Matthew Hoh, former Capt. USMC, led men into war. So he knows the truth that war cheerleaders will never tell you. Check out his recent Memorial Day speech here:
Blog
American Israel Supporters: Fake
Everyone is sick and tired of murderous, dishonest Israel.
So they use ChatGPT to fake it.
“I gotta reevaluate my opinions due to this new information.”
Now They Figure It Out…
Too little and too late and once the smaller companies get Pentagon contracts, they will be destroyed in the Pentagon’s Soviet acquisition system.
“While the Armament Directorate remains committed to our highly-capable legacy products, we have become convinced that widening the aperture to include more non-traditional aerospace companies offers the best chance at accomplishing our cost-per-unit goals, project timeline, and production quantity goals,” Cassie Johnson, the armament directorate’s ETV program manager, said in the release.
The open-architecture drone is to fly at least 500 nautical miles, deliver a kinetic payload, and use commercially-available subsystems, according to a solicitation DIU released in September.
The Pentagon’s current way of building drones is slowed down by “exquisite components” and “labor-intensive manufacturing processes,” DIU said.
“Vendors are incorporating commercial off-the-shelf components wherever possible to mitigate supply chain bottlenecks and to keep costs low. Vendors will also leverage modern design for manufacturing approaches, ensuring air vehicles are not over-engineered for their intended mission, minimize use of expensive materials, and enable on-call high-rate production that is not possible with more exquisite counterparts,” today’s announcement said.
https://www.defenseone.com/business/2024/06/pentagon-looks-beyond-primes-cheaper-drones/397074/?oref=defense_one_breaking_nl
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.
Language, Race, and Man
“Man belongs neither to his language nor to his race; he belongs to himself.” –Ernest Renan
The Frigate Follies Get Worse and Worse
Déjà vu, it’s happening again. The surface navy failures manifested in the Littoral Combat Ship, the Zumwalt and the USS Ford will soon have another ship to add to that gallery of maritime incompetence that showcases the modern US Navy.
I say again, construction started before all the design & modeling were complete, verified and validated.
And I suspect the Concept of Operations (CONOPS) for this ship is not rational or mature.
USNI News reported Navy officials said at one point the Constellation design shared about 85 percent commonality with the original Italian FREMM but that commonality is now down to under 15 percent, no doubt due to the Navy changing almost 70 percent of the requirements since the contract was signed back in April 2020 and the resultant unplanned weight growth leading to over 10 percent above the shipbuilder’s June 2020 weight estimate.
Any amateur navalist will tell you that weight increases require concomitant power-plant output increases to compensate for that design expansion. House lawmakers in the draft FY25 NDAA are proposing to force the Navy to complete its ships’ design “100 percent” prior to lead vessel construction, complete design was actually in the law back in 2020 but the Navy ignored it.
In a nutshell, the US Navy was asked to find a European vendor with an existing ship to reduce acquisition costs but now changes to the hull are occurring and they are constructing ships whose designs are not finished. Here is a chart to demonstrate that:
The “unplanned weight growth” of ten percent or more from June 2020 to October of 2023 on the Constellation-class frigate may require the Navy to shed propulsion capability and in turn reduce the ship’s top speed to allow the warships to have the margin the service needs for future upgrades, according to the Government Accountability Office’s report on the program.
“GAO is making five recommendations, including that the Navy restructure its design stability metric to measure progress based more on the quality than quantity of design documents; use the improved metric to assess the design stability before beginning construction of the second frigate; incorporate additional land-based testing into the frigate test plan; and identify opportunities to further incorporate leading practices for product development into the frigate acquisition strategy,” the report reads.
“The Navy agreed with four recommendations and partially agreed with the recommendation related to updating the test plan. GAO maintains that all five recommendations should be fully implemented.”
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“Navy officials have repeatedly cited workforce challenges at the yard in Marinette when discussing the frigate program’s delays, but the GAO report cites an “unstable” design as the reason for the delays.”
https://news.usni.org/2024/05/29/constellation-frigate-unplanned-weight-growth-could-limit-service-life-says-gao
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.
Democracy and Free Stuff
Democracy: the matching up of people who want free stuff with politicians who promise free stuff. Problem: free stuff as they all imagine it does not exist.
However, it does exist in the market, as explained by Frédéric Bastiat in Economic Harmonies, chapter 8, “Private Property and Common Wealth.” See my discussion of that chapter.
They Kept Sending Us Bombs…Anti-War Blog
As I saw the photos of US politician Nikki Haley scribbling on an Israeli shell bound for Rafah, it’s metal splinters and high explosives likely to rip a small child too pieces, it had me thinking. I once saw a clip of a US Air Force man who was asked why they were bombing neutral Laos, his response was simple, “They Kept Sending Us Bombs.”
Haley is auditioning for the Vice Presidency, it helps her cause to show that she celebrates war as is the custom of the great Western empires. War is not just the imperial realisation of government but it’s a ‘job provider’, those boots, bombs and bully beef cans all require people to work in factories. Uncle Sam will stock pile, supply ‘allies’ and then bury the rest so long as those factories keep stimulating the economy. The IDF for now, will keep on shelling and bombing because, “They Kept Sending Us Bombs.” The ammunition for genocide and Haley’s signature on a shell all a clear endorsement for mass murder.
For near a decade Yemen has experienced a horrific humanitarian crisis, from dysentery to starvation caused by blockade and disruption of war. The Saudi led coalition savaged the country in an attempt to re-install a government that it approved off. The Western allies supplied them, and helped to sustain that war while UAE butcher trucks abducted people from the streets and hacked them to pieces and Saudi’s fired missiles into school buildings and school busses, shredding children to pieces using Australian guidance systems and US missiles. They Kept Sending Us Bombs…
The Saudi’s made peace with their Houthi enemies in Yemen, brokered by the Chinese. Turns out one of the poorest nations on Earth’s military with drones and asymmetric survival instincts can hold their own against one of the world’s richest by threatening their oil fields. In a twist of events the UK and US now bomb and attack Yemen, while the Saudi’s sit it out. Million dollar weapon systems blowing to pieces tents and old trucks, in an attempt to kill insurgents who have adapted to waging a war of the flea against high tech professionals. That humanitarian crisis continues, Yemeni’s starve and die. But they keep dropping bombs.
After flattening nearly every building in Korea, to the point that the Air Force complained that they had nothing more to bomb. That war ended in a draw. Millions dead. After dropping more bombs on Laos than were dropped in all of World War Two by every belligerent. After bombing Cambodia as well with almost as many bombs. Both neutral nations. Then dropping bombs, mines and chemicals with Agent coloured names that mutate life into tumorous death, waging a techno war like no other in history. The Vietnamese won. The dominoes never falling. Having spread cancer from Iraq, Serbia to Afghanistan from depleted uranium, the painful remnants of war linger. Burn pits that savage nature and humanity with putrid vileness, rest assured the same government will save the planet too. Even as their navy dumps aviation gas into the oceans. Did they win? Is the world safer? Is this the green revolution?
Jobs, glory, but above all more government.
When the vintage US battleship New Jersey fired it’s mighty guns on Lebanon in 1983 symbolically punishing the Syrian military and it’s ‘terrorist allies’. It was civilians who died. The powerful 16 inch shells blowing homes to pieces. Spectacular. American. Voters approved, because presidents win with wars. To kill foreigners is after all very presidential.
So long as they keep on sending bombs, the wars will wage on but so too will those precious jobs. That’s good though? You love money. You love government. They can always have more babies. And the factories will always make more bombs. That’s the economy of government wisdom. Waste, debt, destruction. Jobs. Violence. Clearly you love it. Or at the very least, allow it.
It’s their babies who die, whether Palestinian, Yemeni, Laotian, Iraqi, wherever. Their babies don’t matter and so long as men with an indifference to the murder shrug, “They Kept on Sending Us Bombs.” Then the bombs will continue to fall. That’s war after all.
June, 2024
Frigate Failure Follies
I am currently doing a podcast series on what appears to be a droll subject but it is critical to getting big projects right. If you can’t articulate and create a rational and effective Concept of Operations, you will fail.
Th Navy never disappoints in failure lately. They are trying to create a sterling track record of abysmal failure in ship design since the last success of the Arleigh Burke class, which was the last working ship the Navy completed to standard.
The US Navy is now 36 months behind schedule and building a ship without designs completed. The Little Crappy Ship psychosis is still haunting the halls of the Pentagon.
Over at least 2 decades, the Navy’s Constellation class Guided Missile Frigate program plans to acquire and deliver up to 20 frigates—multi-mission, small surface combatant warships—at a combined cost of over $22 billion. To reduce technical risk, the Navy and its shipbuilder modified an existing design to incorporate Navy specifications and weapon systems. However, the Navy’s decision to begin construction before the design was complete is inconsistent with leading ship design practices and jeopardized this approach. Further, design instability has caused weight growth. The figure shows the frigate’s 3D design—a component of design stability—as incomplete over 1 year after construction began.
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Delays in completing the ship design have created mounting construction delays. The Navy acknowledges that the April 2026 delivery date, set in the contract at award, is unachievable. The lead frigate is forecasted to be delivered 36 months later than initially planned. The program office tracks and reports design progress, but its design stability metric hinges largely on the quantity—rather than quality—of completed design documents. This limits insight into whether the program’s schedule is achievable. If the Navy begins construction on the second frigate without improving this metric, it risks repeating the same errors that resulted in construction disruptions and delays with the lead frigate.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106546
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.
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