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The F35 Follies: Britannia Rules a Little

by Bill Buppert | Aug 6, 2024 | Blog

My recommendation to the British MoD: don’t buy anymore of these flying failure factories.

U.K. planned to buy138 F-35s, bought 48, delivered 35, aims at 75 by 2025.

Judging from the delays and failures universally in the program, achieving a delivery of all functional fighters is probably a pipe dream. Since the readiness rate for the F35B (carrier-borne) in US hands is below 20 percent, one can imagine the the British will not be able to keep that percentage aloft. Do the math and single digits of these aircraft still functional in five years is not a sure bet.

Not to mention the two new massive oil-fired 65,000-ton Queen Elizabeth-class carriers can’t safely navigate beyond the shores of England without a catastrophic engine casualty. They may become very expensive aircraft ferries to tour the circumference of the UK.

The Royal Navy is a shadow of its former majesty and there is simply no future for a blue-water armada under the Union Jack for the remainder of this century, if England lasts that long since London is a first world city in a third world country.

The extinction of British steel on the alter of the green religion will play a role in this demise that will roll well into the future.

Former Trotskyist Keir Starmer is the new PM of the rickety old England and the new UK Labor government is reviewing military spending and is unclear on F-35B fate. The UK is also the only country to solely purchase the naval F-35B S/VTOL variant of the fighter for both its navy and air force.

For a long time, the stated goal of the UK was to purchase 138 F-35s, but later, the government seemed to grow cold on that number and seemed to want to reduce it. However, with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the UK affirmed its plan to eventually purchase 138 F-35s.

While Labour may adjust the number of F-35Bs to be procured, it is highly unlikely to cancel the F-35 program. The new government will undoubtedly adjust Britain’s military procurement, but it is unclear at this point what those adjustments will be. Labour has committed itself to increasing military expenditure to 2.5% of GDP “as soon as they can” (up from around 2.1% now).

Labour also claims the previous government “failed on defense” and that under the Torys, “200 aircraft have been taken out of service in the last five years alone.” It is possible Labour will increase the number of fighter jets to be purchased – time will tell.

https://simpleflying.com/what-to-know-britains-f-35-lightning-ii-program/

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Anti-War Blog – Not Enough Paper Cranes

by Kym Robinson | Aug 6, 2024 | Blog

When I was in primary school we were taught about a little Japanese girl named Sadako Sasaki and her paper cranes. She was one of the many victims of the Hiroshima atomic bomb blast, dying after the initial detonation from radiation sickness. One of many thousands who would die painfully in the days, weeks, months and years following the bombs explosion. We learned that in the time before her impending death, she had set a goal of making 1,000 paper Origami cranes. She died at 644. We even learned a song, and a group of ten year old Australian sang and put on a play, pretending to be Japanese children who died from the blast. Then we were told that the bombings were necessary. That the babies, children had to die. The greater good. Collective punishment. We were educated. Killing Sadako saved American lives. Next subject. The next dance to be performed to Tina Turner’s Nutbush City Limits. The ten year old’s forgetting Sadako.

It’s that time of year, when the anniversary of the atomic bombs of Japan are upon us. It’s a period where the culmination of all bombings, on every belligerent city is justified. We are taught that the fascists bombing Guenica or the blitz on London was wrong, the enemies intentional bombing of civilians an evil act that validates their evil status as an enemy. When the Allies bombed French, Italian, German, Romanian, Phillipine and Japanese towns and cities we are told it was a necessity. The Axis were evil. The babies, children included. Even those in occupied nations.

An American GI in Vietnam was quoted as saying, “We need to burn down the village in order to save it.” Perhaps one needs to murder millions in order to save them.

The Japanese empire was evil, it murdered millions, raped, tortured. The ancient Chinese capital of Nangking is forever to be associated with what the Japanese soldierrs did to it’s inhabitants. Like a blight, the empire of Japan savaged Asia, embracing a colonialism which was allowable for Europeans decades earlier. This was the twentieth century, the Japanese could not have such an empire. At least not at the expense of the British, Dutch, French or US empires.

Then the US bombed Korea, to the point that the Air Force ran out of targets. Destroying the North, wooden hut or bridge it did not matter. Millions died. Biological weapons were even dropped. Those developed by the sinister Japanese scientists who had become US assets. The very Japanese military torturers many use to justify the nuking of little Sadako, shared their putrid secrets with Uncle Sam who then used them on Koreans and Chinese. The Japanese had done that too. Though at the time, North Korea was not known as a pariah entity, not to the point of Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany. Communist imperialism was a danger that needed to be opposed, opposed by murdering the people it enslaved. Every enemy leader was the next Hitler, while millions of the next Sadako’s suffered.

Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam would follow in the decades after Korea. More bombs were dropped on Laos, than were dropped in all of World War Two. “They just kept sending us more bombs,” an Air Force man said when asked why. More bombs were dropped on South Vietnam, the allied side, than were dropped in the North, the enemy side. Millions died. Even to this day, the chemicals used to obliterate nature and human life poisons generations later. Bombs and mines randomly explode, shredding mostly the young to death or maiming them for life. All those bombs and lives taken to free the Vietnamese? Save American lives? Freedom? To preserve the Union?

Hundreds of thousands of Sadako’s suffered. Blown to pieces, burned to death, maimed, born into mutated agony all so that men in uniform could enforce policies for men in suits. When the war was over those places became historical chapters, the mass death down played or ignored. It was after all how the greatest nation on Earth learned to wage war. Killing them all. Tokyo fire bombings, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, ‘saved American lives and ended the war’. A war that was ending long before the Los Alamo tests. A war that all but ended when the Japanese had been suing for peace, months before. A war that was allowed to end the moment the Soviet Union destroyed the Japanese forces in North China, Korea and Manchuria. The Allies now needed a healthy Japan to curtail the next enemy, Soviet imperialism.

It’s all complicated I suppose. Blowing up children, wiping out families. Strangers who have no say in policy, individuals who never stabbed a woman in China with their penis or bayonet, babies not even born when Pearl Harbor was attacked, they are all Japs. All the same race, from the same nation. So goes the collectivist rationale. Sadoko may as well have been Tojo or a Japanese swordsman beheading prisoners. Do collectivists allow that reasoning to reverse? That their babies, their children should also be fair game should the national government they either support or have no love for does evil? Or is it more primal than that. Despite the facade of order, justice, civility the savage and ancient supremacy, to conquer and wipe out the other. Sadako is thus inferior. Kill them all! We have the facade, and the reality. Silver B-29’s may as well be horseback archers churning up the steppes in blood.

On my computer, I have this image of a mother, her body burned to impossible recognition. Beneath her, still attached is an umbilical cord that leads to a baby. As her body was burned in napalm, she gave birth. Perhaps natures instinct, to save the child as the mother dies. A last ditch hope of life. Instead mother and new born baby lay as burned remnants among a city full of burned remnants. Scientists tinkered to perfect chemicals and metallurgy, engineers conceived machines and mechanisms that trained war fighters could fly and use so that mother and child may lay lost to history, as burned images on a screen. I stare at such a photo knowing out there are many who will remind me that the mother and child deserved to die. They needed to die. The killers, scientists, engineers, are heroes. The baby, not even named, an enemy. It takes a love of government or some form of nationalism to think that way. To hate a mother and baby so much, that they should be burned to death as little Sadako dies from the bombs radiation.

Unfortunately little Sadako did not make enough cranes to save herself, or anyone else for that matter. Though her killers did build more bombs and planes. No one wants paper cranes, making them doesn’t pay very well, if at all. Next August it will be the same, the bombs loved. The dead, deserving of their fate. Perhaps humanity is at it’s 644 paper cranes, “May the crane of peace fly everywhere!” This is our cry, this is our prayer, “Crane of peace fly everywhere!”

August, 2024

Speaking of democracy…

by Laurie Calhoun | Aug 5, 2024 | Blog, Politics

Democracy has been a much discussed topic of late, what with the separation of President Joe Biden from his delegates only weeks before the upcoming Democratic party convention, to be held in Chicago from August 19 to 22, 2024.

There have been brokered conventions in history before, but will Vice President Kamala Harris secure the Democratic party’s presidential nomination after entirely bypassing the primary process and receiving not a single vote from the electorate? Only time will tell.

Right before the DNC palace coup, and just after the attempt on former President Trump’s life, Alex Bernardo interviewed Laurie Calhoun on The Protestant Libertarian Podcast, focusing on the question:

Is Democracy a Sham?

The springboard for this discussion was an essay, “Sham-ocracy, Scam-ocracy,” published by the Libertarian Institute on June 17, 2024.

Corruption-A-Go-Go: Taliban Continues to Receive US Funding

by Bill Buppert | Aug 5, 2024 | Blog

The US State Department needs to be disbanded and all overseas embassies should be converted to ATM-style kiosks.

The Taliban has just received 239 million debt-bucks in US State Department aid.

239 millions dollars.

The disaster in Afghanistan continues to cascade forward and is now underwritten by unborn taxpayers.

The government watchdog, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), issued a July 2024 report identifying at least 29 grants where the Taliban may have erroneously received counterterrorism funds.

But the funds have already been distributed despite violating the standards for release.

However, we analyzed DRL’s vetting documentation and found that it only provided us with supporting vetting
documentation for three of its seven awards. The four awards missing documentation were missing other types
of supporting vetting documentation in addition to the missing risk assessments, such as final eligibility
notices. This means that even if DRL had provided us with the missing risk assessments, the four awards
would still be missing other supporting documentation.

https://justthenews.com/world/middle-east/taliban-gets-239-million-aid-after-bad-state-dept-vetting

Very detailed summary of US State Department incompetence here:

https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/audits/SIGAR-24-31-AR.pdf

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Further China Reading

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Aug 3, 2024 | Blog

From a reader:

“Hello Joseph. I just ordered your book, and I noticed it was short. I would like to know if there is an up to date book on American foreign policy towards China that you could recommend that is well-researched and truthful with good policy suggestions. Thanks!

I know next to nothing about America-China relations and I am looking forward to reading your book.”

My response:

“I wish I could […] the fact I can’t is a major reason I am working on a much longer book focused solely on the evolution of American policy toward China. Thanks for reading!”

So, yes, once the National Debt and You: What it is, How it Works, and Why it Matters is finished (which should be soon), I will begin working full time on the, to date, unnamed project focused strictly on Sino-American relations, a timely topic that no one seems to be able to deal with objectively, whatever their particular bias.

In the meantime, the book should be done by this tine next year, I will be focused on making sure to get out two pieces a month at the Institute focused on a specific aspect of US policy regarding China or an important event in the history of the relationship.

If there is something specific you’d like to see addressed in the coming months, then, please reach out and let me know!

Raptor Woes Continue to Plague the Air Force

by Bill Buppert | Aug 2, 2024 | Blog

More mismanagement and strategic deficit disorder at the Pentagon.

The F22 Raptor is a very capable late 20th century aircraft and arguably superior to the much more expensive and increasingly anachronistic F35; it is being put out to pasture early because of planning missteps, acquisition problems, maintenance issues, software difficulties and a distinctly dysfunctional strategic environment that is not prepared for the near-peer and peer fight ahead.

Both the F22 and the F35 are maintenance hogs and expensive to maintain over their lifetimes.

If the Air Force and the US Congress don’t find a way to pay for the NGAD program and Congress lets the Air Force retire 32 older F-22s, the Air Force could soon find itself in a dangerous position: with a need to wrest control of the air from a growing and modernizing Chinese air force with a shrinking and aging fleet of F-22s – and with no help on the horizon for potentially decades to come.

Incredibly, those 32 older Block 20s aren’t the only fighters the Air Force wants to retire early. The service also wants to cut half of its Boeing F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bombers while simultaneously reducing the number of new F-15EXs it buys.

The cuts might be less worrying if the Air Force’s other in-production fighter, the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, weren’t such a disaster. The Air Force is decades behind and hundreds of billions of dollars over-budget compared to its original plan to acquire more than 1,700 F-35s – and hasn’t taken delivery of a new F-35 in a year as it waits for testers to work out kinks in the fighter’s latest software build.

The Air Force is in a fighter crisis. But it’s not going to solve that crisis by grounding training jets – and shrinking an air-superiority force that’s probably already far too small.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/the-us-air-force-seems-hell-bent-on-getting-rid-of-its-greatest-ever-fighter-jet/ar-BB1plHiE

If they reach 1700 F35s (present strength is 1,000 produced and not many aloft), I will be shocked but I will be even more shocked if they achieve a readiness rate above 30% of air-frames.

In this new era of the 21st century air wars, whenever you hear Western flag officers talk about air dominance, supremacy and superiority; they are speaking to the past with no martial eye to the future. I suspect the perfect record of stalemate and defeat for US arms since 1945 will continue apace.

Here’s the very real strategic error: the era of manned fighter aircraft is over and the sooner the US and the West realize this, it will possibly lead to a complete reappraisal of what air combat looks like in the 21st century.

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Anti-War Blog – What Will You Do On The Day After?

by Kym Robinson | Aug 2, 2024 | Blog

They did it, finally. The wisdom of the statists, the planet ruined. Desolation, misery, nature blackened to near extinction. The whispering legacy of civilisation. The educated mastery of science and technology used to destroy it all, everything. They called it defence. Hegemonic interests. The fruit of ideology, so poisonous that it’s only cure was for you to be poisoned more. You keep drinking it, gulping and eventually you main veined it right into your blood. Welfare, warfare, so very dependent on the state. You can’t imagine a world without it. A god. Your God.

It’s not real, just an abstract which requires lies, threats, deception and lot’s of debt to pay everyone, debt that’s backed by theft. And what did it get the world? Last century, histories most bloodiest, a history so bloody that the books are inked in death about genocides and extinction. After the long 19th century, when humanity applauded itself for its ability to conquer illness and colonise the savages into servile subjects, world wars. The infection of communism, the plague of fascism, the perfection of chemical and biological weapons, rockets that were meant to take us beyond the moon flattened cities and the physicists and chemists, so loved, split the atom. To be used as bombs.

The most educated of nations, even for a time the most progressive, whatever that means, perfected mass slaughter. Industrial genocide. With a gladius they hacked the Celts in a genocide, Carthage obliterated, the Roman empire so adored conquered in an age of conquests. It’s still admired to this day. Mongolian hoards on horseback, their arrows and swords taking all before them, aboriginal peoples on continents ‘to be discovered’ vanished, a man who claimed to be the brother of Christ led his followers through massacres across China, millions died. And to quote Hitler, “Who remembers the Armenians” or the Herero or Namaqua for that matter. Yet, the 20th century was bloodier. The century of democracy and grand government was the one with too many genocides and wars, yet post 1945 when most occurred, it’s known as a period of peace. Peace meaning, not a world war. That is the standard. War in Peace, a 20th century publication with thousands of pages of war in peacetime.

US presidents now are defined by how few wars they start. Trump’s single virtue being that he apparently hasn’t started any new wars. The voter indifferent to the fact that the military they fund, mostly love and which apparently is constrained by a government they elect has eight hundred bases the world over and is killing and dying as it’s manifest destiny to do so. War is so common, so readily available to observe, the narratives skewered. Whose the goodies, whose the baddies? ‘Which team should I barrack for in the Sudanese conflict?’ ‘I empathise with the Palestinians but the Israeli’s were pretty good at the last Eurovision.’ ‘We don’t commit war crimes, only they do that!’

Assassinations, starvation, dogs eating the disabled to death, prisoners sodomised, the race for Africa. Mark Twain once said that, “History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.” Though in his time, all of that was occurring too. With less technology, one had had to read about it, hear of it or see grainy images in the paper. Now we can see it in 4K. Yet, still the Congo is being raped. Then it was for rubber, the Belgian empire called it a “Free State”. Millions died, limbs hacked from them. Europe needed rubber. Bicycles were a popular thing. Eco friendly transport that helped to stop the pollution of horse manure from clogging up the streets. The Congolese be damned. The curse of Africa is that it’s full of resources and so close to Europe. Now, rare Earth is desired, ripped from the ground, poisoning those who mine it. The poor regions choke in pollutants so that wealthy yuppies in the West feel good about their consumerism. Most recycling meaning it gets sent to a poor country, feels good though doesn’t it. For you I mean, not them. Africa is slowly becoming a patchwork of foreign powers again, this time they are not Western.

Remember when people were scared about nuclear war? When Television movies frightened families to sleep at night. Steve Gutenberg withering away from radiation sickness after he ‘survived’ the blasts of atomic detonations. So scary that President Reagan, in silk pyjamas climbed from the oval office bed and rang his rival in Moscow. “We need to end this thing.” Then they did. Well kinda. At least pulled back some. Now the politicians you all seem to love and vote for are shit posters. Talk of war, sabre rattling, gunboat diplomacy are certainly not new, but now, it’s done without envoys or diplomatic maturity. Nukes are no longer feared, just another toy in the tool box. Like dropping bombs on refugee tents or tomahawk missiles fired into the sands of far away places to kill children with names you can’t be bothered pronouncing. It’s what they do. Blow things up.

So, what will you do in the day after? Will you still love them? Will you pretend that you were not in part responsible? You do support the state? You ignore the violence, erosion of liberty, the human rights violations, the killings when done in your name. Isn’t the whole religion of democracy that thing where you vote for some stranger who then has power over other strangers so that unelected strangers can do what they always do regardless of the newly voted in strangers that the mob decided should now be in positions based on their popularity or how well they lie? Strange ritual. Best system we got, I am told by those who need to be ruled, who need violence to enforce their ideology. LOL who am I kidding, ideology… money. Bribery. Silver coins used to betray and buy your soul that were taken from others, or the status quo satiates, because the unknown feral waters of liberty are uncharted. Never fear, they have nuked the oceans as well. Judas has his silver, dead children matter not.

The privilege that permeates the West is that ‘we’ are always over there. War, is always distant. It’s an accepted right to wage it far away, killing, destroying places that become synonymous with war. Then when it’s over, to the next place. Soon they will be able to reach you, the embargoes, the air raids, the dead children. That may be for you to experience soon, not through a screen. But you wanted that right? I mean you do love the war masters. It’s not like peace or liberty is ever really on the cards when you look to the state. It’s usually more laws, regulations, welfare, subsidies, where did you think it would lead? So, if you are there in the day after, rejoice because history tends to rhyme so chances are the very people who caused it will tell you that they should lead, and fix it. And you probably will believe them, or they will just bribe you with Nuka cola bottle caps, and you will do whatever they want…again.

Is the Medal of Honor Now Subject to Woke Revisionism?

by Bill Buppert | Jul 31, 2024 | Blog

moh6

Note: We just returned from a short vacation visiting new grandchildren hence the brief interregnum of posting.

The Medal of Honor is the highest citation for combat action in the US military.

It’s premature to say exactly what direction this is going because the DoD is being hazy and coy about what this is all about. If it turns out the reassessment is determining whether extraordinary single combat actions on the part of soldiers was exaggerated, it may hold water but if it is the curious chronological conceit that haunts the historians in academia today, the woke virus may reach back because of the identity of the antagonists but that is a supposition with inadequate information now.

The war on history continues to take bizarre turns.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin directed the Pentagon to review the 20 Medals of Honor awarded to U.S. troops for their actions at Wounded Knee in 1890, when soldiers killed and injured between 350 and 375 Lakota men, women and children.

Austin ordered the creation of a special panel to determine whether to retain or rescind the medals, the Department of Defense announced Wednesday. In a July 19 memorandum ordering the review, Austin said the panel would investigate “each awardee’s individual actions” and also “consider the context of the overall engagement.”

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2024/07/24/pentagon-to-review-20-medals-of-honor-from-wounded-knee-massacre/

Nothing new here.

In 1917, based on the report of the Medal of Honor Review Board, established by Congress in 1916, 911 recipients were stricken from the Army’s Medal of Honor list because the medal had been awarded inappropriately. Among them were William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody and Mary Edwards Walker.

Defense officials noted that the department regularly reviews awards for upgrades. The Executive Branch has also conducted reviews to determine whether previous awards should be rescinded, including one in 1916 [and 1917] that led to 911 Medals of Honor being revoked.

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3848583/austin-orders-review-of-wounded-knee-medals/

There was a reckoning that rescinded one third of all medals issued to that point.

Of the 2,625 Army Medals of Honor reviewed, the Board chose to rescind 911 of them. Most of those were from two large groups: the 27^th Maine Infantry and President Abraham Lincoln’s funeral guards.

The 27^th Maine Infantry had been stationed in Washington, D.C., as the Confederates advanced nearby in 1863. The regiment’s enlistments were just coming to an end. The Army offered a Medal of Honor to those who stayed to defend the Union’s capital. About 300 out of 800 soldiers agreed to remain. However, no one kept good records of which soldiers stayed and which went home. As a result, Medals were issued in the name of all the soldiers and Lieutenant Colonel Mark Wentworth was put in charge of distributing the Medals to those who stayed. Due to the confusion, the 1916 Review Board determined that the basis for the awards were suspect and rescinded all 864 awards.

The second large group of Medals revoked were ones that went to the members of President Abraham Lincoln’s funeral guard. This group of 29 soldiers ceremoniously protected the president’s remains as they toured the country. The Review Board decided that those Medals were not awarded for valor and therefore erroneously bestowed.

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