As I have mentioned, the US Navy can’t catch a break from the cavalcade of calamities that is Navy shipbuilding for two generations.

First they removed the 155mm gun when it was disclosed it was 800 thousand dollars a round Advanced Gun System (AGS) then it took five years (!) to launch its first missile from the Vertical Launch System (VLS) on deck. They were going to build 32 of these floating dumpsters but have only built three. Instead of blowing the $22.4 billion on researching and developing the Zumwalts, the money would have been better spent by not being spent.

The Zumwalts were designed as next-generation multi-mission destroyers that would lean on stealth to better survive against enemy ships and airplanes.

The Navy once wanted 32 of these destroyers, but the cost overruns were prohibitive, and only three were built. The ships are also maintenance-heavy and expensive to keep in the water.

The main gun was faulty. Some critics have wondered if the money sunk into the Zumwalt-class would have been better spent building more submarines.

The first of the class, the USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000), was the largest and most costly destroyer ever built. General Dynamics spent $40 million just to make a special facility to produce the ships. That gives you an idea of the magnitude of the program and its expenses. The entire program ballooned to 50 percent greater cost than expected.

Again, no one has been held accountable for these very expensive and slow “gun trucks” (30 knots) that will now haul around five Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) (50 million dollars each) that will be picked up very early by the sophisticated early detection systems of the Chinese off their landmass. Stealth can’t hide from long wave radar.

$22,000,000,000 Wasted? The Navy Has a Plan to Save the Zumwalt-Class Stealth Destroyer

This is the first US Navy decision I can get behind in years.

The US Navy just cancelled its Constellation class frigate program because it is absolutely incapable of building hulls and ships that work. They have not launched a successful surface ship since 1991 with the Arleigh Burke class.

Total appropriated: $7.6 billion for the initial six ships and the amount spent so far with delivery of two incomplete ships: around $2 billion to $2.5 billion.

Canceling the Constellation-class is a major red flag over the US Navy’s eroding naval shipbuilding foundations. The challenge now is reviving the US shipbuilding industry with our allies to deliver warships at the speed today’s great-power competition demands.

Now they need to fire all the flag officers and senior project personnel and do a thorough corruption investigation into this disaster. The US Navy of course levied critical design changes on this ship over the years that severely compromised the original design. They also started building with an incomplete design.

Start firing people and make the Navy act like a first world navy instead of tinpot corrupt third world Marx Brother flotilla.

The U.S. Navy Can’t Build A Navy Anymore

Like a major air disaster that leaves blackened wreckage scattered far and wide, Zohran Mamdani’s New York collision with reality hurtles ahead. The mayor-elect has once again put on display a key reason that catastrophe is inevitable. It is worse than just overlooking something. It is an infantile psychological blind spot.

Mamdani epitomizes the socialist calculation problem all over again, the problem Mises identified more than a century ago. Socialism can’t calculate. So socialist politicians of all parties resist it like the plague. That is why leftist politicians are the first to jump on the rent control bandwagon. They are horrified by the information implicit in prices, real world signals that can actually encourage the provision of more housing. Like little children, they live in a fantasy land in which wishing makes things so. That explains their quick turn to price controls (with their accompanying shortages).  If they can suppress prices by fiat, everyone can afford everything.  Everyone, everything, everywhere, all at once.

Asked how he would get the $700 million needed to provide his promised free buses in New York, the mayor-elect answered, “The most important fact is that we fund it — not the question of how we do it, but that we do it.”

If wishes were buses, then New Yorkers would ride.

It’s not just Mamdani. It is a psychological blind spot endemic among the left. They are loathe to consider the costs and consequences of their policies, preferring to fly blind, oblivious to the coming crackup.

Barack Obama showed up on the Late Show with David Letterman as he campaigned for reelection in 2012. Expecting an easy answer from a candidate he appeared to favor, Letterman asked the president, “Just how big is the national debt?”

Obama appeared visibly out of sorts for just an instant as he admitted that he didn’t know “precisely.”

Trying to be helpful, Letterman asked, “Is it ten trillion?”

That’s when viewers learned that the President did not know “precisely” what the national debt was.  Nor did he even know roughly.

Leftist hate calculation. Obama ducked the question.

Just for the record, the national debt was $10 trillion when Obama was elected the first time. At the time of his appearance on Letterman’s show, the debt had mushroomed to $16 trillion. It had grown by 60 percent in four short years.

President Obama would later announce an election year vote-buying goody for up to five million student loan borrowers.  It was an executive decision to cap certain repayments.

The president didn’t know and couldn’t say how much his new initiative would cost.

“We actually don’t know the costs yet,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan answered for the administration. “We’ll figure that out on the back end.”

On the back end.

Leftist hate calculation. Because they prefer to shut their eyes tight, they shouldn’t be allowed to fly planes. Or drive buses.

A ceasefire that looks good on paper means little when people are living under lockdowns and raids. We open with the West Bank, where daily operations near schools and reports of soldiers quartering in homes reshape civilian life and hollow out the promise of “stability.” The Gaza story is no better: UNICEF’s plan to vaccinate young children falters when syringes and solar refrigeration get blocked, turning a humanitarian fix into a diplomatic fault line. Pair that with silence from Washington on creeping annexation and you can see why trust is evaporating across the region.

From there, we track the war in Ukraine through realities most headlines skip. Russia’s steady gains and declining Ukrainian interception rates expose a painful gap between political messaging and industrial capacity. Sanctions on Russian energy giants and intelligence for deep strikes might sound tough, but the blowback lands on Ukraine’s power grid and civilians heading into winter. We cut through the talking points to ask a harder question: what does actual de‑escalation look like when production lines can’t match ambitions?

The big-picture risk sits in nuclear arms control. With New START approaching expiration, we argue for an immediate extension to buy time for serious negotiations. Demanding a trilateral deal with China up front is a recipe for failure; stabilizing the U.S.–Russia framework first is the only way to keep verification and predictability alive. Then comes the most surreal turn of the week: Abu Mohammed al‑Jolani’s White House visit and friendly media treatment. We unpack what this normalization means for U.S. credibility, the safety of deployed troops near Damascus, and the precedent it sets for rewarding extremism with legitimacy.

If you care about real-world consequences—vaccines that don’t reach kids, power grids that go dark, treaties that prevent miscalculation, and troops placed in harm’s way—this conversation connects the dots. Subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review to help more people find the show. What’s the most underreported risk you heard today?

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