Alexander Dumas wrote in the Count of Monte Cristo: “Moral wounds have this peculiarity – they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart.”

That was something that I relearned last week as I shared over the past couple of nights.

Today was my last day teaching regularly at school. I discussed my decision here last night. I knew this would be the day but I didn’t know how it would play out. While I did not think that it would go badly, I was pleasantly surprised by who it happened. I arrived shortly after a faculty meeting began during which some of the changes that affected my decision to leave were being discussed, with most of the upper school teachers expressing the same concerns I had when I heard about them. Unfortunately, as much as our acting principal sympathized with them, there is nothing that she could do. As the meeting ended and teachers were beginning to leave, I asked if I could speak.

And those who had already left the room were called back. I explained my situation and decision. I said all of the changes had sent me careening back to when I returned from Iraq. I explained some of what happened to me on my returned and how for years afterwards I didn’t go a day without wondering how I might go on living or wondering how I might end my life. I said that when I realized that I was feeling the same way on Friday night that I was despondent. I mentioned how Judy asked about how I was doing on Saturday, and the advice my friend Sam gave me at the pub that afternoon, and how I wrestled with it Saturday night before realizing that Sam was right and made my decision Sunday.

I explained that to my colleagues and told them how many people who I knew, served with, or under their command and taken their lives. I told them how those deaths affected me and others. I said that I did not want to be the guy who showed up at work one day and didn’t come back. I said that I couldn’t do that to them or my students. I explained that I wasn’t leaving because of the changes, but because that what happened last week sent me into an emotional crash that caused me to wonder if I even wanted to even live.

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I said that I wasn’t leaving with any anger or animosity towards anyone, and thanked those who I had been working with, including the acting principal. I have been a leader and been handed plenty of “shit sandwiches” in my life. I know what they are going through. When I finished, a number began to applaud and thank me for sharing. Some began to speak of the emotional toll on them right now as they had to revise all of their curriculum, lesson plans and courses to accommodate that changes that our local leaders couldn’t stop. When it was done I was thanked and then hugged by many of them. The one that surprised me was a teacher who I had conflicts with last year over politics. My story struck a chord with her, she cried. She also said that she wanted to stay in contact and was going to read my book. Maybe there is hope in shared humanity.

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Afterwards I spent time with the acting principal and Dean who asked if I would be willing to come back for special events and presentations. When I was at the pub tonight I reflected on that I came up with an idea that I will discuss with the acting principal and Dean tomorrow. That would be to do classroom presentations for our high school history students, followed by field trips to local history museums and sites, of which we have many, as well as trips to places like the Holocaust Museum and the Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. and maybe even Gettysburg. That would keep me engaged with the school and education without really distracting the research and writing that I want to do.

It was a good day. I want the best for the school and our students even though I cannot keep teaching as I was, I can remain involved. I hope that our teachers and students are able to adapt to things being forced upon us and be able to return to normal next year. I won’t return to teaching as I was, but I wouldn’t mind contributing to the school and ensuring that our students get the education their parents are paying for.

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When I got to the pub tonight meet my friend Bill who I have known for close to 15 years, he congratulated me on my second retirement and bought my Guinness for me. It’s good to have friends.

One thing that I was reminded of that seven years after I returned from Iraq, I heard a quote on the great show The Blacklist, where Raymond Reddington, played by James Spader gave a FBI agent some important advice, something that I try even now to keep in mind during my bad times: “There is nothing that can take the pain away. But eventually, you will find a way to live with it. There will be nightmares. And every day when you wake up, it will be the first thing you think about. Until one day, it’s the second.”

So until tomorrow, I wish you all the best and remind you to watch your six.

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Saint John Chrysostom, one of the great Doctors of the Orthodox Church wrote:

“Happiness can only be achieved by looking inward & learning to enjoy whatever life has and this requires transforming greed into gratitude.”

Last night I wrote about how a series of events at work getting ready for the coming school year that tripped me up and put me back into an emotional state that I haven’t experienced since returning from Iraq. I will not rehash that now, but to summarize, I was depressed to the point of questioning if I even belonged here anymore.

I was tormented by it Friday night and didn’t sleep very well. Saturday afternoon we got together with friends at the pub and as our friend Sam talked with us, we ended up discussing my situation. Sam gave me some really good advice. He said that if I no longer got any joy out of the job, it was time to leave it, especially at my age. I had thought about that before, but a first I stayed to get through a toxic administration and to be there for a young man who has become my protege.

It looked like things would be better this year, but the corporation that we are a part of decided to make a number of changes in scheduling that would force me to cut things that I thought important, (note: this had nothing to do with the way I teach or my views, or even a political or religious ideology being forced on the teachers, as much a many of us objected. But it is a new model used by other schools and school systems, secular, public, private, or religious). The changes required that I cut large sections out, and left me little room to maneuver in order to expand my students learning experience. It also would force me to revise all of my lesson plans, syllabus, and curriculum with little time to comply, as well as undertake number of very time consuming tasks dealing with things like discipline and demerits. I will be 67 years old next year, I don’t have time for that. Five or ten years ago I might have done it, but as Sergeant Murtagh (Danny Glover) said in the Lethal Weapon movies, “I’m too old for this shit.”

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Likewise, a teacher recently returned from teaching overseas was assigned to sharing the classroom with me and completely changing it to where I would find it hard to teach. What he did, while not done with bad intentions, took me back to 2008 when I returned from Iraq and found that my office was reassigned due to a reorganization and that my belongings had been unceremoniously dumped in a storage container outside of the building. I couldn’t find a number of items that meant a lot to me. I was dealing with yet undiagnosed PTSD, but this as well as a number of other experiences with my former political party, favorite media outlets, and former church leaders in the coming months damaged me. I have recovered much during the last 16 years, I occasionally have gotten knocked around hard.

This situation took me back to those hard times and nobody involved realized what the effects were on me.

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I wrote the article last night and I thank everyone who commented on it or contacted me overnight. I went to bed and slept well. This morning I got up and realized what I needed to do. Judy and I met Sam for brunch at the pub to see him open the birthday gifts we gave him. It was a nice morning, and I thanked him for the advice that he gave me yesterday. Since Judy was tired and Sam needed to get together with another friend in the afternoon, they both left, Judy went home, I took some alone time to process everything, write a couple of my German friends, and to let my protege know what I was doing. I got an Uber home and then relaxed a while before writing this article.

I realized that the last few years of teaching have drained me so much that I had to stop work on books that I have in the process of finishing, contacting publishers, and writing here on a daily basis. Writing and research are my passion, my joy, and they rejuvenate me. By resigning tomorrow morning I begin my life again.

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I won’t be leaving with any bad feelings or negativity towards anyone. Likewise, I won’t say anything bad or negative about the school or any of the staff simply because everyone meant well. It just happened that this confluence of events presented me with a fork in the road. Yogi Berra said, “When you get to a fork in the road, take it.”

I decided to take that fork instead of traveling the path that I was on.

While I need to catch up on a lot of things at home, expect me to post here 5-6 times a week. Some posts will deal with current events, others with history, some dealing with PTSD, moral injury, and veterans issues; and some a juxtaposition of some or all of them. I will start working on the book that is nearest to completion and work to find a publisher. Since I am already published this shouldn’t take as long as my first book. I will also let my mind loose to write about things that I have only thought about. It ain’t over for me.

You will see a lot more from me, so please share my articles and recommend that others subscribe. Since I am giving up some income to do this, if you are a casual reader or subscribe for free, think about a paid subscription. My subscribers will be first in line to reap whatever benefits that I can provide. I will write more about that soon, and make some subscription offers.

Until tomorrow. All the best and watch your six.

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I was planning to finish part two of my article on how many ways Trump can lose a war, and getting ready to continue my series on how the United States Navy has seemingly forgotten how to build and maintain warships. Unfortunately one doesn’t know when the ghosts of the past will manifest themselves in the present.

That happened starting on Thursday and continuing yesterday and today. I have been reliving what I felt when I returned from Iraq in early 2008, dealing with severe PTSD which wasn’t diagnosed until I fell into the abyss that summer. Part of that collapse happened when I returned to my unit and found that my office had been repurposed and all of my important papers, mementos, pictures and certificates had been unceremoniously tossed into a metal storage container behind the headquarters. I found many of them but lost others. I found out that summer what happened was part of a phenomenon called moral injury.

I deployed to war, went into harm’s way and came back different and damaged, but the return left me feeling like I no longer belonged anywhere. I won’t recount all of them but they included my vocation as a priest and chaplain, my place in the Navy, and where I fit in the political world after seeing all of the lies about the war up close and personal, and then having to confront the racism and Islamophobia of my former political party and many in my church.

Please know that what has happened now isn’t to that magnitude, and because it is happening now where I work as we get ready to start the new school year, the events of the past week sent me back to 2008. I want to continue teaching, but I realize that I am too old for this shit. I was talked into staying after the first major changes on Wednesday by our Vice Principal and current Acting Principal, but Thursday and Friday were crushing, and it wasn’t fault. I can’t go into details, but I will meet with her Monday and hopefully come to a resolution that will help me stay.

Additionally, I am still wrestling with the Veterans Administration to have my PTSD rating increased. The problem there has been the bureaucracy that seems to want people like me to either die or get so worn out that we stop pursuing what all of my medical and mental health providers say that I deserve. The bureaucratic bullshit is never ending, but I begin again this week, more fully prepared to put this into the net.

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But right now with school starting the day after Labor Day, the solutions that I need will probably upend her hard work, and impact other teachers. I can’t say anything more, but I am depressed and have found it hard to concentrate enough to write. That’s hard because writing is one of my safe havens, I began my original blog on WordPress in late 2008 to help me return to the land of the living.

I find companions in those who wrote about their experiences of returning from war.

On is Guy Sajer, who wrote the book The Forgotten Soldier. Sajer was a French Alsacian of German descent who spent nearly four years fighting as an ordinary infantry soldier on the Eastern Front. When he returned home he struggled and he wrote:

“In the train, rolling through the sunny French countryside, my head knocked against the wooden back of the seat. Other people, who seemed to belong to a different world, were laughing. I couldn’t laugh and couldn’t forget.”

A similar reflection was made by Erich Maria Remarque in All Quite on the Western Front:

“I imagined leave would be different from this. Indeed, it was different a year ago. It is I of course that have changed in the interval. There lies a gulf between that time and today. At that time I still knew nothing about the war, we had been only in quiet sectors. But now I see that I have been crushed without knowing it. I find I do not belong here any more, it is a foreign world.”

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Some eighteen years after Iraq, I still often feel as they did. Maybe I will write about Tipperary soon.

So anyway. Until next time, please have a good night and watch your six.

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First it was Operation Epic Fury. After the fury burned out after expending most of the very expensive offensive and defensive missile systems that the United States and our allies rely upon around the world against Iran, a second rate military power, that despite its bluster posted little threat to us or most of our allies in the region.

On 28 February of this year President Trump orchestrated a coordinated attack on Iran with Benjamin Netanyahu to prevent Iran from being able to acquire a nuclear weapon. Of course this was just a little over six months from a series of attacks in 2025 that according to Trump had completely destroyed Iran’s capacity to build a nuclear weapon.

Epic Fury was supposed to be a massive success that would force Iran to capitulate in days. The attacks succeed in decapitating much of the Iranian political, military, and religious leadership, as well as mostly eliminating Iran’s regular Navy, and much of its Air Force. Both Trump and his henchmen at DOD and in the military itself issued regular updates of how successful the campaign was going. Unfortunately for everyone those reports were completely wrong. Nearly six months later that war is still ongoing, however the military campaign has fallen flat. The Navy is broken, all of our bases in the Persian Gulf, which used to be a lake for the U.S. Navy are our of action and will take billions, maybe trillions of dollars to rebuild, if we even decide to try. The morale of the military, especially the Navy is hitting bottom, one or two aircraft carriers will be out of action for at least the next 18 months, with their repairs clogging up public shipyards, the only ones capable of overhauling nuclear carriers from working on other carriers. That is just the carriers, not their air wings whose aircraft and crews are in need of similar maintenance and down time. I won’t even mention the escort, logistics and amphibious ships that have been subjected to extraordinarily long deployments during the war, that according to Trump isn’t really a war.

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From a purely military perspective this war is lost. So now the Regime has resorted to a clumsy attempt at economic warfare against Iran, known as Operation Economic Outcast. This didn’t just target Iran, supposedly any nation that supported it, except that Trump and his economic minion, Scott Bessent called it an “economic D-Day” but unfortunately excluded Iran’s most important economic and military ally, Communist China from any sanctions. Without the help of China, the economic sanctions and campaign against Iran will fail. In the end Trump’s economic war will leave the United States as an outcast and pariah nation.

The military campaign has failed, even as the Trump regime continues to press it, putting the U.S. military, especially the Navy at risk of collapse because of sustainment issues. This includes morale, maintenance of ships and aircraft, ammunition supplies, and our fleet logistics and support, and forward maintenance capabilities. More on that in the next article.

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What I will finish with tonight is that Trump has brought the United States to the point of a military, informational, diplomatic and economic catastrophe, perhaps of a magnitude not seen since Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. That will be Part Two of this article.

Until next time, probably tomorrow or Saturday, please watch your six.

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When I saw the news of Dolly Parton’s death this afternoon it wasn’t necessarily surprising, but still a shock. It was if I couldn’t imagine Dolly ever dying. I loved her music, her acting, and her generous philanthropy, and her incredible decency and humanity. She understood poverty as the daughter of a sharecropper in Tennessee. Her compassion towards suffering people, her determination to see poor children have good educations were legendary. Dolly was the epitome of human decency. She didn’t seem to have any animosity towards anyone. The only people that didn’t like her, didn’t like her because of her compassion towards anyone; AIDS victims, LGBTQ people, poor people, children, and all people during the COVID pandemic.

The songs that she wrote were, like many in country music rooted in a hardscrabble life. I remember listening to her songs in the 1970s and then watching her in Nine to Five which also starred Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda and Dabney Coleman, followed by The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, costarring Burt Reynolds, Jim Neighbors, Dom Deluise, and Charles Durning. I saw her in other movies, and most recently on the final episode of Grace and Frankie where she reunited with her old friends Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. I won’t reveal a spoiler so you just need to see the picture at the beginning of this article. I will leave you with a video of Dolly singing at the end of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

While the song wasn’t written by Dolly, she made it her own. The chorus speaks to anyone who has ever gone through, or who is persevering though tough times. Doll knew all about those from her childhood.

I'll be fine and dandy
Lord, it's like a hard candy Christmas
I'm barely gettin' through tomorrow
But still I won't let
Sorrow bring me way down

I break into tears every time I hear it and watch that scene. This is Dolly performing it herself during a Bob Hope Christmas special in 1988.

So, until next time, try to remember the goodness of Dolly Parton, because when we remember goodness, our hearts, no matter how hardened by what has been happening in our country, especially since Donald Trump came on the political stage in 2015, we can preserve our own sense of decency and humanity.

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But the same thing has been proven about them, time and time again.

Gustave Gilbert who served as a psychologist to the major war crimes defendants at Nuremberg noted:

“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

Trump, at least used to have a dark charisma which his devout followers found irresistible. Even if he no longer captivates them with charisma, they are still attracted by his power. Since Trump is not a fringe character, but the leader of one of the most powerful countries on the planet, this is not something that we can easily dismiss.

After ten plus years, we in the resistance should know better. One of the things that I have been going back to study is how the Nazis worked to splinter the opposition to them in the nations that they conquered by exploiting natural political and societal divisions in the political factions existing in those countries. Trump and his sycophants have been working to divide their domestic opponents, and split our allies in order to bolster themselves, and our real enemies.

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How do they do this? It’s really not that hard. A skilled regime sees their opposition, and then begins to slice them into segments based on the existing tensions between them. One has to realize that Communists and Socialists have profound differences, the Nazis exploited that in Germany as well in the countries that they occupied. They also understood that resistance to their rule included conservatives, nationalists, monarchists, socialists, and communists. So they attempted, wherever possible to split and cause discord among them. In some cases, as was the case in Greece, this led to civil war following the Second World War.

In Nazi occupied Europe, the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst, the SD, the intelligence branch of Himmler’s SS, worked hard to exploit divisions in the countries the Nazis conquered. They played monarchists against nationalists, nationalists against republicans, republicans against communists, especially in the Balkans family rivalries.

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That is happening in the United States since 2016. Trump and the MAGA Republicans have and continue to use the media, as well as their diverse right wing propaganda and social media machine to turn their opponents against each other. That has become evident in the 2026 Democratic Party primaries as traditional corporate Democratic leaders worked against progressives, be they progressive Democrats, and the so called a Democratic Socialists.

One has to know that is what is happening today. I am a historian, and one subjects that I studied from high school, college, and my two graduate degrees was the Nazi Regime, including its actions at home and abroad. While at home the Nazis felt free to stomp out opposition groups with little need to divide them, in the nations that they conquered and occupied they realized that it would not be so easy. Instead they worked to divide the local opposition based on the political, social, and sometimes ethnic “tribes” that already existed in those countries.

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All one has to do today is look at how Trump, MAGA, and the GOP propaganda machine has exploited even small divisions among Democrats to win elections, beginning in 2016. Then, they peeled away just enough voters through Jill Stein and her otherwise useless Green Party, and people that they used James Comey’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails to win the presidency.

These were same kind of “dirty tricks”, pioneered by Richard Nixon and his “Committee to Reelect the President” (CREEP), in 1972. Nixon’s crimes against our Republic and Democracy were so great that to avoid impeachment he resigned while numerous members of his regime, including his Attorney General, John Mitchell went to prison. Back then Republicans still had enough courage to support the Constitution and law above a President of their own Party. Sadly, that hasn’t been the case since at least 2020. To be honest and for full transparency’s sake, I didn’t leave the GOP until I came back from Iraq in 2008. I became a Republican in 1976 to volunteer Gerald Ford’s campaign before I could vote, even though Ford had pardoned Nixon.

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What I am saying tonight is that nobody, no matter how strongly they oppose Trump, can assume that they cannot be turned against people who also desire to see Trump and MAGA out of power. One cannot take lightly how the media, political office, and social media can divide people who otherwise would be standing shoulder to shoulder with each other. Likewise, as well as how it can encourage a core of absolutely committed “true believers” to remain impervious to the flaws, failures, and contradictions of those they support. Even with Hitler dead and Berlin in its death throes, the Nazi “true believers” murdered opponents, and anyone else considered as being a defeatist or traitor. Don’t think that something like that can’t happen again, especially with the true believers of MAGA who are armed to the teeth with military hardware, and sometimes with military and law enforcement experience.

It really doesn’t matter what the ideology of an oppressive regime is in the end. The fact of the matter is that all of them seek power for power’s sake, and will do anything that they can to divide and conquer their opponents while drawing people in institutions not necessarily allied with them into their regimes. One only needs to study how many former officers and officials of the Imperial Russian army and government joined the Bolsheviks after the revolution. Many later paid for that with their lives when Stalin purged the Red Army in the 1930s. The same can be said about the non-Nazi military officers and government officials who served the Nazi regime.

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We now face a situation where people who we trusted who at one time swore a sacred oath to defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, appear to have become willing participants in crimes against the constitution, the American people, and assisted or contributed to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The American government is sanctioning the International Criminal Court, which was born of the work of Americans who prosecuted the war criminals of the Second World War, who understood that justice was justice was noteworthy a one way street. Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Robert Jackson, who both helped to organize the war crimes trials in 1945 and was the lead U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg said:

“If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”

In the heady days after World War Two, few Americans could imagine such a world where the United States would violate almost every law that we charged the Nazis, and the Japanese with after the war. In the past 60 years we have seen our country violate those laws with impunity, perhaps more this year than any previous time. Unfortunately, we now have a government that seems more committed to breaking international laws and basic humanity than any before them.

So anyway. I needed to get that off my chest before I move on to other subjects or finish my series on how the United States Navy and our government have seemingly lost any idea of how to build and maintain warships, or how to sustain them.

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I go back to work tomorrow in order to work with my school’s new administration on the classes that I will teach and the class schedule for the upcoming school year. So until next time I wish you all the best and please watch your six.

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I have a couple of other articles in process, which will come out soon, but the reports that the Navy is either considering or committed to renaming CVN-81. The ship which will be laid down when USS Enterprise, CVN-80 is launched later this year. Miller, or CVN-81 was announced to be the first of the Gerald Ford Class carriers to have to endure a major disruption to its design because President Trump wants the new ships to be equipped with 1950’s era steam catapults and wants it “island” moved forward so the ship looks more like previous designs. Of course, it was moved further back to better support air operations on the ships, but that doesn’t matter to the narcissistic sociopath President who, like the worst despots in history wants his name put on everything. It wasn’t enough for him to name a class of nuclear powered battleships after him, so he and his sycophants in Pete Hegseth’s Defense Department to further pad his fragile ego to erase that of a true American hero.

Dorie Miller was a mess attendant aboard the USS West Virginia, BB-48 at Pearl Harbor. The ship was severely damaged and sinking to the bottom of the harbor. Her Captain, Mervyn Bennion, was mortally wounded and Miller was recruited to move Bennion to safety, even as Bennion continued to direct the defense of the ship until he passed away. Miller, who had recently received gunnery training took over a .50 caliber machine gun and was credited with downing two Japanese aircraft during the attack. He was awarded the Navy cross in January 1942 and it was presented by Admiral Chester Nimitz on the deck of the USS Enterprise, CV-6 just before the Battle of Midway. Nimitz said: "This marks the first time in this conflict that such high tribute has been made in the Pacific Fleet to a member of his race and I'm sure that the future will see others similarly honored for brave acts."

But then, Trump has despised African Americans his entire life using discrimination against Blacks in one of his apartment complexes, for which he lost a lawsuit, and taking out full page ads to try to poison public opinion against the so called “Central Park Five” who were all later exonerated because the were falsely accused of a sexual assault on a White woman. I could name many more instances of Trump’s abject racism and animus against Blacks, but you can do that yourself. If the Department of the Navy decides to do this under Trump’s sycophant Hung Cao, a failed candidate for the Senate in Virginia, who has major questions about his combat claims as a senior Navy EOD officer it will not only be a crime against Dorie Miller and all African Americans, especially those who served in combat.

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Less than two years after Pearl Harbor Dorie Miller, promoted and serving aboard the Escort Carrier, USS Liscome Bay CVE-56 lost his life when the ship was torpedoed by the Japanese submarine I-175 on 24 November 1943 during the invasion of Makin Island, as Miller and his fellow Mess attendants and cooks prepared Thanksgiving dinner. The torpedo detonated in a bomb magazine. Only 272 of the 916 officers and sailors aboard survived. The dead included Miller, Rear Admiral Henry Millinnex, and the Commanding Officer, Captain Irving Wiltsie.

I hope that some voice of sanity in the GOP, in DOD, or in the White House itself will prevail and stop this from happening. Based on experience, I don’t expect that to happen, but I can hope.

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I will be back with the other articles sooner than later. Until then. All the best, have a good night and better tomorrow. Also, please watch your six.

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Let’s connect some dots:

Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

The Ayatollah’s of Iran began supplying Shad drones and helping Russia build them by setting up production facilities in Russia.

Russia supplies Iran with weapons and intelligence to pursue its war against the United States, which admittedly we started.

North Korean has been sending soldiers with artillery and guided missiles to Russia to continue its campaign against Ukraine. They already provided 14,000 troops beginning in 2024, while today Russian Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov and his North Korean counterpart praised their collaboration and suggested that up to 50,000 more North Koreans would be deployed to Russia to fight Ukraine

China supplies all of them with technology and intelligence, particularly about the United States military in the Middle East and the Western Pacific.

Now look at the one man at the center of the tumult today. His name: Donald J. Trump.

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Trump has been a long time admirer of Vladimir Putin, and might be a Russian intelligence asset, or rather a dupe because he’s not intelligent enough to be a spy. Either way, that is not good.

Trump has mostly hindered aid and assistance to Ukraine which is both fighting for its life and acting as the eastern bulwark of NATO until the alliance can rearm to meet the Russian threat. That threat it not imaginary as the Russians have been making intrusions against NATO allies in the Baltic and Western Europe, using drones, aircraft and ships, but Trump reduced and continues to reduce American forces allotted to the defense of Europe, ships, aircraft, and ground troops, seemingly ignoring all that European nations have contributed to United States.

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To any rational person it would seem that Trump has been helping Putin, while occasionally dangling a carrot to Ukraine.

Meanwhile, angry that South Korea had not supported his war against Iran enough, Trump ordered a dramatic scaling back of military exercises with South Korea because they offended North Korean dictator Jim Jung Un, who Trump seems to have had a man crush on since his first term. Kim seemingly do nothing to convince Trump that he is a threat in Northeast Asia and around the world.

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While Trump stupidly entered a war against Iran with Israel, whose regional and strategic interests are far different than those of the United States, Russia and China have been supporting Iran, with assistance from North Korea. While Trump occasionally talks tough about China, he continually strips the Western Pacific of military assets that would be necessary in any war against North Korea, or perhaps against Chinese campaigns against Taiwan, the Philippines, or anywhere in the Western Pacific, like against our bases in the First Island Chain, that is Japan, Okinawa, and other locations. These are places that our current military plans hinge in the Western Pacific. The last carrier strike group, that of the USS George Washington is now on its way to Iran to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln.

Let us understand, China’s Xi, Putin and Kim know that Trump is an imbecile and they play him by complimenting him and making him feel good. So Trump abandons allies, why engaging in a war that has no good outcome. The Iranians know this and understand that they can play him. They know that Trump has no good options and are willing to let him twist in the wind as Trump continues to weaken the United States.

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Trump loves Putin, Xi, and Kim, but all are lined up against us and the countries traditionally allied or aligned with United States interests. While Trump is against the Iranians, all of them are helping the Iranians against him.

Trump is weakening the United States by his illegal, immoral, and counterproductive war against Iran, while enabling true enemies of the United States. Iran might be an enemy, but until Trump attacked them and exposed our weaknesses in the Persian Gulf, they were not a threat. Now Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, while their Houthi clients are beginning to choke maritime traffic in the Red Sea and the BAB El Mendeb.

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Trump is the nexus of the Axis of Evil. Over a decade he has undermined U.S. National Security, which includes economic factors like oil.

No previous U.S. President has ever put the country in such a dangerous position.

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The U.S. Navy entered this century as the preeminent naval power in the world. We had no peer competitors and a host of allies. The Russian Navy was in shambles after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China was only beginning to emerge as a major seapower or threat. Thus the Navy opted to shoot for the stars in building its next destroyer, the 14,000 ton DDX, or DD21, which became the Zumwalt class. Never has an innovative at future seeing leader been so badly honored by people that recklessly build ships that defy the odds of being so expensive and useless.

The ships were to be a stealth platform that could deliver long range naval gunfire support to Marines using two 155mm long range howitzers originally designed by the Army, which were determined to be both ineffective and expensive to use. The Army cancelled it before the Navy. The ammunition back in 2009 or 2010 would have cost almost one million dollars per round. The class was supposed to number 32 ships but was reduced to just three, the Zumwalt, Michael Mansoor, and Lyndon Johnson which is still building. Zumwalt has just come out of an overhaul to equip her with new hypersonic missiles which are still not available, though the larger vertical launch cells that are now installed. Michael Mansoor has yet to be overhauled, while Lyndon Johnson will be equipped while building. However, these three ships will end up costing over 7.5 billion dollars each without yet deploying to support a combat deployment. Their air defense systems are not suited to fleet defense which limits their role with carrier strike groups or amphibious ready groups. In fact, due to those limitations and their limited anti-submarine warfare capabilities they are exceptionally limited and expensive ships. Honestly, in all of my studies of naval ship designs, I cannot think of any class of warship of any nation since the 1880s. The basic idea is cost versus utility. Many failed designs ultimately were used for different missions, but very few have ever been so expensive and delivered so little. I can recite a litany of failed ships and designs that expended so much of their nations treasure while delivering almost nothing in return.

The program was ended in 2009, in order to continue the production of the Arliegh Burke (DDG-51) ships, while construction continued on these ships and still continues on the last ship. The class has to be considered a vast waste of money and national resources.

If the Zumwalt class was not bad enough, in 2002 the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Vern Clark observed a Danish Navy corvette having its armament package being exchanged for another pier side. Clark had never seen anything like it and decided that the Navy needed something similar, a small, fast, lightly crewed ship that could be built quickly and affordably. Many navies, including NATO, Japan, and South Korea have such ships that pack a punch and can fight. Clark said that he wanted a “street fighter”, and thus began the tragically insufferable saga of the Littoral Combat Ship, or LCS, or as many in the Navy called them, “Little Crappy Ships”.

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Of course this was in the heady days after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Vern Clark had been Chief of Naval Operations since July of 2000. He was a surface warfare officer, who in addition to destroyers and frigates included command of the USS Grand Rapids, an Asheville Class gunboat designed for close patrols of the Vietnamese coast, and drug interdiction in the Caribbean. Only 245 tons, she was far more heavily armed than any LCS, and capable of 40 knots.

After Clark saw the Danish ship he went back and began promoting his idea. Clark wanted a fast ship manned by as few sailors as possible in line with his desire that the Navy be run like a business. Congress approved evaluating the idea in 2003, despite the reservations of the House Appropriations Committee which warned that there was “no ‘road map’ of how the Navy will achieve the system required.” (Pro Publica)

USS Freedom (above) and USS Independence (below)

A year later the Navy awarded contracts to two design teams, one from Lockheed Martin and Marietta Marine in Wisconsin, the other from General Dynamics and Austal, an Australian company planning to build a shipyard in Alabama.

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One author noted “LCS started with a good idea. However, the engineering was immature and the concept of operations too foreign to the existing surface navy to succeed.” (Naval Institute)

Clark’s desire that the ships be capable of 40-50 knots, but that would become the Achilles heel of both classes. The proposals were vastly different, but both were at least in part designed on commercial civilian ferry designs, lightly built to achieve the speed. The Lockheed Martin-Marietta team proposed a more conventional monohull design, and the General Dynamics-Austal team proposed an aluminum hulled trimaran.

Admiral Vern Clark

However, both designs promised interchangeable modules for anti-submarine warfare, mine countermeasures, and a variety of other missions. Unfortunately when the designs were approved for construction, none of the specialized mission packages had ever worked outside of a laboratory. However speed of construction was prioritized regardless of what might be missed if more time was taken. Admiral Clark wanted ships, and he wanted them now.

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As the first ships were built the prices increased, and despite efforts to rein them in continued as the Navy continued to add more missions that required more capabilities of the ships. The Freedom Class was beset by engineering problems, especially with its combining gear. That is the mechanism that connects their diesel engines and gas turbines to the propeller shafts. This gear ensures the ships have the power necessary to reach top speeds required for the design. Unfortunately, it was complex and problematic, so much so that ships broke down in mid transit. Other problems with the engineering systems made headlines as ships could not even leave port.

The Independence class suffered other problems which limited their use. All things being said, both classes have had numerous problems, and well documented survivability issues related to their construction standards. Admiral Clark admitted that survivability wasn’t a question. If damaged in combat the ships were to withdraw or be abandoned, their lack of self defense systems was to be covered by larger and more powerful ships.

Part of the problem was that Admiral Clark wanted to add more mission capabilities and increased their size so much that they didn’t match the speed of a smaller ship. “While the percentage of weight required to achieve high speed in the original did not detract from its sensors and weapon systems, getting the same high speed from a much larger ships did affect the design in multiple ways—including the number and weight of weapons, sensors, fuel, and other key mission components.” (Naval Institute). Likewise, when everything was working right steaming at high speed they were fuel hogs meaning that they couldn’t venture too far away from their support ships.

The initial plan called for 52 ships. As the questions mounted and the failures increased the number was cut to 40 and then to 32. Even so the Navy began retiring ships from service far sooner than their designed lifetimes, and had to be stopped by congressional action. Even so the ships have been a complete failure, that need not have happened. Three Independence Class ships were stationed in Bahrain where they had been assigned the mine warfare missions previously done by the Avenger class mine warfare ships. However, they were so vulnerable to Iranian attack that the Navy withdrew them to Singapore.

I could go on, but the litany is so long that a book could be written about Admiral Clark’s abortion in ship design. I quoted from articles from the Naval Institute Proceedings and Pro Publica. Both of those go into a lot more detail than I can in this article. My research into the LCS goes beyond these articles, likewise, I have friends who worked in the program who shared much with me. Since have already spent so much time on this article, I will leave you those links.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/december/confessions-former-lcs-champion

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-littoral-combat-ship

When the Navy finally abandoned its attempts to put lipstick on the LCS pig, it decided to build a modern Guided Missile Frigate to replace the Oliver Hazard Perry class ships designed in the 1970s. They decided to adopt a proven and already successful design by the Italian FREMM (Fregata Europea Multi-Missione) design already adopted by many navies in the ASW and Air Defense packages, as well as general purpose with AAW, ASW and surface warfare capabilities.

Artist depiction of Constellation

When the U.S. Navy selected the design in 2020 I was thrilled, let me even say overjoyed. I thought that the Navy had finally found its way out of its death spiral of failed surface combatant designs. But I was wrong. The Navy managed to “Iron Ball” a successful and proven design. I kind of took my eyes off of the project because I couldn’t imagine in a million years that we could fuck up a proven design already in service with other navies. But I misundestimated our incompetence. Six years later, with the lead ship already delayed by three years, the Navy canceled the project. The first two ships, the Constellation and Congress, both named for two of the first U.S. Navy frigates authorized in 1794. I wondered what could go wrong, a proven design named after historic U.S. Navy ships, I even sent an email to the Secretary of the Navy suggesting that the Navy continue naming the ships after the great frigates of our navy. Chesapeake, President, United States, Alliance, Bonhomme Richard, and more, both sail and steam.

Italian FREMM type Frigate Carlo Bergamini

Assuming things were on track, I took my eyes off of the ships and the continued design and construction work. As a result I was shocked to read that the Navy had cancelled the project in November 2025. By then the first ships of the class were already three years behind schedule, due to the Navy’s continuous changes to the design which increased their displacement and cost, while lowering their top speed. Likewise, Marinette Shipbuilding, which had been acquired by Fincantieri, the original designer of the class, could not recruit enough shipyard workers to speed their work. As a result, all ships except for Constellation and Congress were cancelled.

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Now the Navy is scrambling to build a replacement based upon the well tested Legend class National Security Cutter introduced in 2008. I will not comment on that now.

One author wrote:

“The theory was sound: take a proven European hull, Americanise the combat systems, and rapidly field a fleet of small surface combatants to relieve the strain on the overburdened Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. However, the US Navy’s acquisition bureaucracy proved unable to resist the temptation to drastically modify the baseline design. You don’t need to be a naval architect to know that making significant changes to an existing warship design is a complex process that would inevitably drive delays and cost rises.”

See the article:

https://www.navylookout.com/from-constellation-to-cutter-the-us-navys-gamble-on-delivery-over-capability/

I will end this for tonight and begin writing about the USS Gerald Ford class aircraft carriers, and yes there in so much detail about them that I dare not even try to write about that now.

All I can say to end tonight, is that it is too hard to imagine why, after so long we still cannot produce and deploy surface warships that were not designed after the 1980s and 1990s. I cannot wrap my head around that. So until the next section on the Gerald Ford class, and the following on the continuing challenge of Donald Trump’s Hitlerian meddling in ship design, I wish you the best.

As always I apologize for the delays in my articles. However, today has been a good day. We got together with my former Platoon Sergeant and sometimes First Sergeant, Cynthia and her son Nate, and after that with our buddy Sam. It was a great afternoon. Tomorrow will be busy as I get ready for the coming school year, while trying to catch up on work around the house, veterinary appointments for the pups, and maintenance on the cars.

So until next time, all the best and as always please watch your six.

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Zumwalt Class

I began writing about the catastrophic Twentieth Century of U.S. Navy shipbuilding thinking that because I watched it happen that I could make short work of an article about the Zumwalt class, the Littoral Combat Ships, the Ford Class carriers and the Constellation class Guided Missile Frigates. The Zumwalt’s and the LCS have to be considered failed designs. The Ford class has to be considered horribly expensive but not yet failed, while the Constellation class should have been a ready made success which was so badly mismanaged by the navy that only two of the first six ships will be completed, with 18 others cancelled. Based on an already successful design the U.S. Navy managed to so screw it up that it was canceled.

I began writing about the Zumwalt’s and LCS tonight, and those two classes took me down a huge rabbit hole that I am still exploring. Part of the problem of studying such things for decades is that one forgets just how complex those decisions and plans were over time. I haven’t done as much with either the Ford or Constellation classes following both closely.

All that being said, though I am not finished with my work, I can only say that the Navy and our naval procurement programs deserve Senior Chief Ness’s Iron Ball Award. It is hard to imagine that what was once the world’s naval leader has fallen to such depths.

I hope to finish the next segment of my series tomorrow, and add a final part of how the Navy is being destroyed in Trump and Hegseth’s unmitigated disaster against Iran.

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I have loved the Navy since I was a toddler, I always wanted to be a Naval Officer. I spent almost 40 years in the military, with about 22 of them as a Naval Officer. I was born in a Naval Hospital, and now at 66 years old, my heart still bleeds Navy blue. But it is hard to comprehend just how far the Navy has fallen.

I will finish the series over the weekend. The last part will be particularly harsh in dealing with how the Trump Regime has gutted the Navy through fruitless and strategically imbecilic actions against Iran. Mind you that I haven’t done not even mentioned to Trump class battleships yet, though I have written about them before.

So, until tomorrow. Have a good night and watch your six.

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Zeus' law tells us to treat strangers as we should be treated because they might be gods in disguise. Telemachus, son of Odysseus.

Before I finish my extended multipart article about the United States Navy’s catastrophe in shipbuilding, maintenance and design over the past 30 years. The final part will be really good, but it is process, so I ask you to indulge your patience. However, since I watched Christopher Nolan’s production of The Odyssey, as a combat veteran and historian I think I need to write about it now while it is still fresh in my mind.

Let me begin by saying that Homer, the author of the Odyssey as well as the Iliad did not write a history of the campaign against Troy or its aftermath in the life of Odysseus, however the messages conveyed in both the Iliad and the Odyssey reach deep into the souls of people, especially those who have gone to war. In the case of Odysseus, a man who went to war and his journey to return home. As a veteran of Iraq, I understand both.

The saga of Odysseus is something that I know much about from my study and teaching of Ancient Greek history and literature, as well as Jonathan Shay’s book Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. I find it interesting that even though I had studied Greek history, mythology, and literature that they didn’t become that meaningful until after I returned from Iraq to a country that I no longer recognized.

I will not try to review the film by comparing it with Homer’s epic saga. Believe me, I have grown weary of reading those reviews. Instead, I will discuss some things that really hit me in Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s saga.

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The first was how Odysseus described the campaign against Troy, and that after 10 years on the beach outside of the city, the attackers reacted against Troy with 10 years of bottled up rage when Odysseus and his soldiers in the Trojan Horse opened the gates to the city. Odysseus was a proud leader, and the deception was his idea. But his actions haunted him. Odysseus’ name means “man of hate” which is not something that we typically honor. But the Greeks considered him a hero, as they did Achilles whose name means “he whose host of fighting men have grief.” Achilles caused the deaths of many Greeks outside Troy, while Odysseus brought about the death of 700 Ithacans when returning home, but the Ancient Greeks considered them heroes, despite their flaws. Tragedy was part of understanding life, as well as recognizing that people as well as “gods” had the same flaws as them.

In the film, Odysseus is haunted by his actions against Troy. He sees them as a disaster for civilization as he knew it. He tells Penelope:

Odysseus: What if... when he left the belly of the horse... and opened the gates of Troy... he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night. We left them a gift in offering of peace that they took into their home... We violated all that’s ever sacred between people... and turned the fight into a hunt. To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire. Including his home. What if he knew, that very night as he walked through fires of anarchy and pain... And in the days of sweaty celebrations that followed, what if he knew exactly what he’d done?

Penelope: What all of you had done.

Odysseus: One man’s idea, one man’s trick... to break Zeus’s Law forever. We live in a world of palaces, trades, language, blind to its beauty... until we broke it.

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Odysseus recounted his role in breaking a divine law, that of Zeus. That understanding was the basis of the Greek concept of Zeus Xenios. It is a law of hospitality for the hosts and reciprocity for the guests. Hosts were to host to welcome their guests with food, drink and shelter before asking who they were or why they had come, or whether they were beggars or kings. The guests were expected not to presume on their host’s hospitality and pledge to reciprocate when they left. Similar principles are found in Judaism and Islam. Christianity inherited it to some extent from its Jewish roots, though you would hardly know that if you follow the lead of MAGA Christian nationalists.

Likewise, the actions of the Trump regime against immigrants regardless of their status goes against such “divine” laws because they break a fundamental understanding of civilized society, regardless of its religion or culture. Zeus’ law helped to strengthen ancient Greece’s social, political and military connections throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor. It also fostered trade relationships and allowed political exiles from other lands to find refuge and a new life where they could both enjoy the fruits of living in safety and contribute to the Greek civilization.

In Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the saga, Odysseus is haunted by his role in the sack of Troy. The description is not unique, it can be found in the writings of numerous men who have taken part in the brutality of war. Even for those who never killed another person, the sight of the destruction wrought by their nation upon another can be devastating to one’s soul. Likewise, he saw the deaths of his men on his return home as his responsibility, that is one of the weighty issues for any military commander at any time in history, not just the subject of an epic poem.

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The Odyssey, be it the Homeric poem, or Nolan’s film adaptation reminds us of our shared humanity and responsibility in this world, especially for those in any position of responsibility. When I left the theater and went back to the pub before going home on Monday night, many thoughts were going through my mind, which came out in disturbing dreams that a deep sleep that I could not escape last night might have been connected. I cannot share them now. I need time to further process them myself and with my shrink. I can only say that they were troubling because I and people who I served alongside was part of a problem and ideology that I always oppose. Nolan’s depiction of Odysseus must have triggered them.

So until tomorrow, have a good night and a better tomorrow. Be sure to watch your six.

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The heat and humidity here have been oppressive this week. Of course it is August in the Virginia Tidewater, the polite term for swamp. Judy was really tired so she wanted to stay out of the heat at the house with our Papillon pups. Since she didn’t seem to mind I asked if she minded doing if I went up to the pub and went to the theater next door to see the Odyssey.

Since I will be teaching Ancient history this year I thought it would be good to see. I am very familiar with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, as well as Dr. Jonathan Shay’s book Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, I thought it might be good to see, especially because I still deal with combat trauma and PTSD from my tour in Iraq’s Al Anbar province in 2007-2008.

I won’t add anything more at this point. I might write about it later in the week after I finish the next installment of my multi-part series on the troubles of the United States Navy.

So have a great night and better tomorrow but as always, watch your six.

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Viktor Frankl wrote: “Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”

Those are chilling words. With only a few of the weapons available to the nuclear powers of today could kill millions more people in minutes than all the Jews killed by the Nazis killed in the Holocaust, or all the people killed during the Second World War, depending upon the target selection.

But tonight, I took a pause in my multipart article on the decline of the U.S. Navy and the United States Maritime, shipbuilding, and ship repair base. But tonight I will write about something that I am well acquainted with as a historian who taught military ethics at the Joint Forces Staff College between 2013 and 2017. It never failed that at least one student would deal with the ethics of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the use of such weapons in the future. I can say that every single officer who presented these subjects were very circumspect and all had significant reservations about their use then or possible use today. The discussions were always interesting, especially about the historical use and how different members of the class fell on the historical use, as opposed to any use now. Opinions on the historical use were divided, with most thinking Hiroshima might have been defensible, but that Nagasaki was not.

Kurt Vonnegut, the great author who wrote Slaughterhouse Five and many other works survived the allied terror bombing of Dresden as a POW of the Germans in 1945 wrote:

“The most racist, nastiest act by America, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki. Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away yellow men, women, and children. I’m glad I’m not a scientist because I’d feel so guilty now.”

But I digress. The subject really matters today because President Trump has thought about using nuclear weapons since his first term, and threatened to use them on North Korea and Iran on numerous occasions. The difference today is that during his first term there were numerous high ranking officials and military officers who were committed to not using them except as a last resort. In his first term Trump was cautious when talking about the use of nuclear weapons of their further proliferation. That has changed during his second term, he has opened the door to help Saudi Arabia get nuclear weapons, and is backing off his demands for Iran to stop its nuclear program and has stated that he would not use nuclear weapons against Iran, despite threatening to destroy their civilization. One cannot destroy the Iranian civilization with the conventional weapons we have been using, especially since we are running out of them.

Things have changed since Trump’s first term. Trump has placed sycophants at the helm of the Defense Department, State Department, Homeland Security, and our Intelligence Agencies. His Defense Secretary has removed nearly forty, three and four star generals and admirals, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Staff of the Army, the Commandant of the Coast Guard, the Chief of Naval Operations, and Admiral Alvin Holsey, the Commander of U.S. SOUTHCOM, and General Christopher Donohue, the Commander of U.S. Forces in Europe and Africa, two our Four Star Combatant Commanders.

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Our current Combatant Commanders in the Middle East and South and Central have not rebelled at following criminal orders to commit War Crimes. Neither has Trump’s hand picked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine balked at those policies. While it is reported that Caine is trying to find a way out of Trump’s war against Iran because he knows that it cannot be won. Meanwhile, Fox News reported that unnamed officials in the Defense Department are exploring ways to loosen restrictions on the employment of tactical nuclear weapons to give the President additional options in a crisis.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pentagon-plots-new-nuclear-options-trump-americas-biggest-adversaries-raise-stakes-report

That is the last thing that a madman like Trump needs. But once again I digress.

The fact is that even today the United States has not renounced the first use of nuclear weapons. It is hard for policy makers to oppose such a policy while endeavoring to build new and more efficient nuclear weapons. Author and filmmaker Greg Mitchell noted:

“After building first-strike weapons, and carefully devising scenarios for their use, the temptation (for any nuclear power) to eventually use them some day may be irresistible. We may not be able to imagine the circumstances under which America would “go first” but this much is certain: The Pentagon has a targeting scheme for every eventuality. The U.S., in fact, has threatened to use nuclear weapons several times since the 1960s—and every American president (except Eisenhower) has endorsed the two times we’ve already used the bomb.” (Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made, 2020 and 2023.) Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and his underlings have repeated threatened the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine and NATO nations.

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This is exceptionally important today neither Trump, Hegseth, or anyone else in the regime seem to have any problem in committing war crimes. Now since Trump’s war of choice has gone off the rails with no way of winning it with the forces at hand in the Middle East, Europe, or the Indo-Pacific, and the fact we are running out the the munitions need to prosecute further attacks or to defend our troops in the region. The only off ramp left is for Trump to give up and agree to Iran’s growing list of conditions for reopening the Straits of Hormuz or calling of the Houthis who are blockading Saudi Arabia and and threatening the closure of the Bab El Mendeb and the Suez Canal.

The other option is more terrifying because Trump has no way of spinning this war into a win and has talked about using nuclear weapons and destroying Iranian civilization. If he makes that decision when the United States is still not threatened militarily by Iran but was the aggressor that brought on this war, he will be going beyond even the reasons that President Truman used to unleash hell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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To President Truman, Secretary of War Stimson and some military leaders, especially General Curtis LeMay, they served a strategic purpose. However, many other reasonable American military Commanders including Admiral William Leahy, General Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral Chester Nimitz, and General Hap Arnold, all disagreed, as they believed Japan was close to surrender. Likewise, since Japan had no means of attacking the United States or even major military bases in the Pacific with anything close to the power of atomic bomb, all sense of the principle of proportionality was lost.

Proportionality is one of the tenants of what is called the Just War Theory first advanced by Thomas Aquinas and other Christian theologians like Hugo Grotius. In order to be just, the means must be proportional. In 1945 Japan no longer could inflict massive damage to the U.S. mainland or even our bases in the Pacific. Neither can Iran inflict the kind of damage on the United States, our forward bases, or our allies. Any nuclear strike would be out of proportion to anything Iran has done or could do to us. It would be a clear violation that we have indeed adopted a policy of no morality or honor.

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John Hersey, the first American reporter to reach Hiroshima and write about it wrote something that anyone that considers using these weapons needs to consider:

“The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?”

In July 1945, Harry Truman was fixated on revenge for Pearl Harbor and to intimidate the Soviet Union since the United States was the sole atomic power until 1949. But Truman’s decision was based on his, and many Americans view that the Japanese were barbaric animals and subhuman. There was a certain element of racism in his view of Asians which was little different than the Nazis views of they referred to as sub-human. The war between the Japanese and Americans in the Pacific was in large part a racial war. Please take the time to read John Dower’s book War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War.

War is terrible, but in every war, every commander or soldier is called to make moral decisions. We tried Nazi commanders for war crimes for violating the laws of war which centuries of philosophers, ethicists, and military leaders sought to hone in order to minimize the chances of war, and to limit its devastation. We have since avoided the use of nuclear weapons, despite routinely violating the same kind of war crimes that we tried Nazi leaders.

Harry Truman was faced with the challenge of some American Christian leaders to his use of nuclear weapons against Japan.

Truman responded to a telegram from the Reverend Samuel McCrea Cavert,the General Secretary of the Federal Council of The Churches of Christ in America, the predecessor of the National Council of Churches. Reverend Cavert was a Presbyterian minister. Cavert’s telegram stated:

“Many Christians deeply disturbed over use of atomic bombs against Japanese cities because of their necessarily indiscriminate destructive efforts and because their use sets extremely dangerous precedent for future of mankind. Bishop Oxnam, President of the Council, and John Foster Dules, Chairman of its Commission on a just and durable peace are preparing statement for probable release tomorrow urging that atomic bombs be regarded as trust for humanity and that Japanese nation be given genuine opportunity and time to verify facts about new bomb and to accept surrender terms. Respectfully urge that ample opportunity be given Japan to reconsider ultimatum before any further devastation by atomic bomb is visited upon her people.”

Truman’s response to the telegram revealed the darker side of his decision to use the bomb.

My dear Mr. Cavert:

I appreciated very much your telegram of August ninth.

Nobody is more disturbed over the use of Atomic bombs than I am but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.

When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true.

Trump routinely uses such language to describe the Iranians. Racism is a part of the soul of Donald Trump. With that is a given what we Trump not do?

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The President’s senior military advisors were certainly of a different point of view about the use of the weapons. Admiral William Leahy who served as Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief and was the senior Naval Officer in service disagreed and told Stimson of his misgivings about using the atomic bomb at this particular point in the war. In his memoirs which were released in 1949 he wrote:

“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons… My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and that wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

General Dwight D. Eisenhower disagreed with the use of the atomic bomb and recorded his interaction with Stimson:

“In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” He also wrote later words similar to Leahy:

“I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”

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Admiral William Leahy wrote in his memoirs:

“Once it had been tested, President Truman faced the decision as to whether to use it. He did not like the idea, but he was persuaded that it would shorten the war against Japan and save American lives. It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons… My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and that wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

General Hap Arnold, the Commander of the Army Air Forces noted: “It always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.”

Those who questioned the decision would be vindicated by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey study published in 1946. That study laid out the facts in stark terms:

“Certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

Later, Dr. J. Samuel Walker, the Chief Historian of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote:

“Careful scholarly treatment of the records and manuscripts opened over the past few years has greatly enhanced our understanding of why Truman administration used atomic weapons against Japan. Experts continue to disagree on some issues, but critical questions have been answered. The consensus among scholars is the that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it.”

Thus the moral question remains and perhaps is best answered by the words of Dr. Leó Szilárd who first proposed building atomic weapons. In 1960 he noted to U.S. News and World Reports:

Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?

But, again, don’t misunderstand me. The only conclusion we can draw is that governments acting in a crisis are guided by questions of expediency, and moral considerations are given very little weight, and that America is no different from any other nation in this respect.

Eisenhower, Leahy, Bradley, and Szilard were correct. The weapons have grown more deadly, the delivery systems, more accurate with greater range, speed, and maneuverability, and even their miniaturization, make their use more likely than not. If they are used it will be the beginning of the end.

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Robert Oppenheimer told Truman that he “had blood on his hands” after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but while he later opposed building the Hydrogen Bomb, but never backed off his Atomic weapons, and never indicated any other remorse for their use. As brilliant and complex as he was, Oppenheimer seemed to lose his ethics when the invention was his, and not Edward Teller’s.

Albert Einstein’s words which he penned after the bombing should serve as a warning to Americans for all time, while pointedly taking on America’s own racism toward American Blacks:

“America is a democracy and has no Hitler, but I am afraid for her future; there are hard times ahead for the American people, troubles will be coming from within and without. America cannot smile away their Negro problem nor Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are cosmic laws.”

Nuclear weapons systems far exceed in number, and power than those of the 1940s and 1950s, with far more capable delivery systems. With the developments in Artificial Intelligence and hypersonic missiles, we may lose the chance of preventing nuclear war, perhaps sooner than we think.

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The current war is unwinnable using the conventional weapons that we have been using, and are rapidly running out of. Iran understands this and keeps upping the ante for what Trump must do for a negotiated end to this war. Will Trump’s fragile ego allow him to accept a humiliating peace deal to try to save the midterms, or will he go for broke?

Indeed that is all a lot to consider and ponder. However, as a historian, a combat veteran, and student of these ghastly weapons, having been a nuclear, biological, and chemical defense officer in Germany in the Cold War, I cannot help but not to think about them. I know far too much and live in one of the biggest targets for our enemy’s nuclear weapons.

Until next time, have a good night, a better tomorrow and please watch your six.

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Six Spruance-class destroyers being built at Ingalls Shipbuilding, Pascagoula, Mississippi. 24 June 1975. From top to bottom: USS Peterson (DD-969), USS Arthur W. Radford (DD-968), USS Elliot (DD-967), USS Hewitt (DD-966), USS Kinkaid (DD-965) and USS Caron (DD-970) are visible. Really not that long ago but a different era.

I have been working on this portion of my article about the crisis in Naval shipbuilding for about five days now. This part deals with our shipbuilding industry. It is not a sexy or exciting subject but it is absolutely necessary to understand what is going on today. For they record, my last assignment as a Navy Chaplain was at Norfolk Naval shipyard where I came to understand the pressure on our government shipyards. I got to know the Naval officers, the administrators, the shipyard workers, and their Union representatives. The year and a half at the shipyard was a learning experience.

Everyone likes a winner, and in 1991 the United States was coming off outlasting the Soviets in the Cold War and assembling a massive multinational coalition to chase Iraq, out of Kuwait after Iraq invaded it because the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. It should not have happened, but April Glaspie, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq unintentionally gave Saddam Hussein the impression that disputes between our Arab allies were not our concern. That was a big oopsie.

A week later Iraq invaded and conquered Kuwait creating a crisis that President George H.W. Bush responded to by sending U.S. troops to protect Saudi Arabia and then building a massive international coalition with the backing of the United Nations to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait. But, the elder Bush succeeded because he was smart enough not to go to Baghdad and overthrow Saddam, unlike his shit for brains son who I voted for twice a mere 12 years later. The younger Bush launched a terribly costly and long war that helped severely weaken the U.S. military, especially the Navy, eliminated Iraq as a balance of power against Iran. Bad for us, good for Iran because they are now about to vanquish the Gilded Idiot in the White House and forever change the world as we knew it, but I digress.

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In 1989 the United States was still a true maritime power. But then the big corporate defense conglomerates saw their opportunity, or rather sensed big profits even as the government and both major political parties tried to “save” money by cutting defense spending as part of the supposed “peace dividend.” Actually this supposed “dividend” had some advantages and savings, especially regarding ground forces, but since the United States was always primarily a maritime power until the challenge of the Soviet Union in Europe, the North Korean invasion of South Korea, and the perceived threat of Communist China and communism around the world when the Army and Air Force began chewing up the defense budget like it was a Thanksgiving dinner. The Navy was still important, and even when it proved its value in deterrence, it began to suffer, as hundreds of veteran warships were paid off or scrapped, and shipyards began to die off, especially those that produced merchant ships. Unfortunately, the loss in shipyard facilities, and the loss of our previously valuable merchant marine impacted more than most of the profiteers imagined. Shipyards, and the ship rights that they employ are invaluable to both our economy, maritime and national security.

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In 1980 the United States had 8 public and 30 commercial shipyards capable of building large military or merchant ships, of which 12 could build naval vessels. Another 270 yards were capable of building smaller vessels. In 1990 that number had shrunk to 8 public and 18 private shipyards, not counting the small yards that specialize in small civilian vessels. By 2001 there were just 4 public shipyards, and 8 private shipyards that specialize in building naval warships and auxiliaries over 400 feet long. Those included Bath Iron Works, Electric Boat Corporation, Newport News Shipbuilding, and Kvaerner Philadelphia Shipyard, Huntington-Ingalls Industries, Halter Pascagoula, Norfolk Grumman, Pascagoula and Avondale, National Steel and Shipbuilding, San Diego. Likewise, there are a number of shipyards classified as “build ready” capable of producing these ships, but had not in at least 2 years.

Me in my hard hat.

Today that number is smaller. We still have the remaining 4 public shipyards, with some debate on reactivating others. But the private shipyards capable of building submarines and surface ships, as well as maintaining them continued to decrease. Today the total number of shipyards capable of building or repairing large naval and merchant vessels is just 64. General Dynamics now controls Bath Iron Works and Electric Boat. Huntington-Ingalls now controls Newport News, while the Korean shipbuilding magnate Hanwah owns Philly. Then there are Bollinger, Mississippi, Huntington-Ingalls, and Seatrium AmFELs inc., on the Gulf Coast, and BEA Systems San Diego Ship Repair, the former NASCO yard. There are a number of shipyards across the country that are capable of building larger ships that are capable of building new ships.

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There is another factor, very few private yards have dry-dock large enough to build or repair our nuclear aircraft carriers or the proposed “Trump” class Guided Missile Nuclear Battleships. There are four private yards capable of drydocking such massive ships, but there is only one at Newport News that can be used to build or begin the dismantling process of these ships. One drydock which is already behind schedule in building the Gerald Ford class carriers, and is facing the block decommissioning of the Nimitz class carriers, with Nimitz next year and Eisenhower in 2030, with the other eight ships following at two to to three year intervals. The planned Trump class will share the same dry-dock. Since the new carriers are facing two to three year delays in construction and it is taking a decade or more to “recycle” the nuclear carriers, one can only imagine the backlog in building the new ships and recycling the older ships. Basic arithmetic is involved. Six new Ford Class carriers, twenty-five new Trump class battleships, and disposing of 10 Nimitz class carriers over the same time period in the same dry dock. Building these ships in not like flipping burgers, each takes years in the dry dock, before it can be floated out for completion. We are still figuring out how long it takes for the disposal of the current nuclear carriers.

The shipyards are only a part of the larger problem, and that is the fact that the number of shipyard workers is at an all time low. In 1980 there were nearly 200,000 shipyard workers in the United States, now it’s under 50,000. Trained, well paid and motivated workers matter, and Hanwah in Philadelphia is sending Americans to South Korea for training and bringing trained specialists to Philadelphia. The South Koreans are also offering to build ships for the South Korean and U.S. Navy at that yard. That would actually be a good idea because the South Koreans are building some of the most successful class of surface ships, large amphibious ships, and modern non-nuclear submarines in the world today.

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I live within a mile or two of most of the private shipyards on the East Coast capable of dry docking warships and making major repairs. Likewise, Norfolk Naval Shipyard was my last assignment in the Navy is just across the Western Branch of the Elizabeth River. Newport News is about 15 miles as the crow flies. I know people that work in the industry and watch the ships under repair.

This situation is the product of a government willing to sacrifice national security to corporate interests and profits.

If you really want to delve into this, go to the Maritime Administration at https://www.maritime.dot.gov/ports/national-maritime-resource-and-education-center/us-private-shipyards-%E2%80%93-major-shipbuilding-an-0

Here are some of the reasons why we are here today. One article noted that: “Regaining domestic shipbuilding capacity in the US means reckoning with a doom loop of interdependencies: labor, stable demand, competitive costs, scale, supply chain depth, and functional shipyards.”

The same article dealt with other uncomfortable facts:

“You can’t attract workers without stable demand: Shipbuilding apprenticeship completion rates sit below 35%. Even major shipyards, like Puget Sound, only begin with around 200 apprentices. The US Merchant Marine Academy, which offers a Marine Engineering and Shipyard Management major, was described by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as “dilapidated”. For those who make it into the shipbuilding industry, first-year attrition runs around 50-60% even at the most consistent shipyards. This attrition happens because there is no confidence in demand signals relative to more reliable industries, like oil and gas or construction. What’s more, around 27% of maritime workers are over the age of 55, meaning we’ll see a silver tsunami of retirements over the next decade.”

That article is important as it mentions more than I can write about tonight. The link is here:

https://arenamag.com/articles/shipyards-graveyards

The causes for this matter. I admit that the causes go back farther that I can write about here, but among the modern issues is that we won the Cold War and had no peer competitors. Then we gained a fair amount of hyper-super-confidence after Operation Desert Storm, after which the Bush, Clinton, and Bush II administrations first used the alleged “Peace Dividend” to decommission hundreds of ships before their projected wear out dates.

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At the same time in the 1990s and 2000s a few massive corporations were allowed to swallow up dozens of shipyards that built naval and merchant ‘ships that sustained the U.S. economy, its seapower, and position in the world for nearly a century. The big corporate entities swallowed up those shipyards, parted them out for profit, and cut back the supply of trained shipyard workers and the pipeline to replace them. To save money after the Cold War we inactivated the Naval Shipyards at Mare Island and Long Beach, CA, Philadelphia, PA, and Charleston, SC. We previously had decommissioned the New York and Hunters Point Naval Shipyards. Now we cannot build enough ships to replace the ones that are aging out, or maintain the ones we have because we busted the infrastructure, in both pubic shipyards and private shipyards. Shipyard backlogs and shortages of well trained shipyard workers in both public (Navy owned) and private shipyards mean that surface ship and submarine maintenance periods and overhauls take far longer and further delay maintenance periods and overhauls for ships waiting for dry-docks.

There is also the shortage of trained shipyard workers. In 1980 the private shipyards in the United States employed 168,800 workers.

https://www.maritime.dot.gov/sites/marad.dot.gov/files/docs/ports/national-maritime-resource-and-education-center/9396/1980-reportonsurveyofusshipbuildingandrepairfacilities.pdf

In 2021 the number was just over 100,000 workers, with many aged 55 or older and will be aging out of the workforce. New workers have high attrition rates, more than 20%.

https://www.maritime.dot.gov/sites/marad.dot.gov/files/2021-06/Economic%20Contributions%20of%20U.S.%20Shipbuilding%20and%20Repairing%20Industry.pdf

The Navy, the Maritime Administration and private sources, including Jimmy Dimon note that the shipyards, both public and private will need around 200, 000-250,000 new shipyards workers over the coming decade. Those men and women will need to be trained and apprenticed and paid well. Unlike tech workers they will have to work in often abysmal conditions of high heat and humidity, cold and ice, and rain. No matter how much money they are paid, the attrition rate will remain high.

https://fortune.com/2026/07/21/maritime-shipbuilding-jobs-six-figure-opportunities-no-degree-according-to-jamie-dimon-but-jobs-are-not-easy/

But then after the attacks of 11 September 2001, the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom, followed by Bush II’s criminal war against Iraq. So in order to make the Navy look relevant in what had become a prolonged land war marked by a costly counterinsurgency campaign, Admiral Vern Clarke decided to retire 30 surface ships long before their designed lifespan, reduce the size of the Navy, and voluntarily give up 30,000 sailors to augment the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan. I know a lot about those things too, being someone that cannot stop reading or studying, and also because I was in the Navy at the time and ended up in Iraq supporting Army and Marine advisors the the Iraqi Army and Al Anbar Province. While there I ran into former shipmates supporting the Army in various roles in Iraq and Kuwait.

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At that time the then Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Vern Clark offered to gut the Navy to support land operations in Iraq and Afghanistan by decommissioning 30 ships well before their projected lifetimes, and reduce the Navy by 30,000 sailors while sending thousands of sailors to support land operations in the Middle East. This was done supposedly to “recapitalize” the fleet with new classes of ships, all of which promised much with untried technologies, all jammed together in new ship designs. The results were devastating to the Navy.

The “recapitalization” began with the DDX project which became the DDG-1000 or the Zumwalt Class. Thirty ships were planned, but costs rose exponentially and only three were built. Their weapons suites were designed for ship to shore naval gunfire support. Unfortunately, the primary system was a long range 155 mm gun, the ammunition for which cost just under 1 million dollars per round and was cancelled by the Army which developed it even before it could be deployed. The ship does not have the Aegis (SPY) radar that would allow it to be integrated into the fleet defense systems, and has no defense systems to protect itself against enemy forces. About a decade after the Zumwalt was commissioned, the Navy is still trying to find a use and weapons for these large and ungainly “stealth” platforms.

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But I have to leave that for a final segment in the Navy’s complicity in the rot.

But for now I will leave you with this. We are in a mess. Multiple administrations, SECNAVS, CNOs, congresses, and corporate America have left us a huge pile of shit to deal with. China is producing over 1,000 ships a year, South Korea, 500, while our shipyards are delivering less than five a year. There is no way that the United States can ever catch up in the raw numbers. Thus new approaches are needed, partnering with allies like South Korea, Japan, and NATO countries, expanding our workforce, reactivating public shipyards, and putting the private yards that are able to produce back to work. This isn’t just for the Navy but for our civil Merchant Marine which is absolutely necessary for our economy and national security.

https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/05/american-shipbuilding-decline/682945/?gift=KPpkKdZU6rRA2Ih9ToAWMg5veGoBDNQOIHYAa5bed-w

So until the next installment, have a great night and better tomorrow.

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So I have been researching and writing my latest part of my exceptionally long, multi-part article on the collapse of the U.S. Navy and the United States shipbuilding sector. There is a lot of historical material to go through if you look at our history, especially after 1990, the end of the Cold War and the illusion of the United States as the sole superpower, especially after vanquishing Saddam Hussein’s Iraq after his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. I am having to sort through articles and government reports, especially those of the Navy and Maritime Administration going back 30-40 years. Thankful the current regime hasn’t expunged them, probably because they ar so old that most never mention the Mango Mussolini.

So, all that being said, I hope to finish and publish that section tomorrow sometime. So until then, have a good night and better tomorrow.

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Essex Class Carriers in 1944

I find it amazing that the U.S. Navy continues to fail at designing and producing new surface warships. It wasn’t always this way as any Naval historian can testify.

Donald Trump poses as the savior of the nation who will build a “Golden Fleet” which is in reality an impossible dream concerning our emaciated and overwhelmed shipbuilding industry, and a fleet built around the Trump Class Nuclear Battleship. Even before it was decided that they needed to be nuclear powered, the class was estimated to cost as much or more than the Ford class carriers per ship. They are to mount a weapons suite that is all untried and untested, and may have little strategic value. I have to hold my for that as yet unrealized fiasco until a following section of this already rather lengthy article. Let me not get into the weeds about our current shipbuilding and repair industry or the failed Navy ship designs since 2003.

Back in the time before Donnie was even a sperm in his daddy’s reproductive magazine, the United States had a true Golden Fleet. In 1945 the United States Navy was the uncontested ruler of the seas. It included 23 Battleships, 28 Aircraft Carriers, 71 Escort Carriers, 72 Cruisers, 371 Destroyers, 361 Destroyer Escorts (Frigates), 232 Submarines, 586 Mine Warfare ships, 1204 patrol ships, 2547 Amphibious Ships and Craft, 1267 Auxiliaries, in total some 6768 ships of all types in commission. That did not count the ships of the Coast Guard or the Merchant Marine, which numbered thousands more ships. 84 shipyards were active in building this monumental number of ships in September 1945. They were located across the West Coast, Gulf Coast, the East Coast, and in inland shipyards on the Great Lakes and along major rivers. It was a truly national effort.

The United States used to be the leader in building effective, long lasting ships that could be continuously upgraded. I learned about this in Navy Junior ROTC, and then I watched as we designed and built the Oliver Hazard Perry Class Guilded Missile Frigates, the Spruance Class Destroyers and the Ticonderoga Class Guided Missile Cruisers, the Tarawa Class LHAs, new classes of mine warfare ships, and the Pegasus Class Hydrofoil Patrol Ships. Likewise reading about the Harpoon Anti-Ship Missile, the Tomahawk Cruise Missile, rapid firing automated 5 inch guns, and so much more was incredible for a teenager.

When I was a young Army officer I began to read about the Arleigh Burke DDG-51 class, which has endured to be one of the Navy’s most successful, effective, and prolific designs in recent history, and the current backbone of the U.S. Navy surface force. As of today 75 of these ships are in commission, with 25 more either building or ordered. Every new batch has been improved and updated with more capabilities than the preceding batch. Now those are being refitted and updated. With the DDG-51 class the Navy replicated its success of the WWII Fletcher, Allen M. Sumner, and Gearing classes, many which served until after Vietnam, and with foreign navies until the 1990s and 2000s.

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Donald Trump likes to talk about a “Golden Fleet”, but his is looking for something as gaudy as his Oval Bordello.

Aircraft carriers designed and built in and shortly after WWII, like the Essex and Midway classes were modernized and updated, with the last Essex class ships being decommissioned in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the last of them, the USS Lexington decommissioned in 1991 as a training ship for Naval Aviators. Four; Hornet, Yorktown, Intrepid, and Lexington are museum ships.

The next class, the Midway class just had three ships but they were larger and had armored flight decks. All three were modernized with angled flight decks like the Essex’s received when modernized, and served in Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War. One, the Franklin D. Roosevelt was decommissioned in 1977 having received fewer upgrades than her sisters during the post Vietnam drawdown. The Coral Sea decommissioned in 1990, and Midway in 1992 following service in Operation Desert Storm. She is now a museum ship in San Diego, California.

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The Navy followed these ships with the Forrestal Class carriers, the first true Super-Carriers, that included Forrestal, Saratoga, Ranger, and Independence. These ship were a major improvement over the Midway class. These follow on ships of the Kitty Hawk class, the Kitty Hawk, Constellation, America, and John F. Kennedy. All eight of these ships were highly successful.

USS John F. Kennedy with USS Hue City and USS Vicksburg in July 2002

The Forrestal class were decommissioned following the end of the Cold War as part of the “peace dividend.” The Kitty Hawk class persevered longer, the America to 1996, Constellation to 2003 following Operation Desert Storm, John F. Kennedy until 2007, and Kitty Hawk, by then the oldest commissioned ship in the Navy, 2009. With the exception of America which was used as a target ship in a top secret test in 2005 to see the kind of damage a modern super carrier could take as part of the process to design the Gerald Ford class. No pictures of the tests were ever released except the final declassified pictures of her which showed none of the damage. She lies at the bottom of the Atlantic so 16,000 feet some 250 miles southeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The other seven have been or are being “recycled”, the kinder and gentler word for scrapping in Brownsville, Texas.

Of course the are the nuclear powered carriers, the Enterprise, and the 10 ships of the Nimitz class. All were remarkably successful. Enterprise decommissioned in 2012 after 51 years of service and probably won’t finish the “recycling” process until at least 2030. Unlike the conventional ships, the nuclear reactors, fuel, and innards that need to be disposed of as radioactive materials in Hanford, Washington, where we park all of our former nuclear reactors, even before the rest of the hull can be recycled. By law the nuclear ships have to be processed at a government, think Naval Shipyard. With submarines and cruisers it wasn’t that hard. They were smaller. They were taken to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, where the reactors were removed, sent to Hanford, and the hulks were then recycled. The problem with aircraft carriers is that they take up dry dock space, which also is needed for carriers going through their periodic overhauls and their refueling cycles. By the way, Nimitz will be decommissioned in 2027 after 51 years of service and Eisenhower as early as 2030, unless the Navy does the smart thing and doesn’t decommission her until her replacement, the next USS Enterprise is ready. Even so, Nimitz, Eisenhower, and the other early Nimitz class ships will be tying up budgets, dry docks and shipyards for decades as they are decommissioned. Unfortunately, the Navy failed to ensure that we had the resources not just to build and operate them, but how to dispose of them when they reached the end of their service lives.

USS Hue City, May 2002 in the Persian Gulf. I was in a small boat departing for a day of boarding Iraqi smugglers.

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Then there is the mismanagement of a class of ships that was our most powerful and versatile surface ship, the Ticonderoga class guided missile cruisers. I served on one, the USS Hue City, CG-66. She was a fine ship with a fine crew and exceptionally well maintained, except that she did not get her five year dry-docking and maintenance period until she was ten years old. She wasn’t alone. Based on the Spruance class destroyers, they were much more powerful than the destroyers. They had the SPY-1 Aegis radar and combat systems and carried 128 vertical launch (VLS) missile cells each, except the first four which had two twin rail missile launchers. There were 27 ships in all, and they were the backbone of carrier group air defense and offensive air operations. Additionally they had a large capacity for attacks on enemy ground targets and surface ships. They were highly effective ships that were in constant demand. Doctrine said that two cruisers would accompany each Carrier Strike group. In peacetime that was not demanding. Deployments were scheduled and maintenance periods predictable. After the attacks 9-11-2001 those days were over. Important maintenance periods were postponed, sometimes for years as the ships were continuously deployed without getting required maintenance. Likewise, the CGX follow on class was cancelled before a single keel could be laid.

As a result the ships were basically worked to death, and by the time the Navy began their modernization program the results of too many years of deferred maintenance had taken their toll. When the ships entered the shipyards many more important structural, engineering, and other issues were identified that costs and the time required to complete them rose exponentially. Only a few were completed, and the other ships scheduled for the updates and modernization were deleted from it and decommissioned, with most being classified as Logistics Support Assets, in other words, ships to be used for parts. The few modernized ships that remain in commission today are all scheduled for decommissioning by 2031, with no direct replacements.

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The exercise shows that strategic requirements and planning are frequently dismissed to meet missions dictated by our political leadership. That is happening even now. Today many ships are being deployed for extended periods without even port calls for their crews, much less maintenance.

With most of the cruisers now gone their place is being held by the most modern DDG-51 ships, but those ships pack less firepower than the cruisers. By the way, the Trump Regime isn’t looking to replace the cruisers, it’s trying to figure out a massive building program of ships with problematic weapons technology, which isn’t proven, on a now nuclear powered surface warship. Since the U.S. Navy hasn’t designed and built nuclear powered surface combatants since the 1970s and 1980s when we produced the California and Virginia class guided missile cruisers. They were good ships, but in the political desire to save money through the so-called “peace dividend” meant that the cost of their modernization and refueling would not occur. They were all decommissioned and recycled despite being barely halfway through their expected lifetimes.

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The Spruance class destroyers, and their four near sisters, the guided missile destroyer Kidd class, originally built for Iran, but given to the U.S. Navy after the Iranian revolution. The Kidd class ships are now part of the navy of the Republic of China (Taiwan) and received substantial upgrades. The Spruance class ships were all decommissioned well before their time and did not receive the upgrades that their large hulls could have received. The U.S. Navy was “penny wise and pound foolish” in how they failed to maintain and disposed of the CGNs of the California and Virginia classes, the Ticonderoga class CGNs, the Kidd class DDGs, and Spruance class DDs. The needless disposal of these ships took hulls and weapon systems out of the Navy that could have prevented needless wear and tear on the Ticonderoga, class and the first batches of the Arleigh Burke classes.

We also got rid of one of the best escorts we had, the Oliver Hazard Perry class guided missile frigates, with no replacements until the failed Littoral Warfare Class ships of the Freedom and Independence classes. More on the LCS abortions later. Many of the Oliver Hazard Perry class ships still serve in the Turkish, Polish, Taiwan, Bahrain, Chile, Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan. Many of those vessels have been extensively modernized. Their LCS replacements are a complete failure. More about that later.

So until the next part. Have a good night and watch your six.

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An Iron Ball

Here is a reflection on something that matters but too many people aren’t paying attention to, and they have not for over two decades. Pardon me it is a long reflection that I have already spent several days in writing so I will break it into about three articles. This is at the suggestion of a paid subscriber who thought it might be better to break such a large article into small sections.

There is a crisis in Navy shipbuilding, especially surface combatants, but encompassing Aircraft Carriers, Submarines, Amphibious ships and auxiliaries. I will return to that after my reflection. I will go through the history of how we got here, the successes of the 20th Century and the disasters of the 21st Century.

LCDR Breedlove and Senior Chief John Ness

When I was in high school, my assistant NJROTC instructor, Senior Chief (Cryptologic Technician) John Ness had a special award. He called it the Iron Ball Award, given monthly to the cadet who “could foul up an Iron Ball”. It was a 10pound shot put ball mounted on a plaque. I believe that the people designing the U.S. Navy’s new surface ship classes since the early 2000s deserve that award far more than any NJROTC cadet ever did.

In Navy Junior ROTC we learned a lot. It wasn’t about dressing up and being able to drill. Our textbooks included The Bluejackets Manual and the Naval Officer’s Guide. We learned seamanship, navigation, solved navigation problems, learned to use nautical compasses and sextants, to take bearings, read nautical charts, learn about satellite navigation with LORAN, learned about the use of radar, sonar, damage control and firefighting aboard ship. We also learned about ship design, construction, damage control, and weapons systems.

USS Agerholm DD 826

USS Pyro AE-24

USS Coral Sea CV-43

USS Mount Vernon LSD-39

USS Frederick LST 1184

USS Gray FF-1054

Chief Ness and LCDR J.E. Breedlove ensured that we got plenty of at sea experience aboard active duty Navy ships. I spent over 70 days at sea in high school aboard a variety of warships; the USS Agerholm, DD-826, an updated Gearing Class destroyer, the USS Pyro, AE-24 an ammunition ship, the USS Coral Sea, CV-43, a Midway Class Aircraft Carrier, the USS Mount Vernon, LSD-39, a dock landing ship, the USS Frederick, LST-1184 a landing ship rank, and the USS Gray DE/FF 1054, a Knox Class Destroyer Escort, later designed a Fast Frigate.

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Aboard the ships we were placed under instruction in different departments of the ship. I frequently ended up in operations, navigation or signals, aboard Agerholm I got to pass 5” shells to the loader in a twin 5” 38 caliber gun mount during a gunnery exercise, and and help man a towing hawser in exercises with the USS O’Callahan and USS Carpenter DD-825. I got my fill of the engine rooms and boiler rooms of steam powered aboard Mount Vernon, pretty quickly. Not just that, required reading included articles from the Naval Institute Proceedings magazine, about naval strategy, new ship designs, and developing weaponry.

That was in the mid-to-late 1970s. Back then with the Vietnam War recently ended nothing military was fashionable, which made me a bit of a nerd. But, regardless of Vietnam, where my dad served I had always wanted to serve in the military, and I loved the Navy.

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I was young but I wanted to learn, something I never quit doing. In college I ended up going through Army ROTC rather than Navy ROTC which told me to enter as a non-scholarship student I would have to change majors from History to hard science, mathematics, or engineering before my senior year. I was polite and said who will help pay for my way through two more years of college without changing my major and adding two to three years of college expenses and debts. They told me to walk down the hallway and talk to the people in green uniforms. Poof, I was beginning 17 1/2 years in the Army, without losing my interest in the Navy, my study of Navy history, ship design and development, or developments in naval warfare and operations. I know that’s weird, but being weird takes work, one has to apply critical thinking even when looking at subjects outside their current environment in order to keep learning. I was still so Navy in my soul that my entire time in the Army I rooted for Navy in the Army-Navy Game.

As a historian that makes me good. As a citizen that makes me better because I realize what is happening and why, more than most Americans.

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Tomorrow I will go into the early 20th Century history portion or this article. It is the tale of successful and adaptive ship designs that served from the Second World War until the Cold War, and the ships that followed them. That will be followed with an article about the decimation of the U.S. Public and Private shipbuilding and repair industries from the 1990s on, then an analysis of the failed or failing designs of this century, and the problem in trying to safely “recycle” our nuclear powered aircraft carriers, which takes decades each, tying up dry docks in Public, that is Navy shipyards which are also needed to conduct maintenance periods and overhauls for active carriers.

I have been writing about all of those but after looking at this I think my subscriber was correct to break the article up into more manageable parts.

Have a great night and as always, watch your six.

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I thought this would be a one day article, and it’s now on day four. But how can I try to distill so much about naval and political history and technology, combined with personal experiences and reflections in one article.

So be looking in this space tomorrow when I will finally publish it.

I thank you for your patience and I will start writing and publishing articles like pancakes. Like Headly Lamarr “My mind is aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention." Thus my work is not done.

Until tomorrow, all the best and please watch your six.

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The subject is one of my passions. I do apologize for going into the weeds.

Until later today which will be tomorrow after I wake up.

All the best.

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Sometimes you get the bar, sometimes the bar gets you.

Just a quick note. I promised a new article last night but we got back a little later from the pub than I expected and I got a lot more into the weeds writing the article than I expected. Likewise, while multitasking watching the eighth and last season of House M.D., I kind of got distracted from the time so I need more time to finish it. You will have it tomorrow.

But, just for a laugh, before we left the pub and because I didn’t drink that much, and I had just talked to a great guy, a server nicknamed “Bear” I had Kristin, our bartender pour me a whiskey glass of iced tea with a block of ice to resemble whiskey with a rock. I posed, she took the picture which I titled “Sometimes you get the bar, sometimes the bar gets you.” I stole that from the end of the film The Big Lebowski. We all got a good laugh, so I will leave you with that until tomorrow.

Have a great night and until tomorrow, watch your collective sixes.

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