At the LP convention a friend asked me to please publicize this GoFundMe for the kids of a lady he knows who recently died, Brittoni Estrella. She had been a great crusader against police abuse after they had killed her husband.
Please do help out if you can.
Footage from the Israeli Military assault on Rafah has again revealed the gruesome reality of war. A reality that tends to be omitted by the censors of the legitimate media, footage of headless babies. Their young bodies, limp, held by rescuers and loved ones in one final desperate embrace. We usually see this sort of evidence of war when it is conducted by a pariah power or is spun in such a way that it’s rare. The natural collateral consequence of warfare. Civilised nations must wage wars, murder the innocent to accomplish policy or achieve goals, it’s the done thing.
Their Headless babies are statistics, ‘our’ babies are sacred.
The people of Palestine have no where to go, they were instructed to flee to Rafah. A refuge. Now the IDF murders them. The death and plunder secondary to the greater ambition of manifest destiny. The world has suffered it before, a chosen people, the most civilised, the shining light on the hill all exercised such violence to accomplish their aims. It is how civilisation purifies the planet from those deemed as being ‘savages’.
The 21st century may allow us the keyhole to witness such ‘progress’, smart phones make anyone a journalist, decentralised media outlets who are not servants of advertisers or national governments and the victims themselves share the reality. If we wish to learn about the world around us we can see the indignity and mass murder. Dig deep enough you can see it happening in the Congo and Western Papua as well. Colonialism, imperialism, whatever the outsiders wish to call it. It’s simply policy. This is government, beneath the facade of civilisation, headless babies.
Chances are you live in a nation state that was built over the bones of the conquered, how you live today is because frontiers ran red with the blood of the ‘savages’. Conquest led to civilisation, today is yesterdays dream. The dead, no longer matter. Later this century at the present rate of murderous progress, Gaza and the West Bank may become what the Lebanon once was, a Paris of the Middle East. Real Estate. The wealthy and important enjoying spectacular views above the long forgotten grave of a headless baby.
Remember the little refugee girl in her soaked red dress, face down on a European beach. The Mediterranean waves washing over her little corpse, beneath the same sea countless others who drowned as the fled war and conditions caused not by them. Seeking a place of peace, chasing a land where they were told freedom soared. Her body has long been lost to the digital voyeurs, for a moment their was the confused realisation that a migrant is a human being, a child even. Though because of where she was born, perhaps her skin tone, language, religion she was always ‘inferior’. Unwanted. To be lost in limbo. A Biafran or dare I say, Palestinian.
The children in Rafah are not in limbo, they are living through a real hell. The biggest government in history sends the money and ammunition, provides weapon systems and watches on while its great ally conducts itself in a familiar manner. Pushing outwards, expanding, conquering the ‘breathing room’, exercising the manifest destiny of its people. To conquer then settle. That is how the civilised do it. If the entire executive branch of the Israeli government were imprisoned for war crimes, it would never punish the criminals. They are the ones shooting, dropping bombs, operating drones, blocking aid convoys, torturing children, no politician among them, just human beings granted the magical right to do terrible things through the writ of government power.
The little child, head ripped from an innocent body is the reality of policy. The brutal truth of collectivism, statism. The ultimate culmination of taxation, regulation, law, professionals working inside a monopoly under the pretence of measured power. It’s easy to dismiss it as just Zionism, a Middle Eastern problem. Though we are witnessing exceptional cruelty for the modern world by the Israeli government, it’s what South East Asia once endured when dropping millions of bombs kept dominoes still standing or when the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan in order to stop it from descending into uncontrollable chaos. Afghanistan has not recovered since and thousands continue to die from the bombs and mines still hidden in the jungles of Asia. The legacy of great powers, where children born generations after continue to lose limbs.
Chances are your government has blown children to pieces for you. You just ignore it, the money, it’s so good. The status quo is maybe kind to you. You claim to be powerless, despite the religion of democracy and the bullshit, this is the reality. Yet, you want government to do the things you want it to do, you push for it, maybe even earn a living from it. National Socialists had welfare policies as well and the Bolsheviks claimed to be benevolent, dead innocent is always the outcome of policy. That’s why you need armed agents to FORCE others to comply. You may proudly wear ACAB yet every single policy you desire requires cops even a conquering military.
Today it’s Palestine, a place of mostly children. The Congo suffers too so that Western hegemony secures the precious resources. Over a century ago, the Congolese were enslaved, hacked to pieces and millions murdered so that Europe had rubber for bicycles. Civilisation. Today smart devices, EV’s and tech is hungry for the plunder beneath African dirt. Western nations boast saving the planet but outsourcing the pollution and suffering to the poorest nations, turn a blind eye to children dying from the poison that powers the ‘renewable’ energy. Beneath the green pretentiousness runs the blood of those who burn coal in the cold to live because the modern colonialism is powered by slogans. For the Western Papuan’s an aggressive Indonesian government, as it has done for decades rules with venom, punishing the people for their culture and for potential resources. Indonesia has big friends, the Western Papuans are a forgotten people. To be ruled and eliminated, progress?
Just another headless child. The voyeurs are all out of “Oh, dears.”
“Things happen in war…” Always to them though, always their babies, always their children.
I wonder if shame exists any more, the privileged in the West are too medicated to know what it feels like.
Dead children doesn’t make them depressed, just indifferent.
May, 2024
“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
Publisher’s Note: I published variations of this in the past amd it certainly rings true for yet another holiday during the year when we celebrate the use of war and violence to advance the agenda of the American Federal government around the globe. We are asked to bow our heads in honor of the dead and wounded who gave their service for freedom. Call me a skeptic. Individual citizens have never been in graver danger of being fined, kidnapped, caged, maimed and killed by their own government for the most banal of violations or infractions against the imperial power that has wrapped its tentacles around every living soul in the land of the free. The export of extraterritorial violence does not make a country free, it puts every inhabitant in the hazard as the entire planet has factions enraged, women and children savaged and murdered and entire religious sects chosen for special military attention.
Full disclosure: I am a retired Army officer so I have been there and done that at neo-imperialist shit-pits around the globe.
Since 1775, there have been approximately 1.35 million deaths and total US casualties of approximately 2.8 million. The deaths could fill a lake with about 1.7 million gallons of blood which could fill a city swimming pool that was 30 feet deep and 275 feet at each side. The deaths on the other side in the belligerent camp are exponentially larger by any standard when once examines the history.
In essence not only are we asked to memorialize conflicts that always manages to strengthen the government’s power on the other side, we are exposed to a constant drumbeat of protecting “our” freedom yet no existential threat to the US has existed since the cessation of hostilities with the UK in 1814.
The celebration of Memorial Day should not be about the soldiery, it should be a mass wake and reflection on the untold millions of innocents detained, kidnapped, injured, napalmed, fire-bombed, incinerated, shot, mutilated, tortured and murdered by the barbaric and naked grasping of the American central government for ever-increasing power and control at home and abroad.
Those acres of tombstones are also a fitting symbol to the state of liberty over time in America as a result of the obedient soldiers marching to the drumbeat of expanding government…forever. War is nothing more than a dispute between plantation owners who quizzically and cleverly get the Helots to spill their blood to build heavier chains and more effective manacle systems.
A discomforting thought: Many people on this day insist that we should honor the dead and maimed because they thought the crusade they were on was righteous. This is precisely the attitude of many people when it comes to the tsunami of police abuses on US soil; the badged political social workers are simply doing what they think is right.
There are many heroes in these conflicts like the young helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson Jr., who positioned his bird between unarmed Vietnamese villagers and an American patrol to protect the innocents from further bloodshed at My Lai.
Howard Jones’ book linked above is the foundational text for discovering the moral rot at the center of the massacre.
The only just war is one fought on your soil to defend your own soil.
Some housekeeping:
I’ve leveraged YouTube Studios to stream my podcasts and we’ll see how that works out.
I have taken a break from Gab and Twitter; I returned to Twitter after years away to help promote the podcast and I have had to tame the vampire by severely restricting the time I spend on it. I will surface to periscope depth on both social media accounts on Sunday mornings but not between to better focus on projects I am tackling. Please use the messaging function on those if you wish to chat.
And I am leveraging the Notes feature here at Substack to post my brain-zephyrs occasionally.
I wanted to thank my personal correspondents who reach out to me at cgpodcast@pm.me.
I encourage everyone to use the comments function here at substack to tease out the conversation.
Like the the Dispatch essays or podcast, let me know via gentlemanly correspondence if there is an issue you’d like for me to ponder or make recommendations for improvements or episodes. -BB
“Happy Veterans Day or a Memorial Day salutation and thank you for your service” or “thanks for protecting our freedom.”
What! I hear this familiar refrain again and again every May and November. I am appalled whenever this unthinking salutation is proffered.
I am a retired career Army officer and like USMC General Smedley Butler before me, I find these sentiments to be hogwash.
The only service rendered was to the American political power structure in the dishonorable hands of the Democrats or Republicans; the former, despite their protestations to peace, have gotten America involved in WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam and on to Libya, Yemen, Syria and the Horn of Africa in the 21st century. Starting with the shameful expropriation of the Mexican territory from 1846-48 to the War of Northern Aggression from 1860-65; the United States went into hyper-colonial overdrive in 1893 in the Hawaiian Islands and has not stopped since. The entire history of American arms on Earth has been a shameful and expansionist enterprise culminating in the first ever post-WWII (the Japanese attack on American territories in the Aleutians during the War to Save Josef Stalin and the minor coastal events in Oregon) attack on American state soil in 2001.
That cycle of attack against American targets on American soil will be realized yet again as I have outlined in my Storming America series on the podcast.
I am frankly astonished at the length of time it took for a substantive attack of any kind to be initiated on American soil with the breadth, ferocity and long sordid history of American mischief and mayhem abroad.
The sheer number of military expeditions the US has embarked on over time is breathtaking. One worthy notes there have been 234 military expeditions from 1798-1993. Another posits the enormous military presence around the globe of United States armed forces abroad from October 1945 through this century.
“This list does not include covert actions and numerous instances of US forces stationed abroad since World War II, in occupation forces, or for participation in mutual security organizations, base agreements, and routine military assistance or training operations.”
Good God, if I were a Martian who landed on Earth ten years ago and found myself attending government schools, to include college, and watching television for any additional cultural education, I would not be aware of any of this. The constant drumbeat emanating from the State is the Orwellian chorus about America making the world safe for freedom and liberty and never using force abroad except in self-defense. The history proves otherwise.
America, next to Rome in the Western world, ranks as one of the world’s most aggressive nation states when one examines the evidence. A country sheltered from the tempestuous and constant warring on the European continent by one ocean and the turbulence in Asia by another ocean, yet it simply cannot mind its own business nor resist the temptation to maim and murder abroad for expansion of political power and control whether for mercantile or colonial aspirations.
One can even see that the brutality practiced by American soldiers abroad is not recent but a long-standing tradition.
Afghanistan, just a few years ago:
“All told, five soldiers were charged with killing civilians in three separate episodes early last year. Soldiers repeatedly described Sergeant Gibbs as devising “scenarios” in which the unit would fake combat situations by detonating grenades or planting weapons near their victims. They said he even supplied “drop weapons” and grenades to make the victims appear armed. Some soldiers took pictures posing with the dead and took body parts as trophies. Sergeant Gibbs is accused of snipping fingers from victims and later using them to intimidate another soldier.
He also pulled a tooth from one man, saying in court that he had “disassociated” the bodies from being human, that taking the fingers and tooth was like removing antlers from a deer.
Sergeant Gibbs said he that was ashamed of taking the body parts, that he was “trying to be hard, a hard individual.” But he insisted that the people he took them from had posed genuine threats to him and his unit.”
Philippines, then:
“Like many of their officers, American troops also showed incredible callousness toward the Philippine civilian population. A man named Clarence Clowe described the situation as follows in a letter he wrote to Senator Hoar. The methods employed by American troops against civilians to find insurgent “arms and ammunition” include torture, beating, and outright killing.
At any time I am liable to be called upon to go out and bind and gag helpless prisoners, to strike them in the face, to knock them down when so bound, to bear them away from wife and children, at their very door, who are shrieking pitifully the while, or kneeling and kissing the hands of our officers, imploring mercy from those who seem not to know what it is, and then, with a crowd of soldiers, hold our helpless victim head downward in a tub of water in his own yard, or bind him hand and foot, attaching ropes to head and feet, and then lowering him into the depths of a well of water till life is well-nigh choked out, and the bitterness of a death is tasted, and our poor, gasping victims ask us for the poor boon of being finished off, in mercy to themselves.
All these things have been done at one time or another by our men, generally in cases of trying to obtain information as to the location of arms and ammunition.
Nor can it be said that there is any general repulsion on the part of the enlisted men to taking part in these doings. I regret to have to say that, on the contrary, the majority of soldiers take a keen delight in them, and rush with joy to the making of this latest development of a Roman holiday.
Another soldier, L. F. Adams, with the Washington regiment, described what he saw after the Battle of Manila on February 4-5, 1899:
In the path of the Washington Regiment and Battery D of the Sixth Artillery there were 1,008 dead niggers, and a great many wounded. We burned all their houses. I don’t know how many men, women, and children the Tennessee boys did kill. They would not take any prisoners.
Similarly, Sergeant Howard McFarland of the 43rd Infantry, wrote to the Fairfield Journal of Maine:
I am now stationed in a small town in charge of twenty-five men, and have a territory of twenty miles to patrol…. At the best, this is a very rich country; and we want it. My way of getting it would be to put a regiment into a skirmish line, and blow every nigger into a nigger heaven. On Thursday, March 29, eighteen of my company killed seventy-five nigger bolo men and ten of the nigger gunners. When we find one that is not dead, we have bayonets.
These methods were condoned by some back at home in the U.S., as exemplified by the statement of a Republican Congressman in 1909:
You never hear of any disturbances in Northern Luzon; and the secret of its pacification is, in my opinion, the secret of pacification of the archipelago. They never rebel in northern Luzon because there isn’t anybody there to rebel. The country was marched over and cleaned in a most resolute manner. The good Lord in heaven only knows the number of Filipinos that were put under ground. Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country, and wherever or whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him. The women and children were spared, and may now be noticed in disproportionate numbers in that part of the island.
And countless incidents small and large in between from the only nation state in the Western world that not only endorses the use of torture but makes it an official means of projecting power abroad.
I have often remarked that cops are the only reason freedom and liberty is and has been in the hazard in America, and unfortunately, the same standard applies for military power abroad.
The only just war is one fought to defend one’s own soil from invasion. There is no other. Every other conflict reek of statist opportunism and yen to expand tax jurisdictions and the power to rob others of their wealth and resources. Some may mistake this for a pretense of the Left. Not only do the progressives and the collectivists in America have a rich history of cheer-leading wars such as WWI and WWII but they also wish to employ military-style violence domestically to achieve their government supremacist dreams.
The notion that foreign wars and entanglements are wrong still emanates from a sparsely populated philosophical quarter that has no majority presence in the academy or the government–media complex. It is a true voice in the wilderness. That voice has one signature message: you cannot thank a veteran for your freedom because they have actively done nothing more than endanger its very existence. In fact, American military power abroad (and increasingly, at home) has made civilians more unsafe than they have ever been. The threat not only emerges from aggrieved victims of American brutality abroad but a government desperate in bad times to ensure that not one dollar of military expenditures is reduced. America is now a national security garrison state. Think about that the next time you take a flight.
Veterans don’t need gratitude but a self-realization on their part that the machine they worked for was never an engine for liberty but a device whose single purpose was aggrandizement of American political power at home and abroad. And that political hammer always extinguishes liberty and never expands it.
“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”
– Gandhi
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) today issued additional provisional measures in a case filed by the government of South Africa accusing the state of Israel of violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, or the Genocide Convention.
The Court effectively ordered Israel to halt its military assault on Rafah in the Gaza Strip ongoing since May 7, to end its blockade and allow humanitarian goods into Gaza on the scale required to meet the needs of the population, and to allow unimpeded access to Gaza of international investigators.
The Court ordered Israel to “Immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;” to “Maintain open the Rafah crossing for unhindered provision at scale of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance;” and to “Take effective measures to ensure the unimpeded access to the Gaza Strip of any commission of inquiry, fact-finding mission or other investigative body mandated by competent organs of the United Nations to investigate allegations of genocide”.
South Africa instituted proceedings against Israel for the crime of genocide on December 29, 2023. It submitted an 84-page application detailing the indiscriminate nature of Israel’s bombing in Gaza, its prevention of goods and services necessary for the survival of the population, and the openly genocidal intent of Israeli leaders. South Africa also requested the ICJ to issue provisional measures ordering Israel to cease its military operation in Gaza, dubbed “Operation Swords of Iron”.
In January, the Court hearings on the request for provisional measures. On January 11, 2024, South Africa presented its oral argument for why Israel’s actions constituted violations of its obligations under the Genocide Convention, urging the Court to issue preliminary measures ordering Israel to halt its operation on the grounds that it would be prejudicial to the rights of the Palestinians in Gaza to do nothing in the meantime while the Court deliberated for months or even years.
The Court did not have to wait to render a final judgment on the question of whether Israel is committing genocide, South Africa argued; it was sufficient for South Africa to have presented a plausible case that Israel was committing genocide to prompt the Court to act by issuing provisional measures.
South Africa explained that it was acting to comply with its own obligation under the Genocide Convention to take action to prevent the crime of genocide, as required of all parties to the treaty.
The crime of genocide itself is prohibited under international law not only for treaty signatories but as a peremptory norm (jus cogens), also known as customary international law, which may not be abrogated by any state on the grounds that they are not party to a treaty expressly prohibiting universally recognized crimes.
Israel presented its defense on January 12, preposterously denying any wrongdoing.
(Watch South Africa’s oral presentation here and Israel’s here.)
On January 23, the government of Nicaragua submitted an application to join South Africa in its case against Israel.
On January 26, the ICJ acceded to South Africa’s request and issued provisional measures on the grounds that Israel was committing a plausible genocide. While the Court did not explicitly order Israel to halt its military operation, it did order Israel to comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, including ceasing indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure and allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza on the scale required to meet the population’s needs.
That amounted to an implicit order for Israel to halt its operation since as international human rights organizations and humanitarian agencies had been crying out for months that to deliver aid at the scale required would require a full cessation of hostilities.
(Watch the ICJ deliver its order in the case of South Africa v. Israel here.)
On February 12, after Israel had announced its intention to invade Rafah, the last area in Gaza where Israel had ordered civilians to flee and where they could get at least some access to humanitarian aid and medical care, South Africa submitted a request for additional provisional measures
On February 16, the Court issued its decision on that request, noting that “the most recent developments in the Gaza Strip, and in Rafah in particular, ‘would exponentially increase what is already a humanitarian nightmare with untold regional consequences’, as stated by the United Nations Secretary-General” on February 7. This situation, the Court said, did not require any additional measures but rather required Israel to implement the provisional measures ordered on January 26.
Thus, the Court effectively declared that Israel had failed to comply with its order to take steps to comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention.
On March 6, South Africa submitted another request for additional provisional measures. Whereas on January 26 the ICJ had acknowledged the imminent risk of Palestinians starving to death, by March 6, Palestinian children had already been dying from hunger and malnutrition.
The ICJ issued its response on March 28, complying with South Africa’s request by reaffirming its order of January 26 and additionally ordering Israel, in light of “the spread of famine and starvation”, to take all necessary measures to ensure, without delay, the unhindered provision of “urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance, including food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation requirements, as well as medical supplies and medical care to Palestinians throughout Gaza, including by increasing the capacity and number of land crossing points and maintaining them open for as long as necessary”.
Thus, the Court once again effectively declared that Israel had failed to comply with its order of January 26, to which it added more specific requirements for Israel to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid.
On April 5, the government of Colombia filed an application to join South Africa in its case against Israel. The government of Libya followed with an application to join on May 10.
Also on May 10 South Africa once again requested additional provisional measures due to Israel’s brazen defiance of the Court’s previous orders. As South Africa noted,
Rafah is the last population centre in Gaza that has not been substantially destroyed by Israel and as such the last refuge for Palestinians in Gaza. Not only is there nowhere for the 1.5 million displaced people and others in Rafah safely to flee to — so much of Gaza having been reduced to rubble — if Rafah is similarly destroyed there will be little left of Gaza or of the prospects for the survival of Palestinian life in the territory.
Israel’s conduct had been “contemptuous of the Court and international law”, South Africa observed. “The onslaught on the Palestinians in Gaza is of a nature that can only be intended to result in the genocidal destruction of that group.”
South Africa therefore requested the Court to order Israel to immediately withdraw and cease its military operation in Rafah and to take all measures necessary to facilitate unimpeded access to Gaza of humanitarian aid as well as to allow access to journalists, UN officials, and international investigators.
The ICJ heard South Africa’s oral argument on May 16 and Israel’s response on May 17. Once again, Israel tried preposterously to maintain that it was doing everything possible to avoid harm to civilians and to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
(Watch South Africa’s oral presentation here and Israel’s here.)
The ICJ’s response today once again acknowledged the legitimacy of South Africa’s argument by acceding to the request to order Israel to immediately cease its military operation in Gaza.
(Watch the ICJ issue its order here.)
On May 20, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a separate body in the Hague, Netherlands, requested arrest warrants for three top Hamas officials for the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023, which prompted Israel’s military assault on the civilian population of Gaza, as well as for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, all of whom are charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been facilitated by the support of the US government under the Biden administration, officials of which could similarly be prosecuted by the ICC for complicity in Israel’s genocide.
Originally published at JeremyRHammond.com.
Since October 2021, it has either failed the flight test or scrubbed launches.
Three years.
The joint Army/Navy Dark Eagle Long Range Hypersonic Weapon, that despite the $8.3 billion in R&D invested in it have so far failed to successfully fire a single AUR, All Up Round, it doesn’t fill you with confidence after the cancellation of the Air Force AGM-183 Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), both are/were hyper-sonic glide missiles.
Don’t believe the January 2023 estimates of 41 million per missile if it ever gets off the ground. Yet another signature failure of the sclerotic and arthritic Pentagon spending sprees using an acquisition system the Soviets would blanch at.
The US remains the most expensive paper tiger in the history of the Earth.
The ARRW program was launched in April 2018 and originally planned to achieve initial operational deployment in 2022. However, in November 2023, after conducting two test flights in August and October 2023, the ARRW hypersonic program was officially cancelled.
The U.S. Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW): Dark Eagle
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.
When you look at the larger disaster of American arms and readiness, all the services are in the hazard of being mission ineffective. The US Navy surface fleet has been an unmitigated building debacle with the Little Crappy Ships, Zumwalt class and the USS Ford carrier not performing up to speed for any of the anticipated mission sets assigned to these failed programs.
I’ve often thought that the sole discriminator for the US military apart from the aging and decrepit USAF nuclear land-based missile forces and bomber organizations that sets the US apart is the submarine force and now the more I discover about the state of contemporary nuclear submarine construction, maintenance, readiness and improvements, the less convinced I am of the efficacy of the US submarine forces.
Jerry Hendrix wrote a disturbing essay on the state of the force and predictably, it is a hot mess.
His indictment is well-researched, terribly disconcerting and a dim prognostication for future strength.
…of the submarine force already in commission, sixteen of those forty-nine boats—or nearly a third of the Navy’s premier offensive force—are in dry-docks or tied to piers, lacking required dive certifications. These submarines cannot get underway due to a three-year maintenance backlog in the U.S. Navy.
The bottom line is that the American submarine force, the “point of the spear” of American power, upon which so many military plans depend, is unprepared to meet the current threat environment, and there are no quick fixes. It has taken decades—and a sequence of bad assumptions and poor decisions—to fall into the current state of unpreparedness, and it will take years, as well as significant investments in both new ship construction and submarine repair capacity, to recover.
Thanks to CDR Salamander for introducing me to the splendid Hendrix essay.
He opines:
Back to the effects of bad assumptions. The issue really isn’t the bad assumptions. In all human institutions, you have imperfections and bad assumptions that don’t survive for long in the wild. The key is how fast you can notice the error, and then take corrective action. If you quickly execute bad assumptions, but then in an accretion-encumbered, happy-talk laden, and bureaucratically inept manner slow-roll the correction, well, you find yourself here.
I am less optimistic and think we have reached the point of no return; there is no recovery from this.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.
Israel is not a Western democracy. It’s a typical oriental despotism that does not share our values. Supporting them is against America’s national interests.
