Blog 7 | The Libertarian Institute

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Fixing Fight Club: A Missive to DOGE

by Bill Buppert | Feb 8, 2025 | Blog

President Trump, SECDEF, Mr. Musk and DOGE,

I am the host of Chasing Ghosts: An Irregular Warfare Podcast and WarNotes: A Conflict Podcast.

You are about to embark on a dark journey to discover the existential mismanagement and beggared martial imagination of the military mandarins at the Pentagon. You have to prepare to do savage bureaucratic combat with the most financially well-endowed military machine in the history of mankind whose penchant for defeat and stalemate has an unblemished record since 1945. Bureaucratic knife-fighting and Machiavellian combat is the only martial skill they possess.

I have distilled the ten objectives that may finally bring the Pentagon closer to being an effective fighting modality.

1. You must utterly lay waste to the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) is a process used by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to determine the requirements for military weapon systems. This acquisition system has managed to spend trillions on exquisite platforms and weapons systems that are always a day late and enormously and ruinously expensive. Exhibit A is the aircraft carrier which is the cross and chariot of the 21st century. If the Soviets designed an acquisition system, it would look like ours.

2. 21st century warfare is characterized by three essential characteristics: robotics, autonomous targeting and the employment of hyper-velocity weapons systems.

Robotics from mud to space will not only dominate military conflict in this century through a rolling cascade of Revolutions in Military Affairs that will dwarf such forward momentum in past history but democratize the employment technology to the poorest countries to challenge the first world employment of exquisite platforms.

Autonomous targeting will be a necessity to remove humans in the loop because of the speed and high density of munitions aloft.

Hypersonics are not new (ICBMs and IRBMs have been hypersonic since the 1950s and the world still has no defense against them once they have tipped at apogee and return to earth) and the employment of high parabola weapons (missiles) and shallow parabola glide vehicles like the Fractional Orbital Bombardment Systems (FOBS) are the future whether the US and its weak allies agree or not. Employment and defense against them is Priority One from a species perspective and the Pentagon has failed miserably. I have catalogued hundreds of instances of this here at my blog entries at the Libertarian Institute where I am the Smedley D. Butler Fellow for Military Affairs.

3. The role of the infantry soldier is changing in a way it has never faced in the history of manned conflict for millennia where the technology is delivering weapons that can target individual soldiers or groups of them in a cost-effective fashion. And they can’t escape their fate. And no, there will be no Heinlein-inspired armored suits for super-soldiers, it makes no sense to do so when robots will fill the bill.

4. The US has utterly failed in aggregated fires synchronization systems that align sensors and effectors seamlessly to deliver neutralization and destruction in a peer conflict (there is no near peer conflict anymore; Yemen has proven to be a peer competitor to the US). The Russians have broken the code and the US has not.

5. Global hegemons always fail and fall even in a unipolar world because nothing concentrates the mind on surviving peer conflict than defensive arrangements left of bang. The Chinese and the Russians have a distinct martial advantage as regional hegemons concentrating on both offensive and defensive stratagems synchronized together. The US cannot defend its homeland from military threats, full stop.

6. The entire Professional Military Education (PME) system from A to Z must be ruthlessly gutted and remade in the image of a system that builds fighting men encouraged to embrace risk assumption instead of risk aversion and promulgates a Prussian culture of disobedience that rewards character, initiative and mission command from the lowest ranks (see Auftragstaktik). Burn all DEI influences to the ground, soldiers’ lives literally depend on their aggressive elimination with extreme prejudice.

7. A complete reassessment and rebuilding of the military personnel performance system and a drastic reduction in the number of flag officers and their useless bloated staffs that have been responsible for the perfect and unblemished cavalcade of calamities, failures and stalemates since 1945. Mr. Donald E. Vandergriff has the blueprint ready to go to fix the broken system.

8. Make eccentricity great again in the armed forces. ADM Rickover and the likes of TE Lawrence, Orde Wingate, John Boyd and Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck would not have a prayer in the modern armed forces promotion circus.

9. Create vigorous red teaming & “Tenth Man” entities through all the services and the Joint Staff whose sole purpose is disruption, uncomfortable questions and extrapolating the second and third order effects of every aspect of operations left of bang and after commencement of kinetic operations.

10. Last but not least, force the Department of Defense to take a knee and make defense of the homeland the first priority in everything. Considerations of defense fix the mind in a fashion that assesses heretofore unidentified gaps in knowledge and inquiry.

I have other ideas but this is a good start. Your examination of the DoD is literally a life or death consequence for America, make it count.

Good luck and Godspeed.

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Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me

Abolish Antitrust!

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 8, 2025 | Blog, Economics, Justice

“That there is inequality of ability or monetary income on the free market should surprise no one. As we have seen above, men are not ‘equal’ in their tastes, interests, abilities, or locations. Resources are not distributed “equally” over the earth.16 This inequality or diversity in abilities and distribution of resources insures inequality of income on the free market. And, since a man’s monetary assets are derived from his and his ancestors’ abilities in serving consumers on the market, it is not surprising that there is inequality of monetary wealth as well.

“The term ‘free competition,’ then, will prove misleading unless it is interpreted to mean free action, i.e., freedom to compete or not to compete as the individual wills.

“It should be clear from the foregoing discussion that there is nothing particularly reprehensible or destructive of consumer freedom in the establishment of a ‘monopoly price’ or in a cartel action. A cartel action, if it is a voluntary one, cannot injure freedom of competition and, if it proves profitable, benefits rather than injures the consumers. It is perfectly consonant with a free society, with individual self-sovereignty, and with the earning of money through serving consumers.

As Benjamin R. Tucker brilliantly concluded in dealing with the problem of cartels and competition:

‘That the right to cooperate is as unquestionable as the right to compete; the right to compete involves the right to refrain from competition; cooperation is often a method of competition, and competition is always, in the larger view, a method of cooperation … each is a legitimate, orderly, non-invasive exercise of the individual will under the social law of equal liberty….

‘Viewed in the light of these irrefutable propositions, the trust, then, like every other industrial combination endeavoring to do collectively nothing but what each member of the combination might fully endeavor to do individually, is, per se, an unimpeachable institution. To assail or control or deny this form of cooperation on the ground that it is itself a denial of competition is an absurdity. It is an absurdity, because it proves too much. The trust is a denial of competition in no other sense than that in which competition itself is a denial of competition. (Italics ours.) The trust denies competition only by producing and selling more cheaply than those outside of the trust can produce and sell; but in that sense every successful individual competitor also denies competition…. The fact is that there is one denial of competition which is the right of all, and that there is another denial of competition which is the right of none. All of us, whether out of a trust or in it, have a right to deny competition by competing, but none of us, whether in a trust or out of it, have a right to deny competition by arbitrary decree, by interference with voluntary effort, by forcible suppression of initiative.’

“This is not to say, of course, that joint co-operation or combination is necessarily ‘better than’ competition among firms. We simply conclude that the relative extent of areas within or between firms on the free market will be precisely that proportion most conducive to the well-being of consumers and producers alike. This is the same as our previous conclusion that the size of a firm will tend to be established at the level most serviceable to the consumers.”

—Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State

Police State in Mexico? Thank you Donald Trump!

by David Hathaway | Feb 7, 2025 | Blog

Timeline / First Term…

I will build the wall and Mexico will pay for it!

How?

I will slap huge tariffs on Mexico if they don’t stop the flow of people and drugs passing through their country and those big beautiful tariffs will cause Mexico to pay for the wall.

Mexico: OK, we will send thousands of troops to the border and to internal checkpoints in Mexico.

Result: Two-hour lines for Americans GOING INTO MEXICO ever since Trump’s first term because Mexican military now conducts thorough searches of everyone going into Mexico. Americans used to be able to drive easily into Mexico without delay. Everyone now has to wait hours going into Mexico and hours coming back. Mexico used to feel more like a free country than the U.S.; because it was.

Trump (still in first term): I will spare you the tariffs because you are creating more of a police state in Mexico and are being subordinate peons to me as your emperor.

Timeline / Second Term…

I will slap huge beautiful tariffs on Mexico because they are not stemming the flow of people and drugs!

Mexico: OK, we will send thousands more troops to the border and also install them at more internal checkpoints throughout Mexico.

Trump: I will spare you the tariffs again because you are being good obedient little children and are appropriately bending the knee to your emperor.

Result: More of a police state in Mexico.

A big thank you to all the Trump lovers and fake libertarians that actually love and promote militarism and state intervention in all of our lives.

Like Farm to Table, Shipyard to Mothballs

by Bill Buppert | Feb 7, 2025 | Blog

USNS Cody

USNS Cody (T-EPF-14), Spearhead-class expeditionary fast transport, was christened on 25 February 2023 by ship’s sponsor Averil D. Spencer, launched at Austal USA in Mobile, Alabama on 20 March 2023, and its delivery was accepted by the U.S. Navy on 11 January 2024. These are a fine balance of weight (hence the aluminum construction) and speed capability. It’s a transport, not an amphibious assault ship. It is being mothballed.

My friend PTS weighted in:

“There are multiple problems with the EPF and they were over hyped and vastly underdelivered. As mentioned, they are fragile with their aluminum hulls as demonstrated of the coast of Yemen. They are un-armed and should have least been equipped with CIWS or SEARAM but the aluminum hull could not support their weight. The flight deck could not support CH53, CH46 or V22 ops so pretty much a non-starter. The flow path of heavier cargo from the flight deck down to the vehicle deck was also not really good either. Now lets talk the berthing… they should have modified the internals tremendously, but they left it pretty much with no cabins, no storage and airline seating. Want to put a company of Marines and their AAV or other vehicles… well they are left sleeping in the airline seating area and will not enough food to toliets to support them for more than a few days without turning the vehicle deck over to containerized storage. A huge issue is the speed and the ships ride. With low sea states you could get 35 kts… but anything higher the speed dropped quickly till you would do better traveling in an old WW2 LST (at 12kts) to move from Okinawa to South Korea. Buddies of mine who did that trip would have been combat ineffective after their slow trip across that distance due to the poor sea keeping abilities in Blue Waters. Finally, they never were able to get it capable of doing a drop of AAV straight into the water and recover them. The real limitations are vast.”

The former HSV-2 Swift, laid up at Ampelakia, Salamina, Greece. In July 2015, the ship was leased by the UAE National Marine Dredging Company & was used to carry aid through Bab Al Mandab strait. On 1 Oct 2016, the ship was attacked and damaged off the coast of Yemen by Houthis.

2016. The Houthis have gotten even

She didn’t fare well (photo from 2021):

The same Austal USA that just sent some grifters packing after bilking taxpayers:

“The SEC alleges that, from at least January 2013 through July 2016, Austal USA’s former president, Craig D. Perciavalle, its current director of financial analysis, Joseph A. Runkel, and former director of the Littoral Combat Ships program, William O. Adams, engaged in a scheme to artificially reduce the cost estimates to complete certain shipbuilding projects for the U.S. Navy by tens of millions of dollars. The complaint alleges that Perciavalle, Runkel, and Adams knew that Austal USA’s shipbuilding costs were rising and higher than planned, but they directed others to arbitrarily lower the cost estimates to meet Austal USA’s revenue budget and revenue projections.”

The Navy department that is in charge of shipbuilding and repair is Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), the largest of the U.S. Navy’s five system commands.

They have 83,000 people; it’s twice the size of the entire US Coast Guard.

83,000

They can’t get anything right.

How could this happen with the streamlined acquisition system at the Pentagon?

Fire the Chief of Naval Operations immediately.

Fire them all.

H/T to John A Conrad IV

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Trump’s Vision for Gaza: ‘We’ll Own It’ – New Episode of the Kyle Anzalone Show

by Kyle Anzalone | Feb 6, 2025 | Blog

In this episode, we dive into Donald Trump’s latest remarks on the future of Gaza, his stance on Palestinian displacement, and his renewed “maximum pressure” strategy on Iran. Trump claims the U.S. will “cleanse Gaza” and might even “own it,” while Hamas outright rejects his vision. We also explore Trump’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, where he watched raw footage of the October 7 attacks.

Plus, we break down Trump’s latest statements on Iran, his push to reinstate harsh sanctions, and his claim that reports of U.S.-Israeli plans to strike Iran are “greatly exaggerated.” What does this mean for Middle East policy under Trump? Tune in for these crucial developments.

The DDG(X) Begins the Change Follies

by Bill Buppert | Feb 6, 2025 | Blog

The DDG(X) program will be over-budget, very late and a shadow of its naval architectural ambition.

Of course.

The US Navy has seemingly abandoned naval gunnery at the 5″ level and above and the latest navy build program for a new destroyer is removing the capability. While missiles are certainly the predominant means to project power from naval ships, there is certainly a call for naval gunnery in certain operational tasks. The increasing density and threat capabilities of drones is making gunnery important also at levels below that caliber to bring back the anti-aircraft utility of Oerlikon and Bofors style 12.7 to 40mm to increase reasonable ship protection.

The latest renderings depicting the U.S. Navy’s next-generation destroyer are missing some weapon systems initially incorporated onboard the ship. According to Naval News, the image revealed by Program Executive Office (PEO) Ships last week showcases the DDG(X) without a main gun. Back in 2022, the upcoming destroyer was equipped with a 5-inch Mark 45 Mod 4 main gun forward of the bow-mounted 32-cell ark 41 Vertical Launch System cells. While this original design was purely conceptual, the new DDG(X)’s missing gun is significant. Similar to the service’s other next-generation projects, its destroyer timeline has been delayed. The most recent estimates surrounding the DDG(X) indicate the destroyer will not become available until the early 2030s at the earliest.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/new-renderings-show-ddgx-destroyer-missing-its-main-gun-214372/

Naval gunnery used to be quite the vocation for interested surface warfare officers and men.

The legendary ADM Ching Lee commanding the USS Washington battleship (BB56) in WWII was the winner in the sole “gunfight” between battleships in the PTO in WWII and sunk the IJN Kirishima in what was point blank range for 14″ and 16″ guns. He was a former Olympic shooting champion in 1920. Guns and gunnery are a tool in the armory.

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USAID w/Daniel McAdams

by Tommy Salmons | Feb 5, 2025 | Blog, Year Zero

Daniel McAdams is back to discuss the news on Trump’s attempt to neuter USAID, their role around the world, and accepting wins where you can get them.