Blog 47 | The Libertarian Institute

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Bang for Your Buck: Breaking the Bank to Upgrade the Nuclear Arsenal (Part II)

by Bill Buppert | Aug 16, 2024 | Blog

reentry of unarmed minuteman iii icbms demonstrate afgsc mission

These recently cleared photos of the reentry of an unarmed Minuteman III ICBM, sent by the team at the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC) Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site demonstrate the accuracy of the unarmed ICBM test launch earlier this month, 2,300 miles west-southwest of Hawaii on Kwajalein Atoll, in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Each test launch reiterates the safe, secure, and effective capability of the land-based leg of the U.S. nuclear triad.

(U.S. Army photo by Amy Hansen)

In Part I, I discussed and critiqued an overview of the new efforts to update the US nuclear arsenal.

Here, we’ll chat (again) about the Sentinel which is the improved replacement for the aging Minuteman III ICBM and it is already in trouble with the schedule sliding to the right and the costs increasing (surprise). The first test flight has slipped from 2025 to 2026. It will continue to slip if history is a judge. The complexity of the Sentinel program has been emphasized by the Secretary of the Air Force, who characterized it as “struggling” with “unknown unknowns.” Acknowledged as one of the most extensive and complex endeavors ever undertaken, the program faces significant hurdles.The Sentinel is the first fully software enable missile unlike the other ICBMs.

The Minuteman III program began in the early 1960s, with the first operational missiles entering service in 1970. At the time, the projected service life of these weapons was just 10 years, meaning the Minuteman III arsenal was slated to be replaced starting in 1980. And here we are looking at a rickety life expansion for the Minuteman III that won’t conceivably be replaced by the Sentinel until the 2030s (maybe).

My forecast: the Sentinel program will be an unmitigated disaster with mission assurance problems plaguing it from manufacturing to deployment that will be late in delivery and costly beyond measure.

That breach mandated that the Air Force and OSD identify the root causes of a program price jump of 37 percent to a new total of over $130 billion and to probe a potential two-year delay to the missile’s planned initial operational capability, previously pegged for 2029.

In the addition, the concurrent development of a new submarine launched ICBM capability is experiencing similar conflicts and delays. The risk of staging this development at the same time risks increasing gaps in coverage for ICBM delivery from the respective modalities.

Highlighting the estimated cost of the Navy’s Columbia submarine program, whose pricetag for 12 subs would be roughly equal to the revised cost of the Sentinel program, the Northrop official argued that Sentinel is a “relatively affordable” piece of the nuclear triad.

https://breakingdefense.com/2024/03/sentinel-icbms-first-flight-test-slips-to-2026-air-force/

Significantly, the program has faced substantial cost overruns, exceeding initial projections by at least 37%. Initially estimated at $118 million per missile in 2020, the acquisition unit cost has now surged to approximately $162 million.

Furthermore, staffing shortages, supply chain disruptions, and software difficulties have been highlighted by the Government Accountability Office. These issues are anticipated to extend the rollout of the program beyond the initially planned 2029 time-frame to a revised estimate between April and June 2030.

The Sentinel: U.S. $100 Billion ICBM Project

The program to replace America’s aging nuclear ICBM arsenal, known as the LGM-35A Sentinel, is already projected to go at least 81 percent over budget, which represents tens of billions of dollars in anticipated cost overruns. Yet, despite the program’s ballooning expenses, the Pentagon has reaffirmed its commitment to the effort, calling its continuation, “essential to national security.”

To many outside of the Defense apparatus, the Sentinel ICBM program may seem unnecessary. After all, the United States already maintains a standing arsenal of more than 400 nuclear-armed Minuteman III ICBMs, each of which can deliver its nuclear payload to targets more than 8,000 miles away, traveling at speeds over Mach 23. These weapons lay in wait, housed in hardened underground silos spanning Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota, and represent only the land-based portion of America’s traditional nuclear triad.

***

While the Air Force’s 2014 [Rand] analysis concluded that modernizing the Minuteman III would cost just as much as replacing them, the Rand study presciently argued that a replacement ballistic missile system “will likely cost almost twice (and perhaps even three times) as much as incremental modernization and sustainment of the MM III system.”

***

As part of ensuring the land-based leg of the nuclear triad is ready and capable of responding to attack, the United States usually conducts four to five ICBM test launches per year. If the U.S. continued this pace of testing, it would run out of extra weapons to launch by 2035, forcing it to either halt test launches indefinitely or start shaving operational weapons off the inventory to be used for these tests.

https://www.sandboxx.us/news/everything-you-need-to-know-about-americas-struggle-to-replace-its-aging-icbm-arsenal/

And those test launches are neither cheap nor efficient.

The nuclear weapons landscape on Earth right now:

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Company Men: Former Spies Spill The Tea

by John Weeks | Aug 15, 2024 | Blog

Danny Jones recently hosted former CIA officers John Kiriakou and Andrew Bustamente for a wide-ranging discussion that touched on torture, 9/11 & terrorism, domestic politics, foreign policy and what it’s like to work within the world’s premiere intelligence agency. It’s worth a listen. And don’t be intimidated by its 3-hour running time. There are plenty of laughs and it’s a great way to avoid listening to your spouse while you cook dinner or walk the dog.

Here are some fun takeaways:

1: Kiriakou and Bustamente are both charming, intelligent, knowledgeable, passionate and likeable people. Which is fascinating, because CIA is a monster. CIA has killed hundreds of thousands of people and helped the Pentagon kill millions of people. And no, they weren’t all bad. How many people exactly? Who knows!? That’s classified. But there’s a lot of cool people who work at CIA and have worked there.

That does not appear to be the case with Mexican Drug Cartels. They also kill a lot of people (although, they’re not putting up CIA numbers), but their ranks are filled with raving psychopaths. Not the kind of guys you’d feel as comfortable interviewing.

2: Kiriakou and Bustamente have different perspectives on the fallout from the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) guilty plea deal and subsequent DoD nixing of said deal. KSM is the man our government has accused of masterminding the 9/11 attacks. He was captured in Pakistan in 2003. According to Judge Andrew P. Napolitano:

“Mohammed and four other alleged conspirators have been awaiting trial since their arrivals at Gitmo in 2006. Since then, numerous government military and civilian prosecutors, as well as numerous military judges, have rotated into and out of the case. Two weeks ago, the government and the defendants agreed to a guilty plea in return for life in prison at Gitmo. When, last week, the Department of Defense abruptly changed its mind and rescinded its approval of the guilty pleas.”

KSM was tortured in violation of U.S. law and international law (which was created by the U.S.) and so putting him on trial is problematic. But, apparently no one in the Biden Administration wants to let a plea deal with the mastermind who brought down our towers. No one wants that headline during an election year.

Anyway, Kiriakou and Bustamente disagreed on the merits of torture. Kiriakou is famously the only person to go to jail over the CIA torture program. Not because he tortured anyone, but because he blew the whistle on it. He believes it was morally wrong, illegal and unconstitutional:

“You know in in 1945, 1946 we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs. In, in 1968…on January the 11^th, 1968 The Washington Post ran a front page…photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. That, that Soldier was arrested, convicted of torture and sent to…prison for…20 years, for torture. And then all of a sudden in 2002 torture is legal because John Yoo and Jay Bybee say it is. But the law never changed. The law was never amended. Congress never voted on any change in the Federal Torture Act of 1946. So, you know, we changed.”

Bustamente believes the government shouldn’t be restrained by the rule of law. In fact, rule of law can lead to a totalitarian system. Kiriakou acknowledged his point but believes Congress should change the law. Bustamente seems to think CIA should change the law based on what is expedient to “the mission.” In fact, Bustamente seems to embrace a CIA supremacist view:

“You can’t…you can’t possibly, actually believe that we are the system that we tell the average American we are?” He asked, with incredulousness in his voice and his eyes.

3) Kiriakou and Bustamente both have an incisive understanding of the CIA as a corporate agent. The corporate agent is a material object comprised of its individual human members:

“The corporate agent exists when a group of people effectively subordinate themselves to the imperatives of a Rational Point of View (RPV) not possessed by any individual.”

Our species lacked corporate agency for more than 200,000 years. Our hunter gatherer ancestors had collective action and intergroup violence, but no standing armies and nothing like sustained, strategic warfare. With the agricultural revolution, we saw the rise of corporate agents. The most monstrous corporate agent is the state, with its military and intelligence services. The state is a corporate agent comprised of corporate agents (The Interagency).

CIA is a particularly lethal corporate agent. Kiriakou and Bustamente touch upon its structure when they refer to the “GS-15” and the “PDB” and the “COS.”

Nothing says corporate agent more than the “Org Chart” and the “Compensation System.” Hunter gatherers had collective action, but they didn’t have a position called Deputy Director of Border Raids, Killing and Rape. The men just got together and got shit done.

Other aspects of CIA’s corporate agent status touched on by the conversation (explicitly & implicitly) were:

CIA must continue to exist
CIA must always have a new mission
CIA culture gaslights its individual members into believing they are only qualified to work at CIA
The job of a CIA employee is to follow orders and make his or her boss happy
The real enemy of CIA (and the Interagency) is the American People

Kiriakou and Bustamente put on a good show. One can only hope men like this have enough influence within the CIA to prevent it from going full NKVD. Because that would be unpleasant.

Bang for Your Buck: Breaking the Bank to Upgrade the Nuclear Arsenal (Part I)

by Bill Buppert | Aug 15, 2024 | Blog

The United States is on track to spend the equivalent of more than two Manhattan projects per year in one of the most expensive nuclear arms races in history.

The US has not done a recorded air breathing nuclear detonation since 1992 (the last US test, Julin-Divider, was on September 23, 1992). Almost 50 years and over 1000 tests in the USA alone and its nuclear warhead inventory and the energetics needed to loft them via rocket-borne means for the submarine and ground-launched missile programs is ancient and sclerotic. Although nuclear explosions have not been conducted in the USA since 1992, the physics of the process is quite well understood, and can be simulated on a computer. There is a considerable amount of physics testing at the National Ignition Facility for making and setting off miniature hydrogen bombs and is active today.

8'disk2

Some of the Minuteman II silos are still using 8″ floppy disk media (although one can make the case it makes them less vulnerable to tampering) although that was supposed to have been changed around 2020. The system, once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), relied on IBM Series/1 computers installed by the Air Force at Minuteman II missile sites in the 1960s and 1970s. Although a USB controller takes way more processing power than a Series 1 has. More likely it’s a system that translates floppy commands to something that reads virtual sectors from a solid state disk, possibly with data at rest encryption that is dynamically decrypted on read.

The GAO talked about this in 2016.

For the ignition systems you can test the bomb mechanism with a lump of some other metal instead of the fissile nuclear fuel to make sure the timing sequence is correct. You can do this 100 times to make sure it’s reliable. You just replace the ones in the warheads every five years to make sure they haven’t gone stale. The theory work behind the nuclear detonation sequence is mostly done in computer models these days, there’s little need to actually set off a thermonuclear blast anymore. We’ve already verified the models decades ago.

The US can test the missiles themselves without a payload. Although the latest tests with the UK have been disastrous. The last successful test was 2012 for the UK.

Don’t think for a moment these will will come in on time and on budget.

Over the past decade, the United States has launched one of the most expensive nuclear arms races in history. As it stands now, this new nuclear modernization comes with a price tag of approximately $1.7 trillion over 30 years.¹ To put this in perspective, adjusted for inflation to 2023 dollars, the four years of the Manhattan Project cost approximately $30 billion.²

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the United States is set to spend some $756 billion on nuclear weapons modernization programs between fiscal 2023-2032,³ which averages out to $75 billion a year on nuclear weapons. That is more than two Manhattan projects every year for the next eight years.

Put in other terms, it is nearly all the money the United States spent on nuclear weapons and delivery systems for World War II, spent every year, for the next eight years. When combined with the Department of Defense’s conventional weapons portfolio over the same period, nuclear modernization will drive annual peacetime Pentagon budgets to unprecedented levels.

***

The United States already maintains the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal, a high-tech array of weapons systems that currently consists of a deployed force of some 1670 strategic nuclear warheads.⁷ These weapons can already destroy all human civilization. The overwhelming majority of these warheads are much more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, which measured 15 and 21 kilotons respectively.⁸ The most powerful weapon currently in the arsenal is the B83 gravity bomb, clocking in at 1.2 megatons, or 80 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.⁹ Even the smallest – the bomber launched ALCM cruise missile – is able to “dial its yield” up or down between 5-150kt.¹⁰ On top of this, the U.S. maintains a hedge of 1938 strategic warheads of all types in reserve, ready to be uploaded onto launchers in the event of a crisis.¹¹ Finally, we maintain some 100 weapons, variously termed as tactical, battlefield, or non-strategic, forward deployed at six NATO air bases that are meant to be carried by conventional fighter craft in the event of a full-scale war in Europe.¹²

Matching a chaos avalanche of incompetency that the West is experiencing now, the recipe for disaster with these updates is assured. The US needs to make a sober assessment of just how much of this expense is necessary. One possibility is reducing the number of total missiles and weapons from thousands to hundreds. Another is the possibility is the retirement of the two airborne legs of the nuclear triad and using the nuclear submarine force as the primary means of nuclear deterrence.

In Part II, I will provide a critique and overview of the new Sentinel system being considered to replace the silo-borne Minuteman III arsenal.

America’s Nuclear Weapons Quagmire

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Israel’s Criminal Assault on Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza: ‘Israel killed my grandmother!’

by Jeremy R. Hammond | Aug 14, 2024 | Blog

In this video published on X today by Palestine Deep Dive, a Palestinian woman named Mariam Mohamed al Khateeb, a twenty-year-old dental student who has an ongoing crowdfunding campaign to get her family out of the Gaza Strip, describes how Israeli soldiers burned her grandmother to death this past March:

https://twitter.com/PDeepdive/status/1823635861419831606

Her grandmother’s home was near Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which came under attack by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in mid-November last year and again in March of this year. Israeli soldiers ordered other family members to flee the area at gunpoint and to leave the grandmother behind. She was burned alive in her home in a fire that, according to Al Khateeb, was started by Israeli forces.

Back in November, Israel tried to justify its assault on the Al Shifa Hospital despite its protected status under international humanitarian law by claiming that Hamas had built its military headquarters beneath the hospital complex. The IDF released a computer-generated propaganda video graphically showing what Israel claimed to exist under the hospital: an elaborate multi-story network of tunnels and bunker rooms.

Remember, this is what the Israeli Defense Force said was under al Shifa Hospital. This is the IDF's own video. This is the lie Biden and his administration co-signed to justify laying siege to the hospital: pic.twitter.com/miEYNiqMBB
— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) December 22, 2023

Israel had long claimed that Hamas was using a bunker underneath the hospital for its military command center, such as during its “Operation Cast Lead”, which started on December 27, 2008 and ended on January 18, 2009. Israel never produced any evidence to support that claim.

The US government defended Israel’s assault on the hospital in November 2023 on the grounds that it had independently gathered intelligence to support its claim that Hamas was using the grounds for its base, but it presented no evidence to support the claim.

It was true that the hospital had an underground concrete basement, which Israel knew about because it was built by Israel in the late 1980s according the a hospital renovation and expansion plan by Israeli architects Gershon Zippor and Benjamin Idelson. A Newsweek “fact check” article published n November 15, 2023, verified that “a bunker or basement was built at Israel’s discretion in the 1980s.”

On November 20, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was interviewed by Christiane Amanpour on CNN, and when asked about what evidence Israel had that Hamas had a major command center under Al Shifa Hospital, he repeated the claim that Hamas was using “bunkers” that he admitted were “originally built by Israeli constructors”. When Amanpour surprisedly asked whether he had just misspoken, Barak affirmed, “No, no. You know, decades ago, we were running the place. So, we held them. It’s a decade, many decades ago, probably five — four decades ago, that we helped them to build these bunkers in order to enable more space for the operation of the hospital within the very limited size of this compound.”

During its assault, Israel cut the power to the hospital complex, thus shutting down incubators and killing six newborn babies on life support. By November 14, 180 patients had died as a result of Israel’s assault, forcing hospital staff had to start digging mass graves to bury the bodies.

As Human Rights Watch noted, “Despite the Israeli military’s claims on November 5, 2023, of ‘Hamas’s cynical use of hospitals,’ no evidence put forward would justify depriving hospitals and ambulances of their protected status under international humanitarian law.”

After taking control of Al Shifa Hospital, the IDF released video of what it claimed were weapons and a tunnel entrance found at the site, but as the New York Times reported on November 16, the images “could not be independently verified, and still have not proven the existence of the sprawling Hamas operation that it said the hospital concealed.” A separate Times article the same day noted that the IDF “has yet to present public documentation of a vast network of tunnels”, a claim that had been “central to its defense of its military campaign in Gaza.”

Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan accused Israel of planting the weapons there, and the Times noted it was “unclear from the video what purpose the passageway served or how far it extended. Israeli forces appear to have destroyed a small structure and dug an extensive area of ground to uncover it, an analysis of satellite imagery and video showed.”

Two Times reporters and a photographer were subsequently allowed to visit, under IDF escort, “a stone-and-concrete shaft on the grounds of Al-Shifa with a staircase descending into the earth”, which, the Times sympathetically reported, “did not seem to settle the question” of whether Hamas had its command center there, a claim that “the Israeli military has yet to show incontrovertible proof of”.

A BBC analysis of the IDF’s video purporting to show Hamas weapons inside the hospital noted that “Israel has yet to produce evidence of the tunnels” that it claimed existed and served as an elaborate command headquarters. BBC reporters were also allowed to visit the site, and they observed two guns behind an MRI machine where the IDF video had shown just one — an indication that the IDF itself had planted the weapons there.

As the New York Times noted sympathetically again on November 17, “the Israeli military has struggled to produce proof to back its assertion that Hamas was using the hospital and its patients as human shields.”

Israel’s failure to produce evidence of the elaborate bunker complex it claimed existed underneath Al Shifa Hospital was punctuated by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proclaiming on November 17 that “the war must go on” until Hamas was eliminated, which would require the IDF to push farther south because, by Olmert’s account, “Khan Younis, which is in the southern part of Gaza Strip, is the real headquarters of Hamas.”

On November 19, the IDF released video footage from a camera being lowered into the uncovered shaft along with footage evidently taken by a solider who’d been lowered down and followed a tunnel shaft to a metal door, but as Jeremy Scahill observed in The Intercept, this footage failed to prove that Hamas had a military command headquarters beneath the hospital.

A Washington Post analysis likewise noted that “the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center”. Key conclusions the Post analysis arrived at were that there was no evidence of military use of the tunnel network by Hamas, and none of the hospital’s buildings appeared to be connected to it, contrary to the IDF’s claim that it could be accessed from inside the hospital wards.

The New York Times in February 2024 published an interactive feature based on an analysis of “[c]lassified Israeli intelligence documents” that it has obtained, which the Times claimed “suggests Hamas used the hospital for cover, stored weapons inside it and maintained a hardened tunnel beneath the complex that was supplied with water, power and air-conditioning.” The Times conceded, however, that the IDF “has struggled to prove that Hamas maintained a command-and-control center under the facility.”

Having claimed the Hamas headquarters was a vast multi-story network of bunkers and tunnels, Israel had “publicly revealed the existence of only one tunnel entrance on the grounds of the hospital,” at a shack outside its main buildings. In the end, the Times further noted, there “may no longer be a way to directly assess” Israel’s claim of “a labyrinth of tunnels and underground compounds used by Hamas’s leaders to direct terrorist activities” because before leaving the hospital grounds on November 24, the IDF “lined the tunnel with explosives and destroyed it”.

In March 2024, the IDF again assaulted Al Shifa Hospital, displacing civilians sheltering there along with patients, killing nearly 200 people the IDF called “terrorists”, and turning the complex into “a wasteland”, in the words Taysir al-Tanna, a vascular surgeon at the hospital.

“Most of the buildings are extensively damaged or destroyed, and the majority of equipment is unusable or reduced to ashes,” said the World Health Organization (WHO), leaving the hospital “an empty shell” and completely non-functional.

In April, mass graves were containing hundreds of bodies were discovered at Al Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis and at Al Shifa Hospital. As Amnesty International described the mass graves as “potential crime scenes” and called for an investigation. The New York Times noted that Palestinians had dug some mass graves earlier, but one of the bodies seen uncovered in a video report by Palestinian photojournalist Haseeb Alwazeer was “wearing blue medical scrubs”, and the person’s hands appeared to be bound together.

According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the bodies of 30 Palestinians were found in two graves in the Al Shifa Hospital courtyard, with reports “that the hands of some of these bodies were also tied” and the possibility of many additional victims. At Al Nasser Hospital, 283 bodies were exhumed from mass graves. “Among the deceased,” OHCHR spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani reported, “were allegedly older people, women, and wounded, while others were found … with their hands tied and stripped of their clothes.”

After Israel’s second raid on Al Shifa Hospital, “the hospital premises were littered with bodies and shallow graves,” as the New York Times put it in an article describing the “near collapse” of Gaza’s health care system, with the WHO documenting over 800 attacks on health care in what it called Israel’s “systematic dismantling of healthcare”.

All carried out, of course, with the full support and backing of the US government, notwithstanding meaningless rhetorical expressions of concern for the fate of Palestinian civilians.

The Spirit Dissolves: Imminent B2 Retirement

by Bill Buppert | Aug 14, 2024 | Blog

Stealth is a buzzword, please keep in mind that long wave radars detects the minuscule radar cross sections of “stealth” platforms. It can still be detected by a sufficiently powerful radar or at sufficiently close ranges. Dual-band radars are more effective against stealth than disjointed sensors, being able to focus the high-frequency beam to track the blips spotted by the low-frequency one.

Pardon me while I geek out: At a low enough frequency, one cannot use angled surfaces to deflect the re-radiated radio frequency (RF); even a very thin wire one half wavelength long is optimally sized to radiate it and the manned aircraft profile is impossible to miss. Low frequencies can detect even a stealthy aircraft because the aircraft itself is large enough that it begins to act like an antenna, re-radiating the electromagnetic field as current it induces flows from one end (or one side) to the other. The absorbing material applied to attenuate higher frequency radars isn’t thick enough to effectively eliminate the current flowing in the aircraft’s body and airfoils at low frequencies, so it reflects more RF.

At the margin in the 21st century, stealth is old school and affordable mass will be the keen edge to defeat first world militaries.

The B-1 Lancer (45 currently in service) and B-2 bombers will retire more than a decade earlier than previously planned under the Air Force’s Bomber Vector, a roadmap which also calls for re-engining and upgrading the B-52 so it can continue to serve into the 2050s.

And keep in mind for my consistent readers that the rule of three obtains here where only one third are available to go aloft operationally at any one time. This means effectively six air-frames available that, by the way, are not invisible to potential near-peer and peer competitors like China and Russia.

The U.S. Air Force is set to retire another B-2 Spirit bomber, reducing its fleet to just 19 air-frames. The decision comes after a ground accident in late 2022 rendered the aircraft uneconomical to repair.

The Spirit may have been introduced more than 35 years ago, but the platform continues to provide significant capabilities to the Air Force.

Back in the 1970s, the service recognized its need for an air-frame capable of deflecting or absorbing radar signals and thus flying nearly undetected. Northrop Grumman was selected to create the B-2 bomber. The Spirit can carry its heavy weapons load to pretty much any point in the world within hours. It can lug 40,000 pounds of conventional and nuclear weapons, including up to 16 Joint Direct Attack Munition satellite-guided 2,000-lbs bombs.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/air-forces-b-2-bomber-facing-sad-reality-211168

The B2 design is half a century old and the B52 is running up on eight decades. The B-52H is the only variant in service today, with 72 aircraft active as of early 2024. A total of 744 B52s were built during the lifetime of production. Ongoing upgrades, including new Rolls-Royce engines, suggest that the B-52 will likely fly past 2050 (twice the anticipated service life). That last production B52H left the factory floor in 1962. Total USAF bomber fleet is currently at 137 air-frames. US bomber production in WWII was 97,810 air-frames.

Only 21 B-2s were manufactured because of the plane’s hefty price tag—about $2 billion per plane—making it the most expensive aircraft ever built. The already small fleet shrunk to 20 in 2008, when a B-2 was destroyed in a crash at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. The news comes as bomber-builder Northrop Grumman was awarded a $7 billion sustainment contract for the program earlier this month. The work, which provides for “B-2 enhancements, sustainment, logistics elements including sustaining engineering, software maintenance, and support equipment,” will last through 2029, according to the contract listing.

In addition to the B-2 divestment, the force structure report provides more details about the service’s plans to shed hundreds of planes in order to invest in new technology, like unmanned aircraft.

The Air Force plans to get rid of 932 aircraft between fiscal 2025 and 2029, which will generate over $18 billion in savings, according to the report. Including the one B-2, the service wants to get rid of 251 aircraft total in fiscal 2025. Then, it wants to shed 293 aircraft in 2026, 235 in 2027, 95 in 2028 and 64 in 2029.

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2024/05/b-2-crashed-2022-wont-be-fixed-air-force-confirms/396519/:~:text=The%20decision%20brings%20the%20service’s,2%20and%20B-1B%20Lancer.

Two billion per aircraft.

Maintenance costs for the B2 is $3.5 million per month.

Please note in the quote above that shedding 932 aircraft between 2025 and 2029 generates $18 billion in savings and the B2 cost two billion each. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

I predict the B21 Raider will be a hot mess if the creation of exquisite platforms in the last half century is any indicator.

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Icebreaker Follies: The US Continues to Drive to Zero

by Bill Buppert | Aug 13, 2024 | Blog

The Navy did have 1.5 icebreakers and now they have half of one.

Well, actually, the US has no operational icebreakers now.

The Coast Guard’s other icebreaker, the ancient heavy Polar Star, is undergoing a service life extension program at the Mare Island Dry Dock in California [H/T to Q Captain].

The fire reportedly damaged a starboard transformer as a result of which the starboard engine remains inoperable.

The Coast Guard’s other icebreaker, the 50-year old Polar Star, is not available during summer as it is undergoing a service life extension program at the Mare Island Dry Dock in California.

Healy departed from Seattle for its summer Arctic patrol on June 12, 2024 taking it through the Bering Strait into the Chukchi Sea. It was traveling in Canadian waters near Banks Island around July 25 when it experienced an engineering space fire.

The sequence of events was broadly confirmed around two weeks later on August 7 by Vice Commandant of the Coast Guard Admiral Kevin E. Lunday during a talk at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC.

“Coast Guard Cutter Healy, one of our only two icebreakers, had just begun her summer patrol and was up north of Alaska and the Chukchi Sea. It had an electrical fire in the engineering spaces; she’s now having to return to home port to try and affect repairs.”

There’s a whisper the US is building new icebreakers with Canada and Finland but we shall see what transpires.

Leaders from the US, Canada and Finland formed the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort (ICE Pact) on 11 July to collaborate on strengthening shipbuilding in the three nations, and their security and economic ties.

The three governments plan to construct icebreakers and other Arctic support vessels, collaborate on workforce development and exchange information. They also hope other nations will order icebreakers from shipyards in US, Canada and Finland to support the capital intensity of multi-ship construction.

The plan is to develop a memorandum of understanding from this initial ICE Pact by the end of 2024 and form a framework of how this collaboration will work in practice.

The Russians have the largest icebreaker fleet on Earth and decades of port and living facilities along more than 50% of the Arctic Circle. They have even commissioned a combat icebreaker. The Russian icebreaker fleet consists of 41 icebreakers, including 34 diesel and 7 nuclear powered. The fleet’s total shaft power reached 697.2 MW, according to Ministry of Transport .

The vessel, constructed at the Admiralty Shipyards in St Petersburg, was initially scheduled for commissioning in 2023 but has faced delays, partly due to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, The War Zone report said.

The Ivan Papanin’s armament includes an AK-176MA 76mm gun and can be fitted with containerized launchers for Klub and Kalibr cruise missiles, which would significantly enhance its combat capabilities.

Russia has a growing fleet of around 40 icebreakers and ice-capable ships, including the unique Project 23550 class specifically designed for combat and breaking through ice up to 5.5 feet thick.

Russia’s new combat icebreaker built for Arctic dominance

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Boeing Incompetence Continues: The Space Launch System Debacle

by Bill Buppert | Aug 12, 2024 | Blog

boeingdisaster

We all know what is happening now with the Boeing disaster in space where two astronauts are marooned and the billion dollar taxicab is not only malfunctioning but can’t be undocked without a human inside piloting the capsule away.

Boeing was contracted by Never Ascend to Space Again (NASA) to develop a new upper stage for the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and it’s seven years behind schedule and significantly over budget.

The new Exploration Upper Stage, a more powerful second stage for the SLS rocket that made its debut in late 2022, is viewed by NASA as a key piece of its Artemis program to return humans to the Moon. The current plan calls for the use of this new upper stage beginning with the second lunar landing, the Artemis IV mission, currently scheduled for 2028. In NASA parlance, the upgraded version of the SLS rocket is known as Block 1B.

As for the upper stage itself, NASA initially predicted development costs would be $962 million back in 2017. However, the new report predicts that the Exploration Upper Stage will actually cost $2.8 billion, or three times the original cost estimate. (For what it is worth, Ars used a simple estimating tool in 2019 to predict the Exploration Upper Stage development cost would be $2.5 billion. So it’s not like it was a huge secret that NASA and Boeing would blow out the budget here).

Of course.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/a-new-report-finds-boeings-rockets-are-built-with-an-unqualified-work-force/

And then you read the NASA Inspector General report.

Oh boy.

We project SLS Block 1B costs will reach approximately $5.7 billion before the system is scheduled to launch in 2028. This is $700 million more than NASA’s 2023 Agency Baseline Commitment, which established a cost and schedule baseline at nearly $5 billion. EUS development accounts for more than half of this cost, which we estimate will increase from an initial cost of $962 million in 2017 to nearly $2.8 billion through 2028. Boeing’s delivery of the EUS to NASA has also been delayed from February 2021 to April 2027, and when combined with other factors, suggests the September 2028 Artemis IV launch date could be delayed as well. Factors contributing to these cost increases and schedule delays include redirection of EUS funds to the core stage during Artemis I production, changing Artemis mission assignments, maintaining an extended workforce 7 years more than planned, manufacturing issues, and supply chain challenges.

A delay of seven years and a tripling of costs for a system that if the track record is any indication will not be on time and will be more than that.

In December 2023, the SLS Program completed its Block 1B ABC after 10 years of development with no baseline and much later in the project life cycle than NASA’s standard practice.

Ten years with no baseline. You can’t make this up.

The government needs to completely reassess why it enters into any contracts with Boeing. They should be banned from any Federal programs now and in the future.

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Anti-War Blog – Just a Meme of Their Time

by Kym Robinson | Aug 11, 2024 | Blog

So much to watch, to scroll past. To ignore. Apparently life is so busy, too much going on to care. The need to escape is paramount, to avoid reality. A reality many claim to be normal. Important even. A woman uses her degree to move about on the Olympic stage, elite competitive break dancing we are told. She is now the current meme. Two boxers outshine all of the the others boxing at the Games, “what gender are they?” The question is screamed and hate thrown about by those who never watch boxing, let alone women’s boxing. But, they care for now, outrage! In that time of outcry, 100 were murdered in one day. Many more to follow. Many more before. The US also sent 28,000 bombs so that more kids may be blown to bits. But I am sure that Raygun is stunning and brave, or cringe. I just don’t care. Why do you?

The UK is now banning memes, that may also include articles, blogs, posts, tangents that go against the allowable opinion. Whatever the State decides one may express and witness. Perhaps reporting on genocide will become illegal? Who reads those reports anyhow and if they do, is there ever more than an, “Oh dear.” In the time of Covid that would have meant questions asked that then were wrongthink but are now allowed to be expressed. What can be asked, what is allowed to be said, what information is to be denied, what may be shared? Whatever any given regime decides, from moment to moment. It seems that the other English speaking nations of the Commonwealth may follow suit. God Save the King! The Orwellian example too obvious to bring up. Fiction does come from reality though, even before Orwell’s time.

Men scream, “I have the right to rape!” outside a prison. In support of those who did rape, violently sodomising inmates. Many seem to agree. History has proven them correct. It seems that some do have such a right. Now at least with vulgar entitlement they scream it with tears of pre-cum in their eyes. The State endorses it. An individual has no rights to their body anyhow, it belongs to the State, what they may or may not ingest, what medication they may access, even the sports they play all dictated by the State so it makes sense that government agents will sodomise men as State policy. It worked for the NKVD, so why not them? In the distance, past the memes and screams for rape, babies starve to death or are blown to bits. Policy.

When men who worshipped the prince of peace conquered the New World, they raped, murdered, enslaved and tortured. We are told by rationale minds that they were men of their time. That the natives were also wicked, and did bad things too. Though in their time mothers cried when their babies died, girls wept after being stabbed from a man’s penis, brothers died fighting them off and fathers broke down when their families were murdered before their eyes. They were people of their time as well. In generations from now, we will have scholars looking back, maybe through memes, reasoning that the current genocide was being committed by people of their time. They would be correct.

This is what civilisations do. Murder, conquer, destroy, bloat their society with debt, engorged with public servants, drowned in paperwork and the people addictedto welfare. Then crumble until a new one comes along. Monuments will be built over unmarked graves, built by those who will be long forgotten, too poor to not build such public work celebrations. The unimportant labour needed to immortalise the important so adored. Indentured as the Irish once were in the Commonwealth, just as a Kenyan may be now in a wealthy Gulf State. Those pretty high rises look lovely on the instagram though. Progress we are told. So that those with the right passports by shop and sight see, as those with their passports taken die to build.

The Congo dies, poisoned. So that you can read this. I have the right to rape! That is the spoken out loud words of the entitled, the privileged. We may discriminate what we spend our time on, though apparently we are far too busy to care. From societies so gorged that weight loss and diabetic amputation is a problem, while babies die from dysentery. Both illnesses so fixable, yet the governments impose embargoes so that more children die. While others are born to simply eat. The starvation embargoes punish who? Well fed warlords and public servants?

And you may ask, ‘what can I do about it?’ Ignoring that most who love government worship the religion of democracy, yet never seem to take any responsibility. The meme outrage comes from millions of individuals the world over. The image of a crushed baby is squashed beneath the memes of a breakdancer with Chris Lilley audio over it. The march to war between nuclear armed belligerents is blown aside by the concern over a sport that most never even cared about before. Women’s boxing wish it had as many fans as the likes and share mob have spewed across the screens. I suppose we know what you do really care about and that makes you just another person of your time.

August, 2024