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Bang for Your Buck: Breaking the Bank to Upgrade the Nuclear Arsenal (Part I)

by | Aug 15, 2024 |

strangelove

The United States is on track to spend the equivalent of more than two Manhattan projects per year in one of the most expensive nuclear arms races in history.

The US has not done a recorded air breathing nuclear detonation since 1992 (the last US test, Julin-Divider, was on September 23, 1992). Almost 50 years and over 1000 tests in the USA alone and its nuclear warhead inventory and the energetics needed to loft them via rocket-borne means for the submarine and ground-launched missile programs is ancient and sclerotic. Although nuclear explosions have not been conducted in the USA since 1992, the physics of the process is quite well understood, and can be simulated on a computer.  There is a considerable amount of physics testing at the National Ignition Facility for making and setting off miniature hydrogen bombs and is active today.

8'disk2

Some of the Minuteman II silos are still using 8″ floppy disk media (although one can make the case it makes them less vulnerable to tampering) although that was supposed to have been changed around 2020. The system, once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), relied on IBM Series/1 computers installed by the Air Force at Minuteman II missile sites in the 1960s and 1970s. Although a USB controller takes way more processing power than a Series 1 has. More likely it’s a system that translates floppy commands to something that reads virtual sectors from a solid state disk, possibly with data at rest encryption that is dynamically decrypted on read.

The GAO talked about this in 2016.

For the ignition systems you can test the bomb mechanism with a lump of some other metal instead of the fissile nuclear fuel to make sure the timing sequence is correct. You can do this 100 times to make sure it’s reliable. You just replace the ones in the warheads every five years to make sure they haven’t gone stale. The theory work behind the nuclear detonation sequence is mostly done in computer models these days, there’s little need to actually set off a thermonuclear blast anymore. We’ve already verified the models decades ago.

The US can test the missiles themselves without a payload. Although the latest tests with the UK have been disastrous. The last successful test was 2012 for the UK.

Don’t think for a moment these will will come in on time and on budget.

Over the past decade, the United States has launched one of the most expensive nuclear arms races in history. As it stands now, this new nuclear modernization comes with a price tag of approximately $1.7 trillion over 30 years.1 To put this in perspective, adjusted for inflation to 2023 dollars, the four years of the Manhattan Project cost approximately $30 billion.2

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the United States is set to spend some $756 billion on nuclear weapons modernization programs between fiscal 2023-2032,3 which averages out to $75 billion a year on nuclear weapons. That is more than two Manhattan projects every year for the next eight years.

Put in other terms, it is nearly all the money the United States spent on nuclear weapons and delivery systems for World War II, spent every year, for the next eight years. When combined with the Department of Defense’s conventional weapons portfolio over the same period, nuclear modernization will drive annual peacetime Pentagon budgets to unprecedented levels.

***

The United States already maintains the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal, a high-tech array of weapons systems that currently consists of a deployed force of some 1670 strategic nuclear warheads.7 These weapons can already destroy all human civilization. The overwhelming majority of these warheads are much more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, which measured 15 and 21 kilotons respectively.8 The most powerful weapon currently in the arsenal is the B83 gravity bomb, clocking in at 1.2 megatons, or 80 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.9 Even the smallest –  the bomber launched ALCM cruise missile – is able to “dial its yield” up or down between 5-150kt.10 On top of this, the U.S. maintains a hedge of 1938 strategic warheads of all types in reserve, ready to be uploaded onto launchers in the event of a crisis.11 Finally, we maintain some 100 weapons, variously termed as tactical, battlefield, or non-strategic, forward deployed at six NATO air bases that are meant to be carried by conventional fighter craft in the event of a full-scale war in Europe.12

Matching a chaos avalanche of incompetency that the West is experiencing now, the recipe for disaster with these updates is assured. The US needs to make a sober assessment of just how much of this expense is necessary. One possibility is reducing the number of total missiles and weapons from thousands to hundreds. Another is the possibility is the retirement of the two airborne legs of the nuclear triad and using the nuclear submarine force as the primary means of nuclear deterrence.

In Part II, I will provide a critique and overview of the new Sentinel system being considered to replace the silo-borne Minuteman III arsenal.

America’s Nuclear Weapons Quagmire

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Israel’s Criminal Assault on Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza: ‘Israel killed my grandmother!’

Israel’s Criminal Assault on Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza: ‘Israel killed my grandmother!’

by | Aug 14, 2024 |

In this video published on X today by Palestine Deep Dive, a Palestinian woman named Mariam Mohamed al Khateeb, a twenty-year-old dental student who has an ongoing crowdfunding campaign to get her family out of the Gaza Strip, describes how Israeli soldiers burned her grandmother to death this past March:

https://twitter.com/PDeepdive/status/1823635861419831606

Her grandmother’s home was near Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which came under attack by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in mid-November last year and again in March of this year. Israeli soldiers ordered other family members to flee the area at gunpoint and to leave the grandmother behind. She was burned alive in her home in a fire that, according to Al Khateeb, was started by Israeli forces.

Back in November, Israel tried to justify its assault on the Al Shifa Hospital despite its protected status under international humanitarian law by claiming that Hamas had built its military headquarters beneath the hospital complex. The IDF released a computer-generated propaganda video graphically showing what Israel claimed to exist under the hospital: an elaborate multi-story network of tunnels and bunker rooms.

Israel had long claimed that Hamas was using a bunker underneath the hospital for its military command center, such as during its “Operation Cast Lead”, which started on December 27, 2008 and ended on January 18, 2009. Israel never produced any evidence to support that claim.

The US government defended Israel’s assault on the hospital in November 2023 on the grounds that it had independently gathered intelligence to support its claim that Hamas was using the grounds for its base, but it presented no evidence to support the claim.

It was true that the hospital had an underground concrete basement, which Israel knew about because it was built by Israel in the late 1980s according the a hospital renovation and expansion plan by Israeli architects Gershon Zippor and Benjamin Idelson. A Newsweek “fact check” article published n November 15, 2023, verified that “a bunker or basement was built at Israel’s discretion in the 1980s.”

On November 20, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was interviewed by Christiane Amanpour on CNN, and when asked about what evidence Israel had that Hamas had a major command center under Al Shifa Hospital, he repeated the claim that Hamas was using “bunkers” that he admitted were “originally built by Israeli constructors”. When Amanpour surprisedly asked whether he had just misspoken, Barak affirmed, “No, no. You know, decades ago, we were running the place. So, we held them. It’s a decade, many decades ago, probably five — four decades ago, that we helped them to build these bunkers in order to enable more space for the operation of the hospital within the very limited size of this compound.”

During its assault, Israel cut the power to the hospital complex, thus shutting down incubators and killing six newborn babies on life support. By November 14, 180 patients had died as a result of Israel’s assault, forcing hospital staff had to start digging mass graves to bury the bodies.

As Human Rights Watch noted, “Despite the Israeli military’s claims on November 5, 2023, of ‘Hamas’s cynical use of hospitals,’ no evidence put forward would justify depriving hospitals and ambulances of their protected status under international humanitarian law.”

After taking control of Al Shifa Hospital, the IDF released video of what it claimed were weapons and a tunnel entrance found at the site, but as the New York Times reported on November 16, the images “could not be independently verified, and still have not proven the existence of the sprawling Hamas operation that it said the hospital concealed.” A separate Times article the same day noted that the IDF “has yet to present public documentation of a vast network of tunnels”, a claim that had been “central to its defense of its military campaign in Gaza.”

Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan accused Israel of planting the weapons there, and the Times noted it was “unclear from the video what purpose the passageway served or how far it extended. Israeli forces appear to have destroyed a small structure and dug an extensive area of ground to uncover it, an analysis of satellite imagery and video showed.”

Two Times reporters and a photographer were subsequently allowed to visit, under IDF escort, “a stone-and-concrete shaft on the grounds of Al-Shifa with a staircase descending into the earth”, which, the Times sympathetically reported, “did not seem to settle the question” of whether Hamas had its command center there, a claim that “the Israeli military has yet to show incontrovertible proof of”.

A BBC analysis of the IDF’s video purporting to show Hamas weapons inside the hospital noted that “Israel has yet to produce evidence of the tunnels” that it claimed existed and served as an elaborate command headquarters. BBC reporters were also allowed to visit the site, and they observed two guns behind an MRI machine where the IDF video had shown just one — an indication that the IDF itself had planted the weapons there.

As the New York Times noted sympathetically again on November 17, “the Israeli military has struggled to produce proof to back its assertion that Hamas was using the hospital and its patients as human shields.”

Israel’s failure to produce evidence of the elaborate bunker complex it claimed existed underneath Al Shifa Hospital was punctuated by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proclaiming on November 17 that “the war must go on” until Hamas was eliminated, which would require the IDF to push farther south because, by Olmert’s account, “Khan Younis, which is in the southern part of Gaza Strip, is the real headquarters of Hamas.”

On November 19, the IDF released video footage from a camera being lowered into the uncovered shaft along with footage evidently taken by a solider who’d been lowered down and followed a tunnel shaft to a metal door, but as Jeremy Scahill observed in The Intercept, this footage failed to prove that Hamas had a military command headquarters beneath the hospital.

A Washington Post analysis likewise noted that “the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center”. Key conclusions the Post analysis arrived at were that there was no evidence of military use of the tunnel network by Hamas, and none of the hospital’s buildings appeared to be connected to it, contrary to the IDF’s claim that it could be accessed from inside the hospital wards.

The New York Times in February 2024 published an interactive feature based on an analysis of “[c]lassified Israeli intelligence documents” that it has obtained, which the Times claimed “suggests Hamas used the hospital for cover, stored weapons inside it and maintained a hardened tunnel beneath the complex that was supplied with water, power and air-conditioning.” The Times conceded, however, that the IDF “has struggled to prove that Hamas maintained a command-and-control center under the facility.”

Having claimed the Hamas headquarters was a vast multi-story network of bunkers and tunnels, Israel had “publicly revealed the existence of only one tunnel entrance on the grounds of the hospital,” at a shack outside its main buildings. In the end, the Times further noted, there “may no longer be a way to directly assess” Israel’s claim of “a labyrinth of tunnels and underground compounds used by Hamas’s leaders to direct terrorist activities” because before leaving the hospital grounds on November 24, the IDF “lined the tunnel with explosives and destroyed it”.

In March 2024, the IDF again assaulted Al Shifa Hospital, displacing civilians sheltering there along with patients, killing nearly 200 people the IDF called “terrorists”, and turning the complex into “a wasteland”, in the words Taysir al-Tanna, a vascular surgeon at the hospital.

“Most of the buildings are extensively damaged or destroyed, and the majority of equipment is unusable or reduced to ashes,” said the World Health Organization (WHO), leaving the hospital “an empty shell” and completely non-functional.

In April, mass graves were containing hundreds of bodies were discovered at Al Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis and at Al Shifa Hospital. As Amnesty International described the mass graves as “potential crime scenes” and called for an investigation. The New York Times noted that Palestinians had dug some mass graves earlier, but one of the bodies seen uncovered in a video report by Palestinian photojournalist Haseeb Alwazeer was “wearing blue medical scrubs”, and the person’s hands appeared to be bound together.

According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the bodies of 30 Palestinians were found in two graves in the Al Shifa Hospital courtyard, with reports “that the hands of some of these bodies were also tied” and the possibility of many additional victims. At Al Nasser Hospital, 283 bodies were exhumed from mass graves. “Among the deceased,” OHCHR spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani reported, “were allegedly older people, women, and wounded, while others were found … with their hands tied and stripped of their clothes.”

After Israel’s second raid on Al Shifa Hospital, “the hospital premises were littered with bodies and shallow graves,” as the New York Times put it in an article describing the “near collapse” of Gaza’s health care system, with the WHO documenting over 800 attacks on health care in what it called Israel’s “systematic dismantling of healthcare”.

All carried out, of course, with the full support and backing of the US government, notwithstanding meaningless rhetorical expressions of concern for the fate of Palestinian civilians.

The Spirit Dissolves: Imminent B2 Retirement

by | Aug 14, 2024 |

b 2 bomber (1)

Stealth is a buzzword, please keep in mind that long wave radars detects the minuscule radar cross sections of “stealth” platforms. It can still be detected by a sufficiently powerful radar or at sufficiently close ranges. Dual-band radars are more effective against stealth than disjointed sensors, being able to focus the high-frequency beam to track the blips spotted by the low-frequency one.

Pardon me while I geek out: At a low enough frequency, one cannot use angled surfaces to deflect the re-radiated radio frequency (RF); even a very thin wire one half wavelength long is optimally sized to radiate it and the manned aircraft profile is impossible to miss. Low frequencies can detect even a stealthy aircraft because the aircraft itself is large enough that it begins to act like an antenna, re-radiating the electromagnetic field as current it induces flows from one end (or one side) to the other. The absorbing material applied to attenuate higher frequency radars isn’t thick enough to effectively eliminate the current flowing in the aircraft’s body and airfoils at low frequencies, so it reflects more RF.

At the margin in the 21st century, stealth is old school and affordable mass will be the keen edge to defeat first world militaries.

The B-1 Lancer (45 currently in service) and B-2 bombers will retire more than a decade earlier than previously planned under the Air Force’s Bomber Vector, a roadmap which also calls for re-engining and upgrading the B-52 so it can continue to serve into the 2050s.

And keep in mind for my consistent readers that the rule of three obtains here where only one third are available to go aloft operationally at any one time. This means effectively six air-frames available that, by the way, are not invisible to potential near-peer and peer competitors like China and Russia.

The U.S. Air Force is set to retire another B-2 Spirit bomber, reducing its fleet to just 19 air-frames. The decision comes after a ground accident in late 2022 rendered the aircraft uneconomical to repair.

The Spirit may have been introduced more than 35 years ago, but the platform continues to provide significant capabilities to the Air Force.

Back in the 1970s, the service recognized its need for an air-frame capable of deflecting or absorbing radar signals and thus flying nearly undetected. Northrop Grumman was selected to create the B-2 bomber. The Spirit can carry its heavy weapons load to pretty much any point in the world within hours. It can lug 40,000 pounds of conventional and nuclear weapons, including up to 16 Joint Direct Attack Munition satellite-guided 2,000-lbs bombs.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/air-forces-b-2-bomber-facing-sad-reality-211168

The B2 design is half a century old and the B52 is running up on eight decades. The B-52H is the only variant in service today, with 72 aircraft active as of early 2024. A total of 744 B52s were built during the lifetime of production. Ongoing upgrades, including new Rolls-Royce engines, suggest that the B-52 will likely fly past 2050 (twice the anticipated service life). That last production B52H left the factory floor in 1962. Total USAF bomber fleet is currently at 137 air-frames. US bomber production in WWII was 97,810 air-frames.

Only 21 B-2s were manufactured because of the plane’s hefty price tag—about $2 billion per plane—making it the most expensive aircraft ever built. The already small fleet shrunk to 20 in 2008, when a B-2 was destroyed in a crash at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. The news comes as bomber-builder Northrop Grumman was awarded a $7 billion sustainment contract for the program earlier this month. The work, which provides for “B-2 enhancements, sustainment, logistics elements including sustaining engineering, software maintenance, and support equipment,” will last through 2029, according to the contract listing. 

In addition to the B-2 divestment, the force structure report provides more details about the service’s plans to shed hundreds of planes in order to invest in new technology, like unmanned aircraft.  

The Air Force plans to get rid of 932 aircraft between fiscal 2025 and 2029, which will generate over $18 billion in savings, according to the report. Including the one B-2, the service wants to get rid of 251 aircraft total in fiscal 2025. Then, it wants to shed 293 aircraft in 2026, 235 in 2027, 95 in 2028 and 64 in 2029.  

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2024/05/b-2-crashed-2022-wont-be-fixed-air-force-confirms/396519/:~:text=The%20decision%20brings%20the%20service’s,2%20and%20B-1B%20Lancer.

Two billion per aircraft.

Maintenance costs for the B2 is $3.5 million per month.

Please note in the quote above that shedding 932 aircraft between 2025 and 2029 generates $18 billion in savings and the B2 cost two billion each. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

I predict the B21 Raider will be a hot mess if the creation of exquisite platforms in the last half century is any indicator.

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Icebreaker Follies: The US Continues to Drive to Zero

by | Aug 13, 2024 |

coast guard cutter healy escorts russian tanker to nome

The Navy did have 1.5 icebreakers and now they have half of one.

Well, actually, the US has no operational icebreakers now.

The Coast Guard’s other icebreaker, the ancient heavy Polar Star, is undergoing a service life extension program at the Mare Island Dry Dock in California [H/T to Q Captain].

The fire reportedly damaged a starboard transformer as a result of which the starboard engine remains inoperable. 

The Coast Guard’s other icebreaker, the 50-year old Polar Star, is not available during summer as it is undergoing a service life extension program at the Mare Island Dry Dock in California.

Healy departed from Seattle for its summer Arctic patrol on June 12, 2024 taking it through the Bering Strait into the Chukchi Sea. It was traveling in Canadian waters near Banks Island around July 25 when it experienced an engineering space fire. 

The sequence of events was broadly confirmed around two weeks later on August 7 by Vice Commandant of the Coast Guard Admiral Kevin E. Lunday during a talk at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC.

“Coast Guard Cutter Healy, one of our only two icebreakers, had just begun her summer patrol and was up north of Alaska and the Chukchi Sea. It had an electrical fire in the engineering spaces; she’s now having to return to home port to try and affect repairs.”

There’s a whisper the US is building new icebreakers with Canada and Finland but we shall see what transpires.

Leaders from the US, Canada and Finland formed the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort (ICE Pact) on 11 July to collaborate on strengthening shipbuilding in the three nations, and their security and economic ties.

The three governments plan to construct icebreakers and other Arctic support vessels, collaborate on workforce development and exchange information. They also hope other nations will order icebreakers from shipyards in US, Canada and Finland to support the capital intensity of multi-ship construction.

The plan is to develop a memorandum of understanding from this initial ICE Pact by the end of 2024 and form a framework of how this collaboration will work in practice.

The Russians have the largest icebreaker fleet on Earth and decades of port and living facilities along more than 50% of the Arctic Circle. They have even commissioned a combat icebreaker. The Russian icebreaker fleet consists of 41 icebreakers, including 34 diesel and 7 nuclear powered. The fleet’s total shaft power reached 697.2 MW, according to Ministry of Transport .

The vessel, constructed at the Admiralty Shipyards in St Petersburg, was initially scheduled for commissioning in 2023 but has faced delays, partly due to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, The War Zone report said.

The Ivan Papanin’s armament includes an AK-176MA 76mm gun and can be fitted with containerized launchers for Klub and Kalibr cruise missiles, which would significantly enhance its combat capabilities.

Russia has a growing fleet of around 40 icebreakers and ice-capable ships, including the unique Project 23550 class specifically designed for combat and breaking through ice up to 5.5 feet thick.

Russia’s new combat icebreaker built for Arctic dominance

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Boeing Incompetence Continues: The Space Launch System Debacle

by | Aug 12, 2024 |

boeingdisaster

We all know what is happening now with the Boeing disaster in space where two astronauts are marooned and the billion dollar taxicab is not only malfunctioning but can’t be undocked without a human inside piloting the capsule away.

Boeing was contracted by Never Ascend to Space Again (NASA) to develop a new upper stage for the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and it’s seven years behind schedule and significantly over budget.

The new Exploration Upper Stage, a more powerful second stage for the SLS rocket that made its debut in late 2022, is viewed by NASA as a key piece of its Artemis program to return humans to the Moon. The current plan calls for the use of this new upper stage beginning with the second lunar landing, the Artemis IV mission, currently scheduled for 2028. In NASA parlance, the upgraded version of the SLS rocket is known as Block 1B.

As for the upper stage itself, NASA initially predicted development costs would be $962 million back in 2017. However, the new report predicts that the Exploration Upper Stage will actually cost $2.8 billion, or three times the original cost estimate. (For what it is worth, Ars used a simple estimating tool in 2019 to predict the Exploration Upper Stage development cost would be $2.5 billion. So it’s not like it was a huge secret that NASA and Boeing would blow out the budget here).

screenshot 2024 08 12 at 08 12 35 a new report finds boeing’s rockets are built with an unqualified work force ars technica

Of course.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/a-new-report-finds-boeings-rockets-are-built-with-an-unqualified-work-force/

And then you read the NASA Inspector General report.

Oh boy.

We project SLS Block 1B costs will reach approximately $5.7 billion before the system is scheduled to launch in 2028. This is $700 million more than NASA’s 2023 Agency Baseline Commitment, which established a cost and schedule baseline at nearly $5 billion. EUS development accounts for more than half of this cost, which we estimate will increase from an initial cost of $962 million in 2017 to nearly $2.8 billion through 2028. Boeing’s delivery of the EUS to NASA has also been delayed from February 2021 to April 2027, and when combined with other factors, suggests the September 2028 Artemis IV launch date could be delayed as well. Factors contributing to these cost increases and schedule delays include redirection of EUS funds to the core stage during Artemis I production, changing Artemis mission assignments, maintaining an extended workforce 7 years more than planned, manufacturing issues, and supply chain challenges.

A delay of seven years and a tripling of costs for a system that if the track record is any indication will not be on time and will be more than that.

In December 2023, the SLS Program completed its Block 1B ABC after 10 years of development with no baseline and much later in the project life cycle than NASA’s standard practice.

Ten years with no baseline. You can’t make this up.

The government needs to completely reassess why it enters into any contracts with Boeing. They should be banned from any Federal programs now and in the future.

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Anti-War Blog – Just a Meme of Their Time

Anti-War Blog – Just a Meme of Their Time

by | Aug 11, 2024 |

So much to watch, to scroll past. To ignore. Apparently life is so busy, too much going on to care. The need to escape is paramount, to avoid reality. A reality many claim to be normal. Important even. A woman uses her degree to move about on the Olympic stage, elite competitive break dancing we are told. She is now the current meme. Two boxers outshine all of the the others boxing at the Games, “what gender are they?” The question is screamed and hate thrown about by those who never watch boxing, let alone women’s boxing. But, they care for now, outrage! In that time of outcry, 100 were murdered in one day. Many more to follow. Many more before. The US also sent 28,000 bombs so that more kids may be blown to bits. But I am sure that Raygun is stunning and brave, or cringe. I just don’t care. Why do you?

The UK is now banning memes, that may also include articles, blogs, posts, tangents that go against the allowable opinion. Whatever the State decides one may express and witness. Perhaps reporting on genocide will become illegal? Who reads those reports anyhow and if they do, is there ever more than an, “Oh dear.” In the time of Covid that would have meant questions asked that then were wrongthink but are now allowed to be expressed. What can be asked, what is allowed to be said, what information is to be denied, what may be shared? Whatever any given regime decides, from moment to moment. It seems that the other English speaking nations of the Commonwealth may follow suit. God Save the King! The Orwellian example too obvious to bring up. Fiction does come from reality though, even before Orwell’s time.

Men scream, “I have the right to rape!” outside a prison. In support of those who did rape, violently sodomising inmates. Many seem to agree. History has proven them correct. It seems that some do have such a right. Now at least with vulgar entitlement they scream it with tears of pre-cum in their eyes. The State endorses it. An individual has no rights to their body anyhow, it belongs to the State, what they may or may not ingest, what medication they may access, even the sports they play all dictated by the State so it makes sense that government agents will sodomise men as State policy. It worked for the NKVD, so why not them? In the distance, past the memes and screams for rape, babies starve to death or are blown to bits. Policy.

When men who worshipped the prince of peace conquered the New World, they raped, murdered, enslaved and tortured. We are told by rationale minds that they were men of their time. That the natives were also wicked, and did bad things too. Though in their time mothers cried when their babies died, girls wept after being stabbed from a man’s penis, brothers died fighting them off and fathers broke down when their families were murdered before their eyes. They were people of their time as well. In generations from now, we will have scholars looking back, maybe through memes, reasoning that the current genocide was being committed by people of their time. They would be correct.

This is what civilisations do. Murder, conquer, destroy, bloat their society with debt, engorged with public servants, drowned in paperwork and the people addictedto welfare. Then crumble until a new one comes along. Monuments will be built over unmarked graves, built by those who will be long forgotten, too poor to not build such public work celebrations. The unimportant labour needed to immortalise the important so adored. Indentured as the Irish once were in the Commonwealth, just as a Kenyan may be now in a wealthy Gulf State. Those pretty high rises look lovely on the instagram though. Progress we are told. So that those with the right passports by shop and sight see, as those with their passports taken die to build.

The Congo dies, poisoned. So that you can read this. I have the right to rape! That is the spoken out loud words of the entitled, the privileged. We may discriminate what we spend our time on, though apparently we are far too busy to care. From societies so gorged that weight loss and diabetic amputation is a problem, while babies die from dysentery. Both illnesses so fixable, yet the governments impose embargoes so that more children die. While others are born to simply eat. The starvation embargoes punish who? Well fed warlords and public servants?

And you may ask, ‘what can I do about it?’ Ignoring that most who love government worship the religion of democracy, yet never seem to take any responsibility. The meme outrage comes from millions of individuals the world over. The image of a crushed baby is squashed beneath the memes of a breakdancer with Chris Lilley audio over it. The march to war between nuclear armed belligerents is blown aside by the concern over a sport that most never even cared about before. Women’s boxing wish it had as many fans as the likes and share mob have spewed across the screens. I suppose we know what you do really care about and that makes you just another person of your time.

August, 2024

Analysis of the ICJ’s Ruling that Israel’s Occupation Is Illegal

Analysis of the ICJ’s Ruling that Israel’s Occupation Is Illegal

by | Aug 8, 2024 |

I joined Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton on his show to discuss the International Court of Justice’s recent ruling that Israel’s persistent occupation of Palestinian territory for 57 years now violates international law and must end immediately.

I had explained the context and summarized the ICJ’s judgment in my July 20 article, “ICJ Declares Israel’s Occupation Illegal”, which is a great short primer to read before listening to this episode of Scott’s show.

During our conversation, we delved into numerous aspects of the ruling in considerably greater detail, and we also discussed numerous points that I didn’t raise the article, so be sure to listen!

Bullet-Point Summary

Here are specific points we discussed about the significance of the ICJ’s ruling:

  • Why we can recognize the importance of the ICJ’s ruling and application of international law despite opposing statehood itself and the corrupt global order, and notwithstanding how the United Nations (UN) itself played a major role in creating the conflict in the first place (as documented in detail in Obstacle to Peace).
  • How the ICJ’s ruling essentially repudiates the entire framework for the US-led so-called “peace process”.
  • Why the ICJ rejected Israel’s objection that the court has no jurisdiction on the grounds that the conflict is a bilateral dispute between Israelis and Palestinians and doesn’t involve the international community.
  • How the ICJ’s new ruling goes beyond its 2004 ruling that the settlement regime and the annexation wall Israel was constructing in the West Bank were illegal.
  • How Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories began in 1967, and how Israel’s unilateral and invalid interpretation of UN Security Council Resolution 242 calling on Israel to withdraw was accepted by the US as the framework for the “peace process”.
  • How the two-state solution is premised on the applicability of international law to the conflict, whereas the “peace process” was premised on a rejection of the applicability of international law.
  • How Israel has perpetually violated UN Security Council resolutions in contravention to its obligations as a member of the organization.
  • How the ICJ detailed Israel’s numerous violations of international law with many varied aspects of its occupation and, moreover, ruled that the occupation itself is illegal and that Israel must therefore immediately end its occupation regime.
  • How people living under a belligerent occupation have a recognized right under international law to take up arms against their oppressors.
  • How the ICJ affirmed that the Palestinians’ right to self-determination is inalienable and therefore that Israel may not place conditions on their exercise of that right as it has done perpetually for over 57 years.
  • Why the ruling is significant even though the ICJ lacks any enforcement authority.
  • Why there is no government that is going to bring peace in the Middle East, it is up to us.
  • What the first step must be for us to bring the conflict to an end.
  • How the ICJ ruling really reflects the will of the international community, which is unfortunately limited in its ability to bring the conflict to an end by the whole framework the UN organization, where the US habitually uses its veto power in the Security Council to protect Israel from international censure and accountability for its crimes against the Palestinians.
  • How US government officials could be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), a separate non-UN entity, for their complicity in supporting Israel’s violations of Palestinians’ human rights, including Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
  • Why the action of moving the US government’s Israel embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem under the administration of President Donald Trump violated international law.
  • How Trump’s killing of the so-called “peace process” was actually a good thing, despite his malevolent intentions toward the Palestinians.
  • How public opposition to Israel’s genocide has at least placed a certain level of restraint on the Biden administration’s support for this crime against humanity, indicating the importance of solving this conflict from the bottom up: again, it is up to us.
  • How the ICJ also implicitly affirmed that Israel’s discriminatory policies with its occupation regime constitute the crime of apartheid.
  • How it isn’t true that Arab citizens of Israel have equal rights.
  • Why it is so utterly perverse and delusional to describe the state of Israel as a “democracy”.
  • How the Palestine Mandate violated the League of Nations’ own charter.
  • How Christian Zionism is the elephant in the room in terms of explaining the US policy of supporting Israel’s systematic violation of Palestinians’ fundamental human rights.

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Doubling Down on Failure: Ford Fiasco Follies

by | Aug 8, 2024 |

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A new updated CRS report dated 5 August 2024 is out on the USS Ford debacle.

I read these reports so you don’t have to.

For plenty of reasons, the carrier is the crossbow and chariot of the 21st century. Yet the US insists on spending tens of billions of dollars on these obsolete and antiquated exquisite platforms that are more vulnerable now than ship at sea in the history of mankind.

Of course, the US is building five of these proven failures. Let’s do easy math and suspend our disbelief and price these colossal strategic blunders at 20 billion each for procurement but inflation and projections of the last ship rolling into the ocean in FY2030 will surely stretch that number north.

20 billion times five equals 100 billion dollars. That’s just to buy the ship and if the Ford is any indicator, many hundreds of millions will have to be allotted to fix what is, in the end, a severely flawed ship design embracing a mid twentieth century concept that is now a military anachronism.

Here’s the procurement breakdown:

CVN-78 (Gerald R. Ford) was procured in FY2008. The ship was commissioned into service on July 22, 2017, and achieved initial operational capability in December 2021. The ship’s first deployment began in October 2022, more than five years after the ship was commissioned into service.

CVN-79 (John F. Kennedy) was procured in FY2013. The Navy’s FY2025 budget submission states that the ship is scheduled for delivery in July 2025.

CVN-80 (Enterprise) was procured in FY2018. On April 2, 2024, the Navy announced delays in the scheduled deliveries of several of its shipbuilding programs, including CVN-80, whose delivery, the Navy stated, will be delayed approximately 18 to 26 months. The Navy’s FY2025 budget submission, which was submitted to Congress in March 2024, shows the ship’s scheduled
delivery date as September 2029, or 18 months later than the March 2028 date shown in the Navy’s FY2024 budget submission, which was submitted to Congress in March 2023.

CVN-81 (Doris Miller) is treated in this report as a ship that was procured in FY2019, consistent with congressional action on the Navy’s FY2019 budget. (The Navy’s FY2025 budget submission, like its FY2021-FY2024 submissions, shows CVN-81 as a ship that was procured in FY2020.) The ship is scheduled for delivery to the Navy in February 2032.

CVN-82, as noted above, is programmed for procurement in FY2030 under the Navy’s FY2025 budget submission. Procuring CVN-82 two years earlier, in FY2028, could involve providing roughly $550 million in AP funding for the ship in FY2025.

CVN-80 and CVN-81 were procured under a two-ship block buy contract that was authorized by Section 121(a)(2) of the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 (H.R. 5515/P.L. 115-232 of August 13, 2018). The use of the two-ship block buy contract reduced the combined estimated procurement cost of the two ships.

You will also note that it took five years after being commissioned before it was deployed.

Five years.

And they certified its deployment status without completing the necessary cyber survivability tests nor the usual shock testing of the Total Ship Survivability Trial (TSST):

The CVN 78 Total Ship Survivability Trial (TSST) has been delayed by approximately one year, until 4QFY24 [fourth quarter of FY2024], due to the ship’s deployment being earlier than planned. The TSST is an onboard, extensive damage-control test to demonstrate how the ship design enables the crew to perform its recoverability-related procedures. For the CVN 78 TSST to be adequate, the testing will require at-sea execution with participation of an embarked air wing. Planning is ongoing to ensure that this adequacy requirement is met.

In 1QFY24, the Navy intends to publish two vulnerability assessment reports (VARs) examining the class’s survivability against above-water and underwater kinetic threats. These reports will include findings from survivability testing and modeling of the ship conducted since 2007. However, these reports as drafted do not accurately model the ship as built and do not include findings from more recent testing. Without updating the models, the analysis in the VARs will not support conclusions on the survivability of the CVN 78 class against threat weapons. The Navy intends to issue a final survivability assessment report that will include the findings from recent testing and update model-based survivability analysis by 4QFY25. If the survivability modeling and simulation (M&S) is updated to accurately model the ship as built, this assessment will support DOT&E’s report on the survivability of the class against threat weapons.

Please note, they deployed a new carrier with an embarked air wing in operational status in 2022 and has not completed its survivability tests which it claims will be the last quarter of 2025, three years after deployment. This is like a new car on the market that has not been safety tested and certified but declared safe and road-worthy.

Despite alleged cost caps for the Ford at 11.5 billion it has quickly exceeded that to balloon to 20 billion plus when all is said and done. Are these the teething pains of a new class of exquisite platform costs, that is possible but the history shows the costs continue to rise upwards. An analyst with more time than me can look at all the promises since 2008 of how much the Ford carrier will cost and consistently underestimate the true cost.

One final note, an aircraft carrier has one job: launch and retrieve aircraft otherwise it is useless. The Electromagnetic Aerial Launch System (EMALS) has been a reliability disaster, to wit.

During FY23, DOT&E observed EMALS reliability remained consistent with recent developmental test (460 mean cycles between operational mission failures (MCBOMF) in FY21 and 614 MCBOMF in FY22).

In order to leave the deck with a naval jet aircraft, the combination of full military power and the catapult assigns the necessary physical loft to get it off the deck and airborne. The failure of the EMALS puts that aviator in the hazard for not getting the loft and ditching the aircraft in the sea (hence the offset of the launch deck so the ship steaming forward doesn’t run over the plane in the drink). That means in combat with sortie generation (number of planes cycled aloft), that is a number that will be on the minds of every naval aviator queued up to be rocketed off the deck.

Withe the nearly century-old steam catapult technology used on all carrier classes before the Ford, the MCBOMF was approx 1:35,000.

I urge you to read the report.

Stop building these things!

Navy Ford (CVN-78) Class Aircraft Carrier Program: Background and Issues for Congress 5 August 2024

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