KC135 boom operators who could have told them the advantages of human eyes on the fuel boom while refueling by dealing directly with the thirsty aircraft lining up to refuel and the instant response to real-time troubles during refueling. This is shades of when Boeing did not consult pilots about the flight-control system (MCAS) in the Boeing 737 Max, which played a role in two fatal crashes.
Here’s a trip down memory lane from 2014:
Shortly after January, Boeing notified the government it had found some issues during a Federal Aviation Administration required engineering process. The FAA process discovered anomalies in some of the wire modules, which in a civilian aircraft would be fine, but in military aircraft would not meet requirements, he said.
“Those anomalies were essentially for redundant aircraft systems where you want to have a redundancy in an electrical system,” Thompson said. In military aircraft, “Wires that represent redundancies cannot be put next to each other in the same bundle,” he added.
“The Boeing folks identified some anomalies so they went and got the wire audit where they went and reviewed 98,000 different wire segments.” There were redundancies in less than five percent of the wiring bundles. “In terms of translating bundles, as the spring and summer have progressed, the Boeing folks have been, in essence, redesigning those bundles,” Thompson said.
What the article fails to mention is that those are Chinese sourced wiring boards.
Chinese sourced.
But don’t worry, fast forward ten years and here is what they are saying:
Chinese-made printed wiring boards (PWBs) on U.S. Air Force KC-46A Pegasus tankers by Boeing [BA] represent a low technical risk, DoD acquisition chief William LaPlante ruled last year [2023].
https://www.defensedaily.com/continued-use-of-chinese-printed-wiring-boards-on-kc-46-low-risk-dod-says/air-force/
The brilliant minds at the Boeing company have also ceased production on the 767 cargo model that the KC46A is based on:
Behind it, the KC-46 logged a $700 million loss due to Boeing’s decision to end production of the 767 freighter, the commercial aircraft on which the militarized tanker is based. The company also pointed the finger at the ongoing machinists union strike, which has paused production of commercial airplanes, such as the 767 made in the company’s Seattle facilities.
Only the government would continue to retain the services of a clearly failed company like Boeing which is creating an impressive track record of cascading failures that rivals government performance on everything that it does. Tens of billions here and tens of billions there, pretty soon it looks like real money.
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Freedom is nearly always blamed for the bad consequences of unfreedom, that is, of government intervention. Take immigration.
We hear these days that migrant gangs are killing, terrorizing, and stealing from Americans. Some immigrants without government papers have definitely committed heinous crimes. Opponents of immigration say that migrants join violent migrant gangs to pay off debts incurred in the process of traveling to the United States. If that’s true, we can see that it’s not freedom that leads to crime, but rather the black market. Black markets by definition are products of unfreedom, that is, of government prohibition of peaceful behavior. Freedom is not the culprit.
Because legal migration is next to impossible, desperately poor and oppressed people pay thousands of dollars to coyotes to get them from Latin America to the United States. If migrants can’t repay the money, they might be forced to work off their debts by joining a migrant gang. Their creditors are likely nasty people because that’s what prohibition does. It doesn’t make an activity disappear; it simply turns the activity over to organized crime. Think of U.S. alcohol prohibition in the 1920s.
Just as repealing drug prohibition would break the backs of the drug cartels, repealing immigration prohibition would break the backs of the coyote and migrant gangs. Under legal immigration, people would apply at U.S. consulates, gain approval if they weren’t violent criminals, buy their plane tickets for a few hundred dollars, and come to America. End of.
Pretending that free immigration causes crime is like thinking that Al Capone was a free-market entrepreneur.
