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Tanks for Nothing: The Era of Manned Armor is Over

by | Sep 5, 2024 |

m1 abramsx

The beat goes on.

I have made the outrageous claim that the era of the carrier is over and also infer that manned tanks are also way past their expiration date due to the demonstrative lop-sided opportunities in salvo competition that is seeing 7-10 million dollar tanks savaged by munitions a fraction of the cost. Even in peer wars of the past, industrial capacity would not be able to keep up with that attrition trade-off but in today’s severely degraded manufacturing environment in the West, this is an invitation to disaster with no capacity to replenish war-stocks lost in combat.

You want manned tanks? Build in smaller densities and revisit the CONOPs to reduce the size and signature by creating smaller unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) that are armed in a variety of ways to discover what the optimal form of this new vehicle will be. When the Iraqi tanks were destroyed at the Battle of 73 Easting in the First Iraq War (1990-91) by the superior tanks and crews with the Abrams, it was the high water mark for a tank first conceived in the 1970s. But over thirty years have past and the tank is overshadowed by many munitions that have become ubiquitous now that were scarce then. During the Persian Gulf War, it is alleged that M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFV) destroyed more Iraqi armored vehicles than the M1 Abrams. A few kills against Iraqi T-72 tanks at close range are reported. A total of 20 Bradleys were lost; three by enemy fire and 17 due to friendly fire incidents. Another 12 were damaged.

Only four USMC Abrams were ever deployed to Afghanistan. The environment was totally unsuitable.

In the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Bradley IFVs fared poorly. In 2006, total losses included 55 Bradleys destroyed and some 700 others damaged. By the end of the war, about 150 Bradleys had been destroyed. Most destroyed by IEDs (nothing new here, merely a variant on mine warfare).

The ubiquity of drones for both munitions and third party targeting is quickly diminishing the utility of tanks in modern near-peer and peer warfare.

The manned tank era is simply over.

m1a2sep2006

M1A2 SEP belonging to 1/66AR, destroyed by IED on March 10, 2006; 2 KIA with an assumed 2 WIA.

m1cojone

It appears approx 35 Abrams were lost (enemy and friendly fire) in the 2003-2011 in Iraq. And very little of these were tank-on-tank encounters and many were IED with only one scuttled (deliberate abandonment and destruction). That M1A1 belonged to 1-64, 3ID destroyed April 6, 2003. The well known “Cojone Eh” was destroyed during Thunder Run; the tank was set on fire by either a RPG-7 or SPG-9 hit to the left side fuel tanks, eventually scuttled with guided air launched munitions and multiple sabot hits.

The Russian-Ukrainian conflict is putting paid the very notion of utility and survivability of manned tanks on the modern battlefield much like my notion that exoskeletal armor so fondly portrayed in science fiction will not have humans in them but will simply be augmented ground combat drones in various modes of motoring (tracked, wheeled, bipedal, quad-pedal, etc) about the battlefield. Even the notion of mechanized or light combat infantryman needs a whole new reappraisal for survivability.

And now the mandarins at the Pentagon want a new Abrams that is, wait for it, hybrid electric. I have not taken the time to look at the Request for Proposal for a new tank but I will bet dollars to donuts the wizards of war in the DoD floated the suggestion of green technology to appease the usual suspects.

Neither the Bradley nor the Abrams should be replaced. It’s time for a complete reappraisal of armored and mechanized warfare in the West.

Stop the madness.

Now, General Dynamics is proposing the AbramsX, a next-generation tank featuring a hybrid electric diesel engine, artificial intelligence, and a smaller crew.

Last year, General Dynamics offered a short YouTube clip advertising the AbramsX. The video made a splash. “It’s the biggest upgrade of America’s military tank technology since early in the Cold War, The Washington Post wrote.

Naturally, the AbramsX will feature updated technology relative to existing Abrams variants. The biggest upgrade is the inclusion of a hybrid electric diesel engine, which is expected to make the AbramsX lighter and improve its fuel economy.

In keeping with the economic theme, the AbramsX will operate with a smaller crew than its predecessors. And like most weapons systems being developed these days, the tank will also incorporate artificial intelligence systems.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/abramsx-us-armys-next-big-tank-nightmare-210113

H/T to R/Destroyed Tanks

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Reader Request

by | Sep 4, 2024 |

titanic1

Does anyone have the CRS or GAO report of the completed F35 OT&E [Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E)]? Any documentation will do.

They fielded the 1,000th airframe and it has NEVER jumped from initial operational capability (IOC) to full operational capability (FOC) until possibly this year.

To quote Lt. Gen. Michael Schmidt, the F-35′s program executive officer, said during a 30 March 2023:

The “F-35 is currently planning to achieve full operational capability status after the full TR-3 and block 4 capabilities of the aircraft are fielded in 2028 — 27 years after the program began…”

“That is by any measure unacceptable.”

27 years.

“While over 900 F-35s have been produced, the program has technically been stuck in its initial operational testing phase — and low-rate initial production — for years over the delayed completion of the trials, whose results DOT&E officials intend to use to support a full-rate production decision. The delays stemmed from technical issues and pandemic challenges impacting the program’s virtual Joint Simulation Environment (JSE), which hosts the combat trials for the tri-variant stealth fighter. Compared to an original plan outlined in 2012, the program formally entered the operational testing phase over a year late in 2018 and previously expected to achieve FRP at the end of 2019.”

https://breakingdefense.com/2023/09/f-35-program-completes-key-combat-simulations-could-pave-way-for-full-rate-production/

I have covered this in the past concerning TR-3 & Block 4 capabilities problems.

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Carrier Blues: Even the Mainstream is Waking Up

by | Sep 3, 2024 |

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The ice is breaking on the stonewalling of the defense community and external observers to have an honest conversation on the aircraft carrier; they may be getting the message on how indefensible and anachronistic this extraordinarily expensive weapons system is.

The Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition has already removed me from their Christmas card list.

More and more of the Coprophile Media is reluctantly waking up to the apparently intuitively obvious conclusion. The defense journalism industry, like the cultural critics in Hollywood, tend to be sycophantic and are very careful with criticism because then they lose the public relations contacts and open doors to the trillion dollar defense industry.

Thank goodness for the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and General Accountability Office (GAO) documentation and data palaces that show the keen observer what is really going on (even though I think the ground truth tends to be far worse than we even imagine).

I do wish a foundation with deep pockets or even Elon Musk would create a clearinghouse/analytical cell that goes through these mountains of data and evidence to show just how bad the American (and by extension, the Western) military establishment is. The US is not prepared to conduct a peer or near-peer war much less more than one conflict at the same time. And the trillions of dollars unaccounted for is another issue altogether.

Hence, America’s obsession with expensive and cumbersome aircraft carriers. The United States has not only committed to this weapons platform, but it has become a cultural symbol. That is why the cult of flat tops has taken hold to such a degree that to even point out that great state rivals, such as China and Russia, as well as the proxies for these nations, such as Iran or North Korea, have developed highly effective countermeasures is considered unpatriotic or worse, heretical. But this fixation on the carrier as more than just a weapons platform, as a cultural icon, is precisely what makes it such a terrible weapon to rely upon.

And then they say something in the major media that you dear readers know already.

Thus, Washington’s current war plans play right into China’s and Russia’s anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategies. If actual war erupts between the United States or any of its major rivals, these forces will do what they must to win the war—and that means going-for-broke and trying to sink US carriers before they can become a serious threat to their forces and interests. 

One way or another, thanks to the advent of hypersonic weapons and anti-ship missiles, such as China’s DF-21 series, American aircraft carriers will not be as effective against targets defended by these A2/AD systems. 

In the history of human warfare, large exquisite platforms always attract plenty of attention from the Roman destruction of Gallic fortresses before the birth of Christ to the use of longbows to defeat very expensive heavy horse at Agincourt to the Maginot Line and battleship dead-ends in the twentieth century.

And everything in between throughout history. The carrier is the crossbow and chariot of the 21st century.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/aircraft-carrier-age-could-end-disaster-us-navy-209915

The U.S. Navy’s other Pacific-based carriers are in port or in their maintenance availability period. Out of six carriers in the Pacific, the USS Carl Vinson recently participated in RIMPAC 2024, the USS Nimitz recently completed a six month planned incremental availability period for maintenance, the USS Ronald Reagan recently completed a homeport shift to Naval Base Kitsap, and the USS George Washington will remain in San Diego until the crew and equipment swap from USS Ronald Reagan is complete.

https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2024/08/no-u-s-navy-aircraft-carriers-deployed-in-the-pacific/

At least the carriers in port will be sunk in shallow water.

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The COVID Narrative Exposed on C-SPAN

The COVID Narrative Exposed on C-SPAN

by | Sep 2, 2024 |

Domestic Imperialists used the coercive apparatus of the state to stop hundreds of millions of people from enjoying their lives for years. Surely, we should see a great utilitarian benefit from these COVID lockdown policies and mask mandates.

Why was it, that states like Florida and California, which had drastically different policies, had no discernible difference in COVID deaths*?

This would have been a great opportunity for Progressives to advocate the Keto and Carnivore diet, considering obesity was clearly correlated with COVID deaths, but such a policy would not have justified massive increases in the size and scope of government in the lives of everyday people.

Here is Thomas E. Woods Jr., author of “Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania” on BookTV:

*Account for Florida’s older population.

Watch the video on BookTV: Diary of a Psychosis

Movie Bob’d

Movie Bob’d

by | Sep 1, 2024 |

In the time just before the rise of Pewidepie as the most popular YouTuber there were the angry and nostalgic reviewers. The Angry Video Game Nerd formally Nintendo, Nostalgia Critic, Spoonyone, Cinemasnob and so on all were prominent on the platform. Mostly in their homes putting together reviews with skits that either missed or hit, while inventing characters to make a point. In that age the intended audience was not little children but rather teens and adults. Some of the reviewers became famous enough to inspire copy cats, or motivate others to take up the webcam and angrily criticise a film or game. Irate Gamer to AVGN being an example of one such copy cat reviewer. Then came Mr Plinkett. the Red Letter Media created character who narrated in a garbled voice lengthy reviews of Star Wars, Star Trek and other films with a comical break down. Such long form commentary form would pave the way for Mauler and many of those in the Every Frame A Pause realm.

The Fair Use period of YouTube ensured that some went to blip.tv or invented their own websites, the Nostalgia Critic heading That Guy With Glasses which had a stable of reviewers under one roof as such. Normal Boots would house many gamer types for a time such as Jon Tron to Peanut Butter Gamer. Lindsay Ellis, was then known as the Nostalgia Chick. She rose to prominence reviewing among the TGWG crew a fan favourite. In his own corner of YouTube lurked Movie Bob, who would often bludgeon contemporary American politics into basically every film he reviewed. Under the pretentious category of reviewer along with Patrick (H) Willems where the reviewer insists that they are the smartest person ever to review a thing to be reviewed. Movie Bob was a cliché that helped invent the modern meme of a Well Ackstually neckbeard.

At one convention where fans met their favourite online celebrities Movie Bob got a photo with Lindsay Ellis. He then went on to use this photo some time later as proof that he and her are friends. They are after all “colleagues” in the realm of reviewers, so to those peering in through the portal of social media it stands to reason that they could be real life friends. Ellis then responded by putting Bob in his place, calling him “creepy” for sharing such a photo with his claim of friendship. The very public Twitter shutdown put Bob down a rung and helped secure him as a meme. He would go on to complain about how it hurt him. You see, Bob is a male feminist type. The kind of male feminist who loses his feminist values when a drunk female is passed out nearby, (not Bob personally but the type of feminist I am referring to, I would never accuse such a man of such a thing…) and Ellis called him out for it.

Years later, Lindsay Ellis apologised for her tweet because it had hurt Bob’s credibility. Though his claim and boast on Twitter itself should have been condemnation of his character, being a false claim and all that. Now why have I informed you of all of this, because recently a 2016 photo of Tulsi Gabbard standing alongside Rabbi Shmuley was X’d out by the pro-genocide Rabbi. Shmuley claimed in his tweet above the 2016 photo that he was, “Excited to see my two close friends Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F Kennedy, Jr lead the Donald Trump transition team.” Many Xers (Tweeters was much easier to say), seemed convinced that it was a recent photo of the Trump team alumni Gabbard.

Whether Shmuley is friends with Gabbard or Kennedy is unknown. They are both politicians who seem to have countless friends, the nature of the photo and tweet is reminiscent of Movie Bob. The attachment of self to another, a political beast determined to steel the flames of fame and influence from another. Or in the case of Shmuley the attachment of a woman who is associated with some antiwar sentiments to himself, who is pro a particular war. The X-tweet is all rather political and much ado about nothing in the grand scheme of things but it does further reveal the damaging attachment of personalities to causes and their association of a message when they themselves seek politics. This is the nature of politics, shaking hands and standing in photos with people of disrepute.

Lindsay Ellis is a much more talented reviewer and film maker than Bob ever was. Tulsi Gabbard is also a far more accomplished person than Shmuley could ever be. Which is why both feel the need to associate themselves with such women. It’s also the dangerous reality of having ones photo taken with strangers, because you never really know who they may be or what they will do with such a photo. But Gabbard is in Team Trump, where the policies seem onboard with enabling the genocide in Palestine. Shmuley already has many friend’s like that.

 

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The Royal Navy Stumbles, Again

by | Aug 30, 2024 |

f35b

The Fat Amy follies continue apace.

We discussed this recently and it looks more and more likely that the hapless and increasingly Orwellian Starmer junta in the UK may be reneging on plans to buy more than the present complement of shoddy F35B aircraft they currently have.

They have started to weigh priorities to shift to a new joint fighter venture with Japan and Italy.

It will be as disastrous as the F35 and the stumbling efforts of the USAF to come up with a sixth-generation fighter aircraft.

I am amused they are all that concerned for having carrier-borne aircraft since both of their carriers are so unreliable, they dare not leave British territorial waters. The Royal Navy has a consistent problem with engineering casualties or breakdowns that are only exacerbated by employing an aircraft of questionable readiness.

The Global Air Combat Programme (GCAP) is now set to create yet another chaos avalanche of bad engineering and a failure of martial imagination tumbling through the treasuries of western aligned nations. Historians will have a hell of a good time documenting the absolute dumpster fire of Western military aviation in the 21st century.

The Labour government may force the MoD to decide between the F-35 and the future Tempest, the planned sixth-generation fighter that is part of the British-led Global Air Combat Programme (GCAP). The UK is working with Italy and Japan on the GCAP, which like the United States Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program calls for a system of systems that could include a manned fighter supported by multiple unmanned aerial systems (UAS) or drones.

The Starmer junta is reconsidering the deal and may not approve the further acquisition.

Original plans called for the UK to acquire 138 of the fifth-generation multirole fighters – which would include the air wings for its two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers – but to date, just 48 of the aircraft have been ordered, with 34 delivered. One of those was damaged beyond repair while operating from HMS Queen Elizabeth in the Mediterranean in 2021.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/uk-could-back-out-f-35-fighter-program-212474

This little gem stuck out at Parliament with a subtext I will tease out for you:

Speaking to the U.K. Parliament’s Defense Committee back in September 2020, Nick Childs, Senior Fellow for Naval Forces and Maritime Security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said he considered a number “significantly higher” than 48 F-35Bs would be required to meet the ambition of 24 jets available for the baseline Carrier Strike mission. Taking into account training and other demands, a figure of 60-70 jets would be reasonable, Childs contended.

https://www.twz.com/air/united-kingdoms-f-35b-fleet-plans-under-threat-as-defense-cuts-loom

Mr. Childs is much more prescient than he let’s on because when you have a 30 percent and deteriorating operational readiness rate and acquire 100 F35Bs, you will be lucky to have 30 flyable aircraft.

Soon enough, the defense mandarins will finally recognize that the era of manned fighter aircraft is over but only after setting hundreds of billions of dollars on fire.

And I remind you, the British win all of their military victories in spite of their best efforts.

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Israel’s Genocide Risks Causing a Vaccine-Derived Polio Outbreak in Gaza

Israel’s Genocide Risks Causing a Vaccine-Derived Polio Outbreak in Gaza

by | Aug 29, 2024 |

The New York Times reported on August 26 that more than 1.2 million doses of polio vaccine arrived in Gaza as part of an effort to vaccinate more than 640,000 Palestinian children with the aim of preventing an outbreak of the potentially paralyzing disease, but Israel’s continued military campaign and blockade of humanitarian aid poses an obstacle to the vaccines being distributed.

One case of paralytic polio has been confirmed in a 10-month-old child in Gaza who became paralyzed in one leg, which was the first case of polio in Gaza in a quarter-century.

Last week, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, expressed concern about this development while reporting that the child “is currently in a stable condition.”

In the US during the pre-vaccine era, most people infected with polio never developed the disease, most people who did had mild flu-like symptoms and fully recovered, and it was in less than one percent of cases that paralysis occurred, sometimes resulting to permanent disability or death.

Poliovirus is transmitted via a fecal-oral route, and its global decline was largely due to advances in sanitation, better nutrition, and other improvements to societal standard of living. As noted in the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) journal Pediatrics, nearly 90% of the decline in infectious disease mortality observed in the US during the twentieth century occurred before there were vaccines available to help explain the decline, which was instead mainly due to factors related to an increasing standard of living.

Changes in the diagnostic criteria for poliomyelitis also resulted in an artifactual decline of cases in the US falsely attributed to vaccination. Prior to 1955, large numbers of paralysis cases due to other causes, such as coxsackie virus infection, were incorrectly attributed to poliovirus, and diagnostic changes introduced that year created a perceived decline in paralytic polio that was largely a statistical artifact.

A famous example of potential misdiagnosis is President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom Americans are taught in school was wheelchair-bound for life because of a poliovirus infection, but whose symptoms some scientists have argued were more likely caused by an autoimmune disease known as Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS).

The reappearance of polio in Gaza, the New York Times reported on August 16, is a result of “the destruction of the territory’s waste and water systems, which, along with malnourishment bordering on famine, has caused a multitude of grave health threats for Palestinians sealed in the territory.”

The Times also incorrectly reported that the vaccination effort “would involve giving recipients two rounds of injections”. While the polio vaccine used in the US and other developed countries is the inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV), which is administered by injection, the oral polio vaccine (OPV) is still widely used in developing countries, and it is the orally administered vaccine that would be given to Palestinian children if the vaccination campaign were able to proceed, according to the WHO.

The Times also failed to inform its readers in both of its aforementioned articles that the strain of poliovirus found in wastewater in Gaza is not the wild type but vaccine-derived poliovirus.

The inactivated vaccine is less effective and does not prevent infection and transmission of the poliovirus, whereas the “live” virus vaccine administered orally does confer immunity in the intestinal tract. However, the live-virus vaccine also carries the risk of itself causing paralytic polio in rare cases, and vaccinated individuals can shed vaccine-strain virus that can revert to virulence and hence infect and cause disease in others.

In the US, every case of paralytic polio occurring after 1979 was caused by the oral polio vaccine, which is why the switch was eventually made around the turn of the century to exclusive use of the less effective but safer “killed” vaccine.

Illustrating how the US government has long placed the policy goal of achieving a high vaccination rate over the goal of properly informing the public so individuals can make their own informed choice, in 1984, with the risk of paralytic polio being greater from the vaccine than from the wild virus and an inactivated vaccine already available, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declared with respect to the continued use of the oral polio vaccine, that “any possible doubts, whether or not well founded, about the safety of the vaccine cannot be allowed to exist in view of the need to ensure that the vaccine will continue to be used to the maximum extent consistent with the nation’s public health objectives.” (Emphasis added.)

In 2019, the WHO reported that the world had crossed the threshold whereby more cases of polio were being caused by the vaccine than by the wild virus. The polio strain found in wastewater samples in Gaza and in the confirmed child case of paralytic polio was “circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2)”.

The horrific sanitary conditions and widespread malnutrition in Gaza are the result of Israel having waged a genocidal military campaign against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip for over ten months now, with indiscriminate bombardment that has systematically targeted the civilian infrastructure, including Gaza’s health care system, and killed over 40,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, coupled with a blockade policy that has been condemned by international human rights and aid organizations as the illegal use of deliberate starvation as a weapon of war.

In December of last year, the government of South Africa brought a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), sometimes called the “World Court” because it is the international community’s highest authority on interpretation and application of international law, accusing Israel of violating the 1948 Genocide Convention. The following month, the ICJ issued a preliminary ruling finding that Israel was committing a plausible genocide and ordering the Israeli government to take actions to demonstrate its commitment to compliance with the convention. Israel ignored the order.

In May, the ICJ ordered Israel to halt its military assault on Rafah in southern Gaza, where civilians had been ordered to flee by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and where 1.5 million Palestinians, over half the population of Gaza, were sheltering. As with the provisional measures the ICJ had previously issued, Israel ignored the Court’s order and proceeded with its genocidal campaign.

In a separate case brought before the ICJ by the UN General Assembly, the Court was asked to determine the legal consequences of Israel’s persistent occupation of Palestinian territory, and it issued its advisory opinion on July 19, ruling not only that a multitude of aspects of Israel’s occupation violate international law but that the occupation itself is illegal, amounting to an apartheid regime.

In May, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a separate body at the Hague in the Netherlands, announced that he was seeking arrest warrants for three top Hamas officials, including Ismail Haniyeh, whom Israel assassinated in Tehran, Iran, on July 31, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, the ICC has yet to issue the warrants, which require the approval of a three-judge panel.

The US government under the administration of President Joe Biden has been supporting Israel’s genocide while cynically feigning to care about the lives of Palestinian civilians and colluding with Israel in a public relations campaign aimed at creating the false perception that the only obstacle to a cessation of hostilities is Hamas’s rejection of an Israeli ceasefire proposal, when in fact Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly made clear that Israel will not end its genocidal military operation in Gaza before achieving the stated aim of eliminating Hamas and otherwise making demands transparently intended to ensure that no ceasefire can be achieved—a policy that has angered families of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups during the murderous attacks in Israel on October 7 last year.

While it is unlikely to happen given the perversity of the existing world governmental order, the US government could theoretically also be charged with violating the 1948 Genocide Convention for its complicity in Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Cross-posted from JeremyRHammond.com.

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