This is Darryl Cooper on World War II and the Holocaust. Try listening to him instead of what the Party said he said.
Aren’t you people embarrassed for letting shameless liars tell you what to think?
Do you think maybe you could take the lesson and become harder to fool for next time?
Carrier skeptics have been hammering away at the anachronistic cargo cult of the aircraft carrier. The Navy has invested a significant amount of political capital and mountains of budget dollars to maintaining a fleet of these allegedly deadly weapons of war that were recently steaming away with their tails between their legs from the Red Sea where the US Navy (in its own words) experienced the deadliest combat since WWII.
Against a foe with no navy to speak of (largest vessels in the Yemeni fleet are fifty year old patrol vessels).
Now Kat Klarenberg at Global Delinquents penned a brilliant jeremiad against these budget-busting behemoths that destroy dollars more effectively than anything else.
Stop building these things.
Stop funding and re-imagine the martial nature of naval combat in the 21st century.
Similar bombast was present in remarks Sullivan made in an accompanying “exclusive” interview with The Times. He spoke of how in the immediate aftermath of “Oct. 7”, his White House national security team decided strident “military muscle movements that could show decisiveness” were absolutely vital. As such, Washington sought to “over-deliver on speed, and scope and scale of American power protection to reassure the Israelis, and to deter adversaries.” USS Eisenhower’s dispatch was considered the boldest “military muscle movement” possible.
Sullivan expressed delight with the results of Operation Prosperity Guardian, suggesting USS Eisenhower’s “fight” with AnsarAllah in the Red Sea “showed that [aircraft carriers] could still battle effectively at close ranges.” This appraisal was echoed by US Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro. He dismissed “critics” who “predicted the end of the usefulness of carriers”, claiming Operation Prosperity Guardian was a “valuable lesson” demonstrating how US aircraft carrier naysayers had gotten it badly wrong.
Sullivan and Del Toro can put a happy face all they want on the continuing efficacy of carriers but the evidence is now overwhelming that these enormously expensive aircraft ferries are a complete waste of money in the world of 21st century peer and near-peer warfare. These ships will go down ignobly in history as floating coffins that will seal the fate of thousands of sailors trapped in these missile sponges if the inevitable new wars in this century kick off.
A far more rational conclusion to draw from Operation Prosperity Guardian is that US aircraft carriers have been proven beyond any reasonable doubt to be a redundant relic of a bygone, unipolar age. The Empire’s bloated, exorbitantly expensive military machine built in recent decades, exclusively suited to one-sided gang-beatings of adversaries that can’t retaliate, is now unable to meet the challenges of modern warfare. By contrast, the Resistance have effortlessly innovated and equipped themselves for 21st century battle.
If the effusive endorsements of Operation Prosperity Guardian issued by Del Toro and Sullivan are truly sincere, then unambiguous, urgent takeouts from the fiasco evidently have not been heeded. Eerily, such cecity was precisely foreshadowed by the July 2002 Millennium Challenge. Largely forgotten today, it remains one of the grandest war games ever mounted by the Pentagon. Costing $250 million – almost $500 million in today’s money – it involved both live-action exercises and computer simulations. In all, 13,000 real-life US troops participated.
Please read the whole essay because Kit does a great overview of the infamous 2002 Millennium Challenge exercise debacle in which GEN van Riper demonstrated the emperor had no clothes in the Pentagon.
https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/collapsing-empire-rip-us-aircraft
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
Whatever the giant-jawed Zionist propagandists at Reason magazine say, the truth is always the opposite.
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.
M1A2 SEP belonging to 1/66AR, destroyed by IED on March 10, 2006; 2 KIA with an assumed 2 WIA.
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
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
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.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.
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.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
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
