The development and maintenance of advanced naval platforms like the HMS Queen Elizabeth are costly endeavors. Budgetary constraints have often led to delays in maintenance and upgrades, exacerbating existing issues and preventing timely resolution of technical problems. Ensuring adequate funding is crucial for maintaining the carrier’s operational readiness and addressing its persistent challenges.

They are being coy about just how bad this ship is. And the very notion of having a single carrier instead of two does not say much about force projection capabilities. I am highly suspect the two carriers can even deploy together and the RN does not have the logistical capability to do this.

The F35B/C flying issues and readiness problems are compounding the military effectiveness problem.

The UK is a third world nation with a single teetering first-world city that is rapidly slipping to a point of no return.

The Royal Navy’s HMS Queen Elizabeth Aircraft Carrier Is In Big Trouble

These ships have been plagued with drive-train issues and depend on allied navies to assist in blue water projection.

Just sell them.

The carriers were approved in 2007 by then prime minister Gordon Brown. One of them was almost scrapped before it even set sail, but ministers discovered axing it would actually be more expensive.

HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Queen Elizabeth cost a combined £7 billion. Today it is widely accepted the UK will not be able to adequately defend or operate them independently.

Navy might have to sell off £3,500,000,000 HMS Prince of Wales aircraft carrier

Retired Royal Navy Commander Tom Sharpe said: ‘If I was a carrier-skeptic, and there are plenty, I would be gunning for one of them right now.”

Sharpe is sharper than any navalist in the British Admiralty.

As existentially injured and incompetent as the Royal Navy is now, I am not surprised they would try to sell this carrier which shares significant “mechanical casualty” issues that make it eminently unreliable just motoring through the ocean. Much like the US Littoral Combat Ship offer recently rejected by the Greek Navy, no one could afford to fix these much less maintain them. Like aircraft carriers planet-wide, these are extraordinarily expensive dinosaurs.

Dear President Trump,

Fire missions!

Please conduct airstrikes on:

The FBI Central Records Complex in Winchester, Virginia.

AND

The NSA Bluffdale/Camp Williams LEED Silver facility in Saratoga Springs, Utah.

Please be sure to evacuate all employees to a local detention center to be screened before release.

Cordially,

The American Taxpayer

***

America turns this into a national event with a countdown televised and broadcast across the land.

SHOT, OUT.

SHOT, OVER.

SPLASH, OUT.

SPLASH, OVER.

Then do firefighter aircraft flyovers with massive salt drops to symbolically close the mass surveillance era.

Nothing is working for anyone with a clear eye to reform in the Department of Defense. We may find some reform will take place now but I am cynical and not holding out much hope.

Nothing.

“Fixes are proposed; panels are held; good, sensible reforms are constantly suggested: yet nothing works, everything keeps getting worse, and there seems to be no way out of the crisis.”

The crisis will be solved through the bankruptcy the state is volunteering for.

The missing link inside the American policy establishment today is a basic discussion about the future and sustainability of the empire in light of America’s industrial weakness and cultural confusion. Powerful ideological and political constraints, however, currently make such discussions not just impossible but also career-ending for any individual who would dare to attempt them. The result of this chronic unwillingness to even acknowledge basic first principles inside Washington is to trap the Navy, Army, and all the other branches of the U.S. military on the far side of the Red Queen’s magic mirror: forcing them to constantly make impossible trade-offs and sacrifices just to postpone necessary discussions a little bit into the future, dooming them to running faster and faster just so that America’s leadership class won’t ever have to move an inch. In this clash between ideology and reality, ideology is almost always the victor. And it is winning at the cost of destroying the U.S. military itself.

To a student of human history, the woeful state of America’s national security establishment does not appear as some sort of great mystery. It is far from unique; in fact, it might not even be noteworthy. It is just the normal stuff of human history, going back thousands of years. The USSR is still very much in living memory; what went on in that empire in its final decade wasn’t all that different from what is happening in America today. Despite all the hype, America’s empire is not actually very exceptional; it is far more similar to than different from history’s many other empires that have all risen to wealth and glory only to then fall away. The cancer eating away at the U.S. military is of a similar genus to that which once ate away at the Red Army; the oblivious and out-of-touch responses coming from elites inside Washington aren’t particularly different from the attitudes of Soviet elites of days past. Having foolishly succumbed to the slow-acting poison of an ideology that proclaims that America possesses the first and only non-ideological military in the world, America’s civilian and military elites now find themselves trapped in a grim and decaying Wonderland of their own making.

Ideology has so blended with the Imperial City and the military temples at the Pentagon ensure an absolutely impossible problem set where no one has the will or means to stop the massive train from running out of tracks in a spectacular crash that will sunder the American empire.

America’s National Security Wonderland

Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me