To be fair, no trains on the Northeast Corridor allow checked baggage, but even if they could and did, the Acela Line would not.

GD Two and I went Business Class. There is also a First Class, with allegedly more leg room and more comfortable seats. Also free food and drinks, to include beer, wine, and more serious spirits, delivered to your seat in First Class. Allegedly the food in First Class is substantially better and is served with actual silverware. My cousin, who has gone from Boston to New York City several times on Acela First Class says the seats are pretty marginal even in First Class. And I quote, “Yeah, there’s a button you can push for lumbar support but it doesn’t actually do anything.

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--David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

As we stand here, quite possibly on the verge of civil war – the first shots of which may, indeed, already have been fired at Trump and Charlie Kirk or by Luigi Mangione – we ought to remember that the Klan is neither the opposite to nor the cure for ANTIFA, and the American National Socialist Party doesn’t really equal or cancel out the Democratic Socialists of America^[1]. Instead, all of those as well as other, similar groups, serve mainly to pull us apart and to make civil war more likely.

Step away for a bit from those extremes that are pulling us apart, though. Look down, from your own godlike heights, and see the actual political distribution. See – yes, surely you can, if you try – two bright lines, demarcating the border between hard left moonbats, hard right-wingnuts, and the middle third. Now look a little closer, why don’t you? Notice that it’s not an even distribution, by any means, but yet another bell curve, with quite small numbers at the fringes and rather large majorities, some a little more right, some a little more left, in the center between those lines of demarcation.

I think it’s pretty fair to say that, oh, say, circa 1946 or so, the curves of that bell curve were steeper still, and the percent of the population, be they then Republican or Democrat, that agreed on the core things was much more massive even than it remains today. Nobody back then was arguing that someone can become a woman, after completely skipping the sheer horror of female puberty, by a mere declaration. The DSA and the Wokistas would have been laughed out of any Democratic Party convention, if not, indeed, beaten half to death. The Klan (then a Democrat institution, now without a home at all) was no more welcome with Republicans than it is now. Did we have communists and nazis then? Yes, of course, but hardly anybody listened to them. Look to the Chicago Democrat Convention of 1968 to see how Democrat cops, in Democrat Chicago, hosting the Democrat Convention treated hard left agitators.

We were so much alike back then. All the really important things we agreed on.

It would be nice – actually, not just nice but country-saving – if we could go back to the times when everybody inside those two border not only agreed on the big things, but spoke the same language – no, we don’t anymore, not entirely – and repudiated those extremes that are not antidotes to each other and, indeed, feed on each other.

Now go back to the epigraph in the beginning of this peace. I don’t know that anybody wants to admit it, and the left would rather die than admit it, but I’ll admit it. I’m considerably brighter than most but, even so, my reason is slave to my emotions and instincts. So, surely, are yours. I sit at the border between the right third and the middle third (which, again, are not really thirds).

Bright or not, instinctive and emotional or not, I know one thing for certain; I might not be right. My political position could be partly or wholly idiotic; and myself not be able to tell. The same goes for you, dear reader. And same goes for anyone inside that large portion of the political bell curve we used to be able to realistically call “the center.”

So where is the best position to come from? It must come from the balance of those who are about as much to the left as I am to the right. It can never come from those to the right of me or to the left of them.

So we need, desperately need, that old style Democratic Party.

Unfortunately, for reasons I’m not going to claim I fully understand, that Democratic Party is in the process of being taken over by the hard leftists of the DSA. As it is doing so, it is apparently shedding voters who really belong in that old Democratic Party and find no place for themselves in the new one. To quote James Carville, beyond whom there is nobody who is more of a Democrat:

“I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the ‘S-word.’ Schism. I really do. Everybody’s always said, ‘No, no, we’re a coalition. We’re a big tent.’ And there’s just some shit that I can’t be in the same tent with.”

And he’s absolutely right. Some shit stinks too much to deal with or tolerate.

So what would happen if, say, the party drove out the DSA, banned any member of it for life from ever being in the Democratic Party, ever speaking for the Democratic Party, ever getting one red (and rapidly vanishing) cent from the Democratic Party, and ever appearing on any ballot as a Democrat?

A couple of things that would happen are obvious. The Democrats would no longer be saddled with the left-wing lunatic fringe. It would be much harder for the hard left to seize the primaries for their preferred hard left lunatic candidates.

But more important things would happen, too. If you embrace the working class again, rather than a consortium of freakazoids, they will come back to you. A lot of voters who are sitting things out will come back to you. Moreover, and more significantly, a lot of voters for Trump would come back to you. You might have some years in the wilderness, yes, but you’re getting those anyway.

In the long run, as voters return to you, that schism and purge are the only ways you are ever getting back into power.

^[1] This would no longer be true once we enter that civil war.

Report on Civil-Military Operations (CMO) Training at the National Training Center, Ft. Irwin, CA

Report Compiled by: LTC Thomas P. Kratman, Director: Rule of Law, US Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute (PKSOI). (Brief Bio of reporting officer at Appendix A.)

Introduction

In mid-June, 2004, the above-mentioned member of the PKSOI, the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, visited the National Training Center with an eye to evaluating CMO training as conducted by the NTC. The escort officer and guide for this visit was Major Rene “Pancho” Porras, the S-5 for the 11th ACR, the NTC’s opposing force (OPFOR) regiment. During the visit the majority of the “towns” recently constructed on Fort Irwin were visited. In addition, the visiting officer met the bulk of the key CMO players and trainers. No statement contained herein is expressly attributable to any given person but represent the visiting officer’s overall impressions and evaluations of CMO training at the NTC.

The main body of this report will not attempt to cover every aspect of CMO that either is now, or conceivably could be, portrayed at the NTC. Rather, it will concentrate on a relatively few key aspects that are either critical to realism and superior training or, if non-critical, promise considerable return for small expenditure. Relatively minor issues will be included at Appendix B.

Physical plant and Civilians on the Battlefield (COBs):

By emplacing towns and large numbers of COBs, many of them native Arabic speakers, in the maneuver area the NTC has made impressive strides towards creating a more realistic environment for not only High Intensity Combat (HIC) but also Low Intensity Combat (LIC) and Stability Operations. Admittedly, the towns do not look like small towns in Iraq or Afghanistan, being largely composed of boxcars, conexes, and small storage buildings. This mere appearance is not critical. The towns are generally large enough, complex enough, and populous enough to be considered fair physical representations of what is to be found in many areas of the Middle East.

That said, the towns do have some areas for improvement. In terms of physical layout, the most important of these is that none of them are large enough to present a real surveillance and control challenge. The rotational brigade would not be hard pressed to keep every town in the maneuver area under continuous surveillance did its commander so choose. Moreover, most of the towns could be continuously garrisoned. Without building a mega-town the only solution to this might be to have one phase during the rotation in which every building, conex and boxcar were assembled at a single location, along with their populations. This would represent a real challenge to the rotational brigade; something that would be too big to control from the outside. No doubt moving the buildings around would be pricey, both in terms of drayage and of wear and tear to the buildings.

Economic and political life:

While the physical plant and population are generally adequate, minus the proviso given above, there is a glaring deficiency in terms of what the towns do individually and collectively.

Towns and cities exist for any number or combination of reasons. Among these reasons are:

1. economics – to include agriculture,

2. security,

3. inertia (“We live here because we have always lived here.”) (but, note, without one or more of the other reasons being present this reason is rarely enough for a location to remain inhabited),

4. industry,

5. service,

6. governance.

They require, as a minimum, some reason to exist. None of the towns in the maneuver area seem to have any reason to exist, though valid reasons could be manufactured.

Towns and cities are also interdependent. There is no obvious interdependence among the towns in the maneuver area. This lack has many negative implications to both CMO and LIC training.

Towns and cities, with their associated economies and agricultures, also have benefits to offer an occupying force. These range from water, to lodging, to (sometimes) food (including catered food), to providing a labor pool. On occasion towns and cities can also provide electricity, security guards or other things. None of the towns, as configured and operating, have much to offer an occupying force, though they could with fairly minimal reconfiguration.

Towns and cities in a given area communicate among themselves. This is to say, they trade, they inter-visit, and they share opinions. They also are sometimes political, economic or emotional and traditional rivals. At the very least the existence of towns and cities also means a high level of non-military movement on the battlefield; people and goods going from place to place.

There is also the great likelihood of having present on the battlefield various groups of Bedu (nomads) who also have an economic function in providing meat and dairy to the towns. Moreover, these Bedu are a potential source of both useful intelligence for the rotational brigade and the Para-Military (PM…aka the OPFOR) and a means for the PMs to obtain concealment while maneuvering themselves and their equipment. Finally, the Bedu are a potential source of constant uncertainty and irritation to the rotational brigade, a massacre waiting to happen (as indeed happened – more or less – to the group by Granite Pass the day before the visiting officer arrived at the NTC).

Problems, training-wise, that arise from these deficiencies are manifold. Because those towns which ought to be agricultural have nothing analogous to crops surrounding them cordons and searches are altogether too easy. Moreover, without crops or irrigation canals to be damaged by maneuver forces the SJA does not receive a sufficient workout in handling damage claims. While crops, beyond the merest hand-watered gardens, are probably beyond the watering ability of the NTC to support, some animals – goats and sheep mostly – could be provided. Areas could be fenced off with engineer tape and marked as crops. Alternatively, for greater visual impact and to provide cover for insurgents stakes could be driven into the ground and laced with strips of camouflage netting.

The lack of civilian economic and social transportation in the maneuver area is unrealistic. As things stand, the odds of any given non-military vehicle or group moving around the battlefield being PMs are overwhelming. This skews the realism of the exercise.

In addition, one often overlooked part of CMO is the support the civilian infrastructure and available civilian resources can provide to the maneuver forces. These range from labor, to Class I, to water, to laundry service for the troops. Other resources can, properly used, lessen the financial burden to the United States, while providing livelihood that is not the moral equivalent of welfare to the populace, thus preserving their pride and helping to win hearts and minds. As things stand, there is no motivator for the maneuver commander to try to make use of local resources because they have nothing he needs or wants.

Equally overlooked is the need to pay for what we take even though certain usages an American soldier would rarely consider. For example, we put a base camp on land. At Fort Stewart that is a function of coordinating with range control. In the theater of war, however, someone certainly owns that land, uses it himself or rents it for grazing or farming. Our taking it over without recompense represents an unjust and possibly unlawful taking. It may also represent serious eventual food shortages to the populace. At the exercise level, our taking it also represents a splendid opportunity for the CA and SJA people to train to do that part of their jobs which involves contracting and Civil Affairs. Failure to contract and pay could be cause for unrest, civil disturbances, and possibly sniping.

While some few fixes might prove expensive, it would be possible, with only minimal expenditure of resources, for the NTC to correct most of these problems. The city at the base of Tiefort Mountain might be declared to have a spring where potable water could be purchased by the maneuver force and would in any case be “purchased” by some of the other towns (said water being delivered in bulk to the Tiefort area daily by NTC personnel). If the maneuver water source at the main post were simultaneously declared to be several hours further away (by imposition of a 3-4 hour administrative delay to watering trucks going back for it, for example) the value of being able to obtain this local water would go up. This would not only give the maneuver commander incentive to win hearts and minds (or to lose them if he buys too much water) but also more of the means to do so. In addition, it would give a reason / excuse for more COB movement on the battlefield, hence more cover for the PMs.

Labor is not only a useful resource to exploit but an effective means of population and resource control, a task that the NTC is ideally situated to train maneuver units and commanders on. Unfortunately, the need for labor for maneuver units at the NTC is somewhat limited: filling sandbags, perhaps putting up concertina, digging anti-tank ditches for the high intensity combat phase, translating and the like. Notwithstanding these limits, simply putting the COBs to work under supervision is such an aid to intelligence gathering, is so useful to winning hearts and minds, and so separates the average civilian from the PMs, at the NTC but also in the theater of war, that it ought be pushed.

“Junction City” cries out to be a truck stop / gasoline station. Not much would be needed: two 600 gallon fuel pods with hoses and spigots, an “attendant” (and the Arabic speakers are already somewhat bored and would welcome, most of them, some kind of useful active employment), perhaps four large glass jugs for measuring POL would suffice for the gasoline / diesel dispensing part. This very sort of arrangement is not uncommon in the Middle East. The only other real requirements would be a more or less notional automobile repair facility, a “commercial” lodging facility (needn’t be much), a “restaurant” for the drivers to stop and eat (while exchanging intelligence, to be sure), and a bread bakery. The bakery might also be a source of supplementary rations for the BluFor as well as an economic boon to the area.

To portray the Bedu would require little: perhaps some goats or sheep, one vehicle to move the baggage while walking themselves. Nor need the Bedu be huge clans on the move. Three to four separate family groups of 10-15 each should be adequate. What is important is that the Bedu move daily in patterns hard to predict but consistent with the real or perceived situation on the ground as understood by the COBs.

Additional Players:

NGO’s and IO’s:

The United States Government and its agent, the US Army, either encourages or tolerates NGOs and IOs, depending on the particular organization, its ethos and the aid it may bring to accomplishing the mission. As a general rule, security situation permitting, the government and the Army do not bar any such organizations from the theater of war or from mission participation. In perhaps overly simplistic terms these organizations come in four broad varieties. These are:

1. Pro US mission with valuable resources

2. Anti-US mission with valuable resources

3. Pro-US mission with little or nothing in resources

4. Anti-US mission with little or nothing in resources

The participation in training by NGOs and IOs which the NTC is currently encouraging is an excellent first step. Unfortunately, the very people who are willing to join in (generally groups 1 and 3) are also the easiest to work with. Group 2 is not represented and perhaps never can be organizationally represented until the day that the lion lies down with the lamb. Nor can group 4 be fully discounted because while they have little to offer in help they can be an extremely annoying distraction and a public affairs nightmare. Moreover, a little more cooperation on our parts with Human Rights Watch just might have saved us from the Abu Ghraib scandal.

For role playing purposes, I recommend that, where possible, the NTC have such NGO and IO personnel as will join in play roles other than their own, with emphasis on groups 2 and 4.

State:

The US Department of State is an important player in stability operations. They are also sometimes capable of dealing with NGO/IO groups 2 and 4 in ways the military cannot. For this reason I strongly recommend contacting Colonel Doug Nash, NashDE@XXXXXX.XXX, and enlisting his aid in obtaining State Department participation.

Ambassador:

Ideally, an ambassador brings coaching expertise to the maneuver commander as well as pressure on the maneuver unit. The PKSOI has contacted Ambassador R. W. (“Bill”) Farrand, Pamichko@XXXXXXXXXX.XXX, and he is interested, “with enthusiasm”. The Ambassador is retired, a friend of the Institute, experienced in stability operations, and, as a former naval officer, sympathetic to the armed forces. (Note that any expense incurred will be on the NTC.)

USAID:

The United States Agency for International Development is generally a key player in stability operations. They do not organizationally do much directly as their assets are managerial and financial. So much useful can be done with USAID financing, much of which is discussed above, that they should be invited to and included in the exercise. This should be possible as the head of USAID, Andrew Nazios, is a retired Civil Affairs colonel.

CIVPOL:

The raising of civil police is critical to success in the Stability Operations or the Peacekeeping mission. Unfortunately, this also takes more years to do properly than the rotational brigade has weeks in the box. Nonetheless, in its search for realism the NTC program would be well served to find a retired police officer to at least go through some portion of a police training program. During the June visit the nearest anyone came to this was a failed offer to one mayor by the Marine element of the rotation to teach marksmanship to his police force (which was arguably illegal).

There exist certain NGOs and IOs capable of providing civil police training as well as prison guard and administrator training. If a CIVPOL representative can be obtained, he or she could function as yet another NGO (almost invariably a sympathetic, group 1, type) to interact and coordinate with the maneuver force.

The High Intensity Conflict Phase:

Two things occur with regard to training for high intensity combat. One is that it is a mission we cannot afford to forget how to train on and test for; Operation Iraqi Freedom is most unlikely to be our last war. Thus, I do not recommend that it be done away with. That said, the timing is unfortunate in that it comes before the Stability Operations phase, thus leaving the BluFor with adrenaline in their veins and blood in their eyes at the exact worst time. It is also not the sequence of events troops currently face either in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The NTC should consider either a) having the high intensity missions come at the end of the rotation, perhaps a foreign incursion in response to success in the Stability Operation mission or b) interspersing a limited number of more or less high intensity missions of battalion size or below throughout the rotation.

Rule of Law play:

In a real sense, mission success in stability operations can be defined as that state of being and point in time when a “government under laws, not men” is in place. This is a strategic level concept far removed from the day to day concerns of the maneuver commander on the ground. Yet, tactical events have strategic implications. Overall success will never be achieved unless the tactical commander supports the strategic necessity of establishing the rule of law.

To support training in establishing the rule of law there is much the NTC might profitably do. Civil Police training, as mentioned above, is one key component of establishing the rule of law. Others include eliminating crime and corruption, establishing a court system, and establishing a prison system (and, since Abu Ghraib, monitoring same very closely).

Given the short duration of the training rotation at NTC, it is probably sufficient if the maneuver force, at some time over the rotation, is presented with:

1. Two or three cases of minor crime to investigate and prepare to bring to trial,

2. One or two cases of outrageous corruption (i.e. a local contractor being paid to remove trash and signally and repeatedly failing to do so or a local judge being found consistently taking bribes),

3. The requirement to set up and monitor some sort of short duration detention facility.

Cultural Familiarization:

The Arabs are very proud of their religion and culture. Moreover, this pride is sincere. Although it is not our culture it is the culture into which we are training out soldiers to operate. It is also a culture in which understanding and familiarity are combat multipliers while the lack of same can prove disastrous.

The Arabic speaking COBs were most interested in, even enthusiastic about, the prospect of being permitted to put on cultural familiarization training for US Forces. They represent a rare and valuable asset and opportunity and I strongly urge the NTC to work this into the schedule, either at

1. one town, units by rotation over the course of the exercise,

2. at the very beginning,

3. or at the very end.

Because of the ability to set up something more impressive using option 1 that is my recommendation.

Summary of Recommendations

1. Study the possibility of collecting the moveable buildings of the towns into one location at some point, preferably early on, in the exercise.

2. Give each town a reason to exist and set up the physical plant to make that reason valid and potentially useful to the BluFor (i.e. water and governance at Tiefort, a truck stop and trade center at Junction).

3. Consider the physical layout of the towns and their environs; modify same to support civil-military play.

4. Interlink every town in an economic system such that ill events in one have economic and politic implications in the others.

5. Set up a transportation net, busses, trucks and automobiles, plus trading Bedu to support the portrayal of the economy of the area.

6. Make the area and population potentially useful to the BluFor to drive civil-military play.

7. Portray more NGO and IO involvement.

8. Portray more US Governmental agency involvement.

9. Require Rule of Law issues to be played and resolved.

10. Give cultural familiarization training.

Thomas P. Kratman

LTC, IN

Director, Rule of Law, PKSOI

Appendix: Minor Points

1. The number of Arabic women available in the maneuver area is not sufficient to fully sensitize BluFor troops to the impact of women and Islamic culture.

2. Minor use of chemical IEDs would add both realism and difficulty to the exercise.

3. Bedu should engage troops who approach their camps on foot from either the rising or the setting sun.

4. Among other aspects previously mentioned, the villages ought include cemeteries nearby, marked with uncut stones more or less regularly arrayed. These would provide an excellent chance for an unfortunate incident.

5. NGO’s and IO’s sometimes strain local resources for food, water and lodging as well as causing inflationary spirals by overpaying. Explaining this, controlling and rationing them is an interesting exercise.

6. Some cheap floor rugs could add authenticity as well as making the tunnels of Tiefort easier to conceal.

7. The troops and players were generally unimpressed with the professional COBs, for the most part.

8. There is room for play by both spies and informers.

9. Generally speaking, the head of an Arab town or an unusually important man within one, will have a tent set up outside of the building to entertain and hold “majlis”.

10. It seemed the general feeling that maintaining military site OCs (Observer-Controllers), as was formerly done, was preferable.

11. It was the visiting officer’s distinct impression that Transfer of Authority was not being done with the thoroughness one would expect of a normal Relief in Place, let alone that demanded by the much more complex environment of CMO and Stability Operations. It was not possible to determine where the weight of effort to correct this should go.

12. Little thought seems given to riot control training.

13. It might be useful to give the 11th ACR troops some Arab Cultural training as well.

14. Consider writing a “How to Roleplay an Arab Civilian” handbook for 11th ACR.

15. Many of the COBs are dressed in Pakistani, not Arab, clothing.

“You cannot read the entire magazine and not come away understanding that a great debt is owed and it’s time for this country to pay. When my editor asks me, like, what’s your ultimate goal for the project, my ultimate goal is that there’ll be a reparations bill passed.”

Never mind that no great debt is owed, that, no, slavery did not build the United States, that we can’t even say, with any certainty, that the Africans aboard the White Lion, the ship that arrived in Virginia in 1619, were even sold as slaves. Never mind, too, that no reparations bill is going to be passed. No, not ever, not at the federal level, though idiot states like California might, and idiot cities like San Francisco certainly have.

But should they have? Should they ever? Bill Buckley wrote once to the effect that, rather than setting up a welfare state – though remember here that most welfare benefits, about two-thirds of the thirty trillion we’ve spent since 1965, do not go to blacks – they and the country would have been better off if we’d just given every black man, woman, and child a one-time cash grant. He didn’t use the term, “reparations,” but clearly that and reparations would be in the same general category.

I’ve pondered Buckley’s statement – and God knows where I read it, for Grok doesn’t – for nearly sixty years now. Is there a legal or moral theory to support it? Would it have been better if we’d done that back in the sixties?

Indulge me in a little kitchen math. Total expenditures on the welfare state since 1965 run around thirty trillion. Yes, that’s with a T and an R. The portion of that spent on blacks is about ten or eleven trillion. Let’s be charitably conservative and call it ten trillion. If we had not spent that on the welfare state, we could today have given every black man, woman, and child in the US about two hundred thousand dollars. That would have been about nineteen thousand, or a bit less, in 1965 dollars. For about twenty-one million black folks. This would have been a four hundred billion dollar bill, in 1965 dollars.

This was never doable. Four hundred billion was three times the federal budget in 1965 and fifty-four percent of GDP in 1965. It is also not clear that two hundred thousand now, nineteen thousand then, would actually not be a serious overpayment. No, I mention it only as a measure of what would have been cheaper, a single payment or six decades of payments.

But was there a moral basis for any payment commencing in 1965? I would suggest to you that there was such a basis.

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I wrote this back in January, 2021, just before the junta took power that occasionally put President Shitstain Brainfog and Vice President Kamalhoe McGiggles on display in the Oval Office. Widest possible sharing authorized and encouraged; share via copy and paste. Be sure to include my name, so the left can understand I am not afraid of them and perfectly willing, on my own ticket, to fight:


*****

So why, after all this, do so many of us _still_ believe the election was stolen?

In the first place, there are two things we mean by “the election was stolen.” They’re mutually reinforcing, yes, but they’re not the same. The first of these is via the influence of media and social media. It was not illegal for them to have been Biden’s campaign, but they _were_ Biden’s campaign. What that means, in practice, is that they used their privileges under the first amendment to violate the intent of the first amendment. I say “privileges,” by the way, rather than “rights” because by their conduct they have undermined the first amendment to the point we can calmly consider killing it, as regards the media, as so many lefties want it to be killed for the common citizenry. It no longer serves its purpose.

The second factor is our belief that actual spurious ballots were introduced into the system by both mailing in and other means. And the numbers were not even that large; Trump “lost” by about twelve thousand in Georgia, eighty thousand in Pennsylvania, and under twenty-one thousand in Wisconsin. Let’s not pretend that those were particularly difficult numbers to have illegally come up with.

But there’s not a shred of evidence…the courts…

Look, friends, we live in the age of MiniTru and Comrade Ogilvy. We have precisely zero sources of reliable direct information. Don’t believe me?

Answer these questions:

1. What was on Hunter Biden’s laptop?

2. What party and philosophy ruled the states that drove United States’ Covid stats into the stratosphere?

3. Who took the blame?

4. How much evidence did there turn out to be of Russian interference with the 2016 election?

And, conversely:

5. How many Arab states has Israel recently signed peace treaties with?

6. Who got NAFTA replaced with a treaty that more carefully guards US workers’ interests?

7. Who hasn’t gotten us into any new wars?

8. Under which presidency did the United States regain energy independence, so we DON’T get into any new wars?

9. Why are illegal immigrants largely going or staying home?

10. And how much do we hear about this: USPS worker charged with dumping ballots, as mail carriers perform extra trips before Election Day | Fox News

And, if you don’t know the answers to these, ask yourself why you don’t?

Moreover, why did Facebook and other social media suppress any notion of election fraud? One doesn’t need to suppress a lie; “a lie will not stand.” There’s only benefit in suppressing “inconvenient truths” (to steal another fraudulent Democrat meme).

Of course, when you control the media, a lie most certainly WILL stand…if it’s your lie.

Instead, we are thrown back on secondary increments of data, because the left isn’t clever enough – well, not YET, anyway – to have doctored those. (“Call for Comrade Ogilvy from Democratic Party Headquarters! Comrade Ogilvy please pick up the red phone in the lobby…”)

Among the secondary sources of information are:

The railroading of secession through various Democrat-run southern states by careful selection of those who would be allowed into the secession conventions.

Tammany Hall.

“Vote often and early for James Michael Curley.”

The Battle of Athens and the E. H. Crump (Democratic Party) political machine.

Cook Country, which is to say, Chicago, 1960.

Princess Nudelman, the dead goldfish (yes, I know the fish didn’t cast a vote. What’s important is that someone TRIED).

Look at the heritage.org election fraud map.

In short, election fraud is so completely a part of the Democratic Party and the left, more generally, and has been for so long, that it would only be remarkable if there were a close election where there wasn’t any. We expect it. If we can’t easily see it, we expect it to be only because it’s a little better hidden than usual.

The Democratic Party is and always has been a party of corruption, heavy on power, short of or bereft of principle. The only difference between it and any given sub-Saharan African kleptocracy is in the shade of skin.

But what about the courts?

No, wait; you didn’t know that the legal profession is up there – or down there – with college sociology departments for its tendency to lean left? You didn’t know that coming up with direct evidence is often quite difficult? Investigations take years to uncover single instances of discrete bank fraud; we’re expected to find evidence of massive voter fraud quickly? See below.

Then, too, one might well wonder just _which_ John Roberts it was that visited Epstein’s pedophile island. Epstein didn’t waste his efforts on nobodies, you know; oh, no, he turned over the use of his harem of barely post-pubescent teens to the already powerful and the up and – you should pardon the expression – comers.

I don’t know that it was him. I will not insist it was him. I want to see an honest investigation into whether or not it was him.

Of course, to be more fair than he probably deserves, Roberts probably does think he’s heading off a civil war. He’s wrong, of course, as Roger Taney was before him; he is bringing the war closer and ensuring it will be worse.

Difficult to come up with evidence? Enter the mail-in ballot, a positive Godsend for would be election fraudsters. Just think about what’s required to prove effective fraud on that scale. It’s not the mere one hundred and thirteen thousand vote that allegedly swung things in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.

We’re not talking here about railroading Jefferson Washington Lincoln III, the small-time dope dealer and occasional fence. Oh, no; this is a much more – an infinitely more – difficult problem.

For one thing, the investigators would have to scrub the voting rolls themselves. Then they’d also have to scrub the obituary columns and social security death register for the last century or so…or three. Add in the birth and naturalization records. They’d have to match not just the one hundred and thirteen thousand votes in question, but every mail in ballot AND every other ballot too. (No, the mere likelihood of most of the fraud coming via mail does not rule out more traditional methods.) And they’d have to do all this in a country that has an automatic revulsion against keeping and consolidating those very kinds of records, and often where the government in charge of the states in question will interpose every possible obstacle. And all of that with MiniTru ensuring that no adverse information ever sees the light of day.

Has anyone put that kind of effort into the investigation? No, they have not. Hence, with the best will in the world, the courts had not enough to work with. Hence, none of the investigations can be said to be valid. No, none of them. Neither can any of the court decisions, even where legally sound – and they were not all legally sound; Roberts, you swine, I’m looking at you – are dispositive, either.

So forget it; the information coming from the media is doctored and dishonest, with anything contrary studiously suppressed. The investigations were trash. The court’s refusal to hear cases prejudiced where not just outright unconstitutional.

Now some ignorant toad is going to scream, “Conspiracy loons! Conspiracy theory!”

Not on your life. People are not competent to conspire at this level, while Biden, cowering in his basement, certainly wasn’t. No, no; this is not a conspiracy but a consensus or, rather, several of them. A consensus exists when similar people, with similar values, backgrounds, and educations, see similar issues and problems, similarly, and come up with similar programs and solutions. A consensus doesn’t rule out conspiracy (“Adam, should we introduce spurious bit of bullshit X as people’s exhibit A, for the impeachment trial?”) but doesn’t depend on it either. It was sufficient in this case for enough middle and lower party workers and sundry activists, plus the media and the vile and filthy denationalized rich to a) believe that the only legitimate directions for the United States to go were further left, more globalist, less nationalist, more feminist, less nativist, etc., b) to recognize the promise of mail-in ballots, c) to deny for themselves that any principle is more important that continuing to move in those directions, and d) a resolve to do it, each in his or her or s/h/its individual capacity. No, Facebook did not conspire with Twitter; there was no need. No, X judge didn’t conspire with the Democratic Party; there was no need. No, Buffet and Bezos and Billzebub Gates didn’t conspire with Soros; there was no need. There was no need because they share a consensus.

And, so, no; we do not have any faith in the election results. Nor will we have, especially since we are quite certain that election fraud is now the way of the future. Soon to be President Harris (does anyone, anyone at all, have any illusions about that? Did anyone, ever? I have no more doubt of it than I have that she gives the best blowjob in the world, if the payoff is right) will never be considered legitimate. And she, and we, can expect everything from civil disobedience to nullification to riot to resistance in arms until the war commences. (Bet you didn’t know that the South was not the only region the states of which engaged in nullification.)

*****

Since President Trump has raised this issue again, let me further state that what may well have happened in 2020 is more significant that the civil war, Pearl Harbor, and 911 _combined_. It is, if we cannot undo it and also destroy those responsible for it, the death knell of the Republic. No, this is no time to let bygones be bygones.

Ever ponder the mystery of gunboat diplomacy? Mystery? Why, yes; it’s a mystery. Think about it; a small boat or flotilla of a western power, often mounting cannon that, in nautical terms, were pretty laughable. It fires a few shots or a few dozen or even a few hundred or thousand and the Arab, African, or Asian rulers knuckle under and give us what we^[1] want.

It’s mysterious, so much effect for so little expenditure and so little damage.

Note, here, that when I am writing of gunboat diplomacy, I am expressly ignoring the expansive version found in Wiki and in any number of left-wing books and columns online. In other words, no, it’s not the threat of invasion on land nor even the actual fact of invading. It’s not blockade on its own.

Let’s look at a few examples, shall we?

Zanzibar, 1896

This, the shortest war in human history, took place because, after the suspicious murder of a pro-British Sultan, the replacement was a) not the preferred British candidate and b) had the affrontery not to seek, less still obtain, the approval of the resident British consul in Zanzibar. Moreover, the cheeky blighter hid himself in his palace, fortified it, called out his guards and slaves, plus over a thousand civilians, to defend him. Worse, when the British ordered him to stand down and leave his palace he – can one believe it? – refused.

The British duly opened fire. About five hundred people were killed or wounded and the palace shot to pieces. After between thirty-eight and forty-five minutes of this, the Sultan sought and was granted refuge in the German consulate. He, himself, was uninjured.

Finally, in a smashing show of their dedication to justice, the British fined the Zanzibari people for the cost of the shells.

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The emphasis of this column will be on idiocy, not on the law of war. I will, however, use the law of war to show that those writing it, getting it modified, interpreting or, more accurately, misinterpreting it are idiots, devoid of reason, and completely ignorant of the reality of war. That, or they’re simply dishonest. Sometimes, of course, they are both.

What I’m going to use as a vehicle for this little sub-project is a number of inherent internal contradictions to the law of war as written by this sort of human rights lawyer, NGOs (non-governmental organization, which, yes, bizarrely actually think of themselves as legitimate sources of law), and general bleeding hearts and do-gooders.

Taking and Executing Hostages

Though there is case law holding that taking and even executing hostages^[1] is lawful, provided certain factors are present, especially that there is some connection between the hostages and the behavior, the illegal behavior, we wish to deter, more modern takes absolutely forbid it^[2].

It’s a nonsense bar. Why? Everyone taking part in an insurgency or program of terrorism, to the limited extent these may differ, is also enrolled in a conspiracy to wage war in an illegal manner or is actively and actually waging war in an illegal manner. The traditional and proper penalty is death.

So imagine every prisoner you have taken in a theater of war experiencing an insurgency. Most will not have been captured in arms, wearing a fixed insignia recognizable at a distance, and were parts of organizations operating other than in accordance with the law of war. Every one has been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death, except for those you found not guilty and released, say, and those still pending trial.

Imagine you have tens of thousands of them, all sentenced to death, but you have so far executed none of them. What you have done, however, is listed the names of the tens of thousand of them, broken down by tribe, by city, by town, and by province.

And then an IED goes of in Tikrit, killing two of your men. You duly consult your list, select two hundred names from in and around Tikrit, and then hang them^[3]. You then start conducting raids in an around Tikrit until you’ve come up with at least two hundred more.

You haven’t announced any hostage taking. You have merely exercised your lawful right to enforce the law of war. The effect, the practical effect, however, is indistinguishable from taking and executing hostages.

It might, be it noted, be wise to distinguish between those who have waged war in an illegal manner and those taken in arms, meeting all the requirements of lawful combatancy. If you have the latter, you ought not, remembering that there may be more than one enemy insurgent organization involved, and that you ought not hold as engaging in a conspiracy to wage war in an illegal manner those who are under organizations who have not done this.

I mean, it’s not as if we can’t beat them like we owned them, provided they’re not cheating.

This, the futility of the rules against hostage taking, tends to show that the international human rights lawyers, etc., pushing this kind of thing simply do not understand, and are likely to be incapable of understanding, the realities of the matter. All that’s left to them, then, is to scream and pout and throw temper tantrums. We can survive the worst of their tantrums and the loudest of their screams.

Failed Surrender and the Doctrine of Ineffective Surrender^[4]

There is a theory, again emanating from international human rights lawyers, NGOs, etc., that the right to surrender is absolute, under all circumstances. You must accept surrender right up until the last millisecond.

No, really; modern human rights lawyers, NGOs, and some interpretations of international humanitarian law (IHL) push the idea that the right to surrender is effectively absolute — once someone indicates they want to surrender, you are required to accept it and stop using force against them, even in the middle of an ongoing firefight. The NGOs/Lawyers will almost invariably claim that:

• Surrender must be respected the moment it is offered or indicated.

• You cannot refuse it even though the person is still dangerous, still armed, or because accepting it would be tactically inconvenient.

• Continuing to shoot after surrender has been offered is a war crime.

• This view is heavily influenced by human rights law creeping into the law of war, especially in non-international armed conflicts and urban environments.

So let’s explore that a bit, shall we?

First, the notion fails on a number of grounds. One is that soldiers engaged in a hotly contested assault cannot be said to be fully sane at the time of the assault and for some short time after. They also develop literal tunnel vision. And in circumstances of doubt, they will never be convicted by their own organization because everyone in that organization understands that they have a pat insanity defense and can even credibly deny seeing that their enemy put his hands up.

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That’s right; you cannot imagine how it pains me, the Supreme Court upholding birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens and transient tourists born within the United States. As much as it pains me, though, it doesn’t hurt as much as the knowledge that the Supreme Court actually got it right. Unwise? Oh, definitely, but legally and constitutionally right notwithstanding. And now, per Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion, it is up to the political branches to do something about it. I’ll cover that something – those _many_ somethings – in my other column, The Care and Feeding of YOUR Right Wing Death Squad.

By the way, we cannot in good conscience complain about the legislating from the bench done by the left-wing Supreme Courts of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, in one breath, and then, in the next, whine about the failure of the right wing Supreme Court to legislate from the bench in the 2020s. This is why Kavanaugh’s ruling is generally correct; he sees the limits on judicial power, avoids the constitutional question, and tries to resolve the issue at the lowest level of law possible. Go read his dissent, I encourage you.

But right...I’m claiming they got it right. Oh, Kratman, you traitor to all that is good and holy, how can you?

With pain, as mentioned, with great pain.

But, however painful I find it, they still got it right. However, they didn’t get it right, necessarily, in the opinion, or not completely so. I’ll cover that.

The court had to try to determine just what was in the minds of the legislatures at the time of ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Yes, clearly, the amendment was aimed at protecting the rights of the recently freed slaves. It did not, however, say that it was only aimed at the freedmen. It would have been easy enough to have done so, but they simply didn’t say that. On its face, then, the amendment covers everybody born in the United States (barring four exceptions listed in the later Wong Kim Ark case).

Ah, but surely they didn’t intend to grant citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants, right?

Wrong; the thought, the objection, the limitation, would never have occurred to them. Why not? Because the very concept of illegal immigration didn’t exist for us yet. At the time of ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, such was our national appetite for labor, the United States welcomed everybody. Even the limited strictures imposed at, say, Ellis Island didn’t yet exist. Indeed, Ellis Island didn’t open as an immigration processing center for another twenty-four years. “Come one, come all, baby!”

Note that even the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese Exclusion Act lay decades in the future. Looking to the past, however, we can see that the English Common Law which, yes, is and was generally good law in the United States, had birthright citizenship. And for many centuries before the Fourteenth Amendment. If you were born there, the king had an obligation to defend you and you had an obligation to support him. (This is the part Roberts really got wrong; citizenship is not the right to have rights but a mutual exchange of duties.)

Ah, but what about the need to be domiciled here, as Justice Thomas wrote of in his dissent. Becoming domiciled is a conscious decision. Newborns do not make conscious decisions; they cry when their butts are slapped; they cry when they’re hungry; they cry when they need changing, and that’s it…and none of that is very conscious. Hence the limitation of domicile – not that it was ever enacted into law – doesn’t exist for them. I cannot see how the decisions of parents (and, by the way, most illegals fully intend to be domiciled here, if they can avoid la Migra), can affect a presumptive citizenship in babies.

I just can’t see any other way to frame it but that the Fourteenth Amendment, on its face, extended citizenship to all children born here, irrespective of the citizenship and ultimate allegiance of the parents.

This is the part the court missed. The administration based its case largely on an interpretation of “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States that required no other allegiance to any other sovereign, which includes other sovereign states.

Let me introduce you to William Young Boyd II, a scion of the prosperous Boyd family of Panama. (He appeared in the books, Yellow Eyes and the Tuloriad, with his permission.)

Bill was a student at Phillip’s Andover, a very high end private boarding school here in the States. At the age of eighteen, in 1944, he received his draft notice. No, he was not a citizen of the United States, but of Panama. No, he was not on a track toward citizenship. No, he had not made a decision to domicile here. No, his visa was only a temporary student visa. Nonetheless, we drafted him, trained him as an infantryman (anti-tank, actually), put him in the 42d Infantry Division, and sent him overseas to suffer, fight, and possibly die[2].

Now tell me, in what way did the United States fail to exercise complete jurisdiction over Bill Boyd? Complete jurisdiction, even though his visa was temporary? Complete jurisdiction, even though he was not domiciled here and had given no indication he intended to be domiciled here? (After the war, he returned to Panama and took his proper place on the board of Boyd Steamship Company.) Complete jurisdiction even though he was most definitely not a citizen? Tell me how some state can exercise more complete jurisdiction that to draft someone, make him take an oath of allegiance, turn him into an infantry private, and then send him overseas to fight for us?

Bill was hardly alone or unique. We did the same thing in the Civil War. We did the same thing for the First World War. We did the same thing for the Second World War, en masse. We’ve trimmed those laws a bit, in the time since, but Congress can, at any time in the future, reassert that very same form of – need I say it again? – _complete_ jurisdiction, hence, given how easy that would be, that form of complete jurisdiction already exists, in posse if not in situ. In short, the United States will assert as complete a form of jurisdiction as possible, at need, at any time such a need arises.

Note that these two limitations, domicile and complete jurisdiction, done to death by either myself or Kavanaugh’s concurrence in the result, do not cover all the possibilities. There is a third possibility, which is birth tourism, the obtaining of US citizenship by foreign nationals, for their children, for whatever reasons seem good to them.

Nobody collects precise data on numbers of birth tourism births in the United States. Grok provides a list of the most prominent offenders:

1. China: By far the largest source. Tens of thousands of Chinese women have traveled to the U.S. specifically for birth tourism in recent years.

2. Russia: Significant numbers, especially from wealthier families.

3. Turkey: Notable increase in recent years.

4. Nigeria: Growing source, particularly from affluent families.

5. Mexico: Long-standing flow, though more mixed with other migration.

6. Brazil: Increasing in popularity.

7. South Korea: Historically significant.

8. Taiwan: Consistent numbers.

9. Iran: Notable despite sanctions.

10. India: Growing, especially among upper-middle-class families.

Note, we can deal with these, in other ways, effectively and perhaps completely. The numbers are not really great, in the big scheme of things. Indeed, it’s really only China that represents a huge problem, and that problem is more a case of legal but morally pseudo-citizens returning to the US for espionage and sabotage than economic problem or citizenship-dilution. I’ll cover it in the other column, to be posted in The Care and Feeding of YOUR Right Wing Death Squad.[3]

[1] Hat tip to Doctor Smith

[2] Bill wrote a couple of books about his experiences in the Army, both at war and, later, during the early stages of occupation, with the 5^th Infantry Regiment. If we had known that about his background, in 3/5 Infantry, on Fort Kobbe, in Panama, in the 80s, he’d have been an invited guest at every battalion function we held. It is probably a memorial to his overall modesty that somehow we did not know this about him. I only found out via an exchange of emails.

[3] Because the left is so orgasmic with glee over the Barbara ruling that TCAFOYRWDS is the proper place to rain on their parade.

So you cannot possibly fit a frigate into something the size of a LIGHT FRACKING CRUISER? That’s absurd. And incompetent. And typical.

Kelly Johnson – yes, Skunk Work’s Kelly Johnson – had a number of official rules for doing business with the government. He also had one unofficial rule: “Never do business with the Navy. They don’t know what they want, they’ll change their minds every week, and they’ll break your heart — or some more exposed part of your anatomy.”

That quote dates to the mid-fifties, so you have apparently been having problems with this sort of thing for a long, long time.

So, to particulars. The Franco-Italian frigate, called the “FREMM”[1]; the United States Navy was going to buy these sixty-seven hundred ton behemoths as our own Constellation Class frigates. Ignore for now that this was in no way a frigate, but comparable in tonnage to the Second World War’s Atlanta and Juneau Class light cruisers. No, calling a light cruiser a frigate does not make it a frigate. On the other hand, it was planned to have less than a frigate’s crew[2]. This is another problem we’ll discuss in a bit.

For now let us note that being a light cruiser masquerading as a frigate, does not make it a frigate.

From the outside, looking in, it appears that the problem stemmed from the desire to have one do-it-all kind of light cruiser-sized frigate. So you began adding in missions and the means to accomplish those missions. This included thirty-two Vertical Launch System cells, mainly for air defense[3]. Moreover, you wanted the Constellation Class to be able to:

1. Destroy surface ships over the horizon

2. Detect enemy submarines

3. Defend convoy ships

4. Employ active and passive electronic warfare systems

5. Defend against swarming small boat attacks

And then projected costs began to rise. And the inevitable delays began. When just enough money had been spent and just enough progress made on the first two “frigates,” the program was put to sleep. Those first two are still a-building and, who knows, may well be finished.

The current replacement for the Constellation Class is going to be a four thousand ton Coast Guard cutter, the National Security Cutter. It apparently has its own problems.

So at this point you, Dear Navy, tried your hands at Littoral Combat Ships and failed miserably. You tried your hands at modifying a successful foreign design and failed, miserably. You are now looking at a Coast Guard-designed cutter. What is the outside viewer to assume beyond that you are incompetent to design a small warship? That’s right, simply incompetent.

This is exacerbated by two related factors, the preposterous expansion of your shore establishment at the expense of the fleet, and the will-of-the-wisp fetish for crew reductions driven by an unseemly fetish for automation.

Unseemly? Robotics and automation are fine for routine tasks. But yours is a fighting service where the enemy gets a vote. You will take damage in war and your skeleton crews are not capable of dealing with that damage. Neither are there any practical robots, nor are there likely to be very soon, that can deal with serious damage.

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So let’s suppose we are executing all common law felons on the first conviction. Besides reducing the crime problem massively, what else is good and bad or, at least, problematic about it?

The first problem is what I phased in the title as the sheep v. lamb problem or “May as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.” Think about that in regards to three of the crimes I listed last week: Rape, Burglary and (late add) kidnapping. If you are going to be executed for any of those crimes, and you can eliminate the main prosecution witness or witnesses by slitting one or a few throats, what is the actual downside to you?

There isn’t any. You have just radically improved your chances of getting away with the crime and living over what those chances would have been had you left living witnesses.

Perfect solutions to the problem? There aren’t any. This doesn’t mean, however, that there are no at least partial solutions to the problems, which, over the long haul, are likely to prove perfect enough.

People often assume when I put crucifixion in my books I am unserious, or that when I discuss it online I am pulling people’s chains. Uh, uh. Oh, I don’t revel in the prospect, no; I am not a sadist. Even so, I am absolutely serious. In a world where criminal justice can devolve into the sheep v. lamb calculation, the obvious way around that calculation is, “Who said anything about giving you a quick and fairly clean death like hanging? Oh, no, my friend, if you merely rob someone, we will hang you. If you kill them we will not hang you; we will tie you to a cross (tied rather than nailed to avoid offending the Christian majority) and leave you there to struggle, suffer, beg, plead, cry and whine like a little bitch as you die by self-inflicted slow torture, in public, by inches, over days.”

Somewhat similarly, a simple and easy hanging may not be enough for rapists, to include child molesters. Why not make the punishment fit the crime? Why not impale them?

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You will probably understand why the title when you’re done with this piece.

“Ah, yes, the ‘unalienable rights.’ Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. Life? What ‘right’ to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What ‘right’ to life has a man who must die if he is to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of ‘right’? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man’s right is ‘unalienable’? And is it ‘right’? As to liberty, the heroes who signed the great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.”

--LTC (Ret.) Jean DuBois, Starship Troopers

Personally, I think Heinlein, while on the right track here, in general, was just a bit too extreme. Why? Because I can identify two natural rights and one natural law. The natural rights are the right to do anything that’s to your own advantage, using any means available, and the right to try to contract. The natural law is the law of contract, natural because self-enforcing. In other words, if you make contracts and violate them, even once, people will not contract with you thereafter.

To some extent, the contract can be tacit, never stated but broadly understood. Thus one does not snatch one’s neighbor’s children to turn into stew for the evening dinner, for example, lest he do the same to yours after using his natural right to shoot you and then skin you alive as you bleed out. No, I am not suggesting that little Mary Sue would make a fine dinner, merely illustrating in stark terms the tacit contract.

This is not hard to understand.

So if the right to life and liberty are not natural, whence do they arise? They arise under the natural law of contract, specifically the social contract, under which we give up certain natural rights, and incur certain obligations[1], to gain greater rights and protections.

I am not so doctrinaire nor so authoritarian as to insist that someone be under the social contract. If they want out, and declare that they do, either by word or deed, they can be out. If they do, however, what basis for according them the rights that arise not naturally but only under the social contract? There is no such basis. If they’re out, then they ought be treated as really out.

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You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads!

–Dr. Evil, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery

So why battleships at all? Before I answer that we need to look at the questions, why carriers and for how much longer?

Carriers do two primary things, support the precise and flexible/timely throwing of aerial firepower at an enemy, at long range, and provide facilities for command and control of flotillas and fleets. The latter is not actually carrier dependent; there are lots of ships and even more conceivable classes of ships that can house an admiral and his staff, while providing broad, sophisticated, and secure communications capability. The Blue Ridge Class of amphibious command and control ships could surely, perhaps with a little tweaking, do everything a carrier permits, command and control-wise, and perhaps more. It probably can’t keep up, but something could be made which can.

Pundits[1] bemoan the vulnerability of carriers. “Oh, nooooes; those deadly Chinese carrier-killer missiles. Oh, nooooes!”

That’s really not the big problem. Even though they’re quite large, carriers are harder to find than that. To the extent that the Chinese may rely on satellites to find those carriers, yes, we can take out their satellites. The carriers can, today, do their jobs from outside the range of those oh-so-deadly DF-21s. We test carrier vulnerability on a regular basis as landings turn into crashes. Might we lose one or two? Sure, we might. That’s just the potential cost of doing business in that kind of business.

It might be worth remembering here that more sailors died at sea during the Guadalcanal Campaign than did Marines and Soldiers ashore, and generally in unspeakable agony. And yet we won the war. Funny how that works out.

In any case, no, we need not be overly concerned about carrier vulnerability or, at least, not quite yet. Rather, we need to be concerned about aircraft and pilot vulnerability. And that is where my Dr. Evil quote, above, comes in.

There is a 1995 Protocol against Permanent Blinding Weapons, Protocol IV to the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. However, Section 3 of that Protocol says the following:

“Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this Protocol.”

Indeed, almost the entire thrust of the Protocol is on intent. If your intent is not to blind, but to kill, to destroy a plane in the air or cause it to crash, or to destroy optics, and you have the ability to kill, destroy, or crash, then your laser weapon is lawfully usable. The same is true if the intent is to destroy or damage optics.

It’s also true that a laser weapon capable of dazzling at ten kilometers will blind at two or three. Note that China had such lasers, in the form of the ZM-87 handheld jobbie, about thirty-five years ago. The ZM-87 had an average power of fifteen milliwatts. The HELIOS system, only so far deployed on the USS Preble, DDG-88, has an average power four MILLION times greater. And HELIOS is by no means the ultimate in conceivable laser power. The lasers we intend to put on the Trump class are ten times more powerful, and that is still not the ultimate in conceivable laser power.

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Color me deeply skeptical. No, not about the value of fifteen battleships; I am skeptical that any of these things will BE battleships. I suspect also that the Navy is – perhaps deliberately – ignoring what we learned about battleships during the roughly thirty-five years when they ruled the oceans.

A battleship is a large, heavily armed and armored warship, that can both deliver serious blows and take them. As regards that latter, by way of example, though the IJN Yamato was sunk, it took between eleven and thirteen torpedo hits, and between six and twelve[2] mostly one thousand pound bombs, to sink her. Her sister ship, Musashi, took nineteen torpedo hits and seventeen bombs. That is what it means to take blows. No warship currently in commission anywhere in the world, of which I am aware, could take anything like that level of punishment. Nor even a small fraction of it.

The way a battleship took blows and kept sailing and fighting was via torpedo blisters or belts[3], armoring, compartmentalization, damage control, plus offensive and defensive firepower, the former being useful to sink the enemy, after which they can’t throw any more fire at you. Mutual support – because these behemoths were supposed to operate in squadrons of four – was a key component of defensive firepower.

Earlier armoring schemes tried to match the level of armor to both the likelihood of hits and the importance of the thing or area being protected. Post World War One, the more advanced forms of battleship tended to use what was called “all or nothing” armoring systems. In this, a closed top, open – which is to say, unarmored - bottom armored box was designed, within which were the critical things like magazines, engines, fire control, and command. Also turrets were heavily armored, especially on their faces. Yamato and Musashi, for example, had twenty-six inch sloped armor, which was effectively about thirty-three inches if hit from close range on a flat trajectory. A command station, called a “conning tower,” above or as a part of the superstructure, would also be well armored. Everything else got nothing. The armored citadel, ideally, had enough flotation to it that a good deal of the rest of the ship could be flooded and the ship still float to make its way back to port or to be towed back to port, for repairs.

It should be obvious that, at thirty-five thousand tons, almost exactly the same length and beam as an Iowa Class battleship, but a much shallower draft, that the Trump Class is going to be essentially unarmored. It will not be able to take serious blows.

It is less obvious whether, in the face of hypersonic missiles, such a ship even can be effectively armored. It is not impossible that it can, possibly though sheer thickness, possibly through some form of the same kinds of defense we use on tanks, ranging from one or another form of Chobham, to explosive reactive armor, non-explosive reactive armor, and active defensive systems like the Russian Shtora-1 and Arena, Germany’s StrikeShield, or Israel’s Trophy system.

A quick history lesson: Back in the 1880s through the early 1900s, there was a school of naval thought, predominately among the French “Jeune Ecole,” which thought that a large number of cheap torpedo boats could make the battleship obsolete. Back in the 1970s, with the appearance on the battlefield of large numbers of Sagger Anti-tank Guided Missiles (ATGMs)[4], pundits all over the world were likewise predicting the end of the tank. Both were wrong and for largely the same reasons. One was that both tanks and battleships had redundant carrying capacity, which allowed modifications to defensive arrangements – better armor, secondary guns, spaced armor, torpedo blisters, etc. – to nullify the torpedo boats and defend against their torpedoes…or ATGMs. Another was improved tactics for dealing with both. A third was combined arms, to protect the expensive assets with cheaper ones, and to destroy or suppress the threats presented. Thus, infantry digs ATGM crews out of close terrain and fortifications. Thus destroyers did for torpedo boats.

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No, I’m not particularly afraid of a war with China. Yes, I mean that in both senses; I’m not especially worried that it will happen and I am not especially worried about the result if it does.

Let’s take the latter first, shall we?

China’s strategic position is appalling, and at least the higher party cadres and senior military leadership have to know that it is. Why? China is utterly dependent on both imports and exports to keep their economy going and to feed themselves. By that latter, I don’t just mean they need to import food, though they do to the tune of one third. That’s bad enough, but they also need to import fertilizer to grow the inadequate amount of food they grow for themselves. No, nitrogen and phosphates aren’t a huge problem; they are net exporters. Potash is a problem. Loss of potash imports probably cut their grain production by about ten percent. This would be painful, but survivable with a touch of rationing and some weight loss.

Except for one thing, oil and natural gas. Cut those off and grain production drops by a third within two years and probably forty percent after that. On top of the loss of the third that they must import, that’s serious hunger.

And another thing, farm machinery and transportation. China only produces about a quarter of its oil needs domestically. Cut those off and mechanization of farming must be reduced.

Add in that this kind of food reduction also means they must stop feeding food animals.

Moreover, while a good deal of their transportation net runs off of electricity, which can be produced by the coal China does have, at what we might call the strategic level, getting the food from the farms to the railheads and from the railheads to markets to kitchens requires liquid fuel. China’s ability to produce liquid fuel from coal exists, but it is tiny.

Add in the increased need for liquid fuel for their military in this case.

A long series of interrogatories to Grok suggests that China’s total food production and importation collapses by seventy percent or more within two or three years if they go to war with us.

It won’t be sudden; they probably have about a year’s worth of food in storage against such a day. But within three years? We’re talking an entire civilization in kwashiorkor[1] and marasmus[2].

How do they keep that industrial civilization going in the absence of food and energy imports, or the exports that have kept their economy going? They likely don’t.

Although China’s population appears to be in accelerating collapse, they still have a lot more people than we do. Surely that represents…nothing. For a war fought largely at sea it represents nothing. Yes, they can, at least for the moment, build more ships faster than we can. However, we can build things to sink ships faster than they can build ships. Thus, we’ll keep our existing naval supremacy.

There’s a worse factor in there, though; in China sons are just a lot more important than daughters. No, I don’t care if this upsets western feminist sensibilities; we are not talking about the west but about China. Daughters, assuming they marry, go on to take care of their husband’s family. Sons take care of the parents. It is the rare Chinese family with an extra son to spare.

But can’t they build enough ships to overwhelm our blockade in the short term, at least? No, they can’t. China is surrounded by enemies on land, Vietnam, India, and Russia predominant among them, though none of the neighbors – barring, maybe, North Korea – really likes China or doesn’t fear it. No, however much public kissy face they may engage in for foreign consumption, China and Russia have long-standing, intractable issues between them. China is a threat to Russia and vice versa in ways we are not.

So all the manpower and money spent on a navy is largely wasted. They’re not going to get a navy large, powerful, and competent enough to take us on and, if they really try to, we will manufacture a war – the United States is good at this – to trim them down to size before they can. Worse, every increment of money and manpower they spend on the navy is money and manpower not spent on the much more important army and air force.[3]

Ah, but what about their carriers? Their carriers that are based on a rotten design? That carry a bit over half the aircraft? That are non-nuclear (though they’re building a nuke ship)? One is unimpressed. For that matter, China’s limited blue water fleet would have to fight past the first island chain – Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia – to even get at us. If they can.

And those oh-just-too-deadly for words, yet untested, DF-21 carrier killer missiles? We’re not going to blockade within range of those, even though we have reason to doubt they’re as effective as the propaganda portrays. We are not talking a stop and search blockade here; that would be idiotic. Rather, we will identify an exclusion zone and simply sink everything within it or heading toward it. To get past our blockade to ship to presumptive allies; that would require a good deal of hoop-jumping to avoid being sunk. We can do this.

So, yes, we can take on China and crush them. And they have to know we can. So, being sensible men and women, they probably do not want a war with us. Hence, we probably will not have one.

Here’s the part that bothers me, which goes with the existence of that mostly useless navy. What if the Party has been captured by its own propaganda? It may know China cannot win and still be forced into actions that lead to war by the demands of the lower ranks in the party and in the larger society and the military.

Unfortunately, we and the Chinese don’t understand each other well at all. One example, one pointed example, will suffice.

China uses and has used its military as a kind of message-sending device. The pattern is clear; when there’s an issue at hand, they hit out. They’ve done it to India at least four times, I think, to Vietnam once, in a very serious – probably twenty-five to thirty thousand dead – way[4], in 1979, and to the USSR over a period of about seven months, in 1969. China hits, causes some pain, then backs off and says, “Now let’s talk.”

They also, however, tried this approach with us in Korea. It didn’t work. Once they hit us and drove us back, we were not interested in talking; we wanted revenge and erasure of the humiliation. I do not have the sense that we ever understood that they wanted to talk. I don’t think they ever understood why we would not talk.

And that lack of common understanding could, indeed, lead us both into an unfortunate war. It is critically important, therefore, that we never allow China to acquire the delusion that they can take us on.

Go Navy; six hundred ships or bust.

[1] Caused by protein deficiency.

[2] Caused by deficiency in all macronutrients.

[3] The Navy is much more important to us because we have no serious land enemies in this hemisphere.

[4] To the tune of about a thousand killed every day for a month.

And what that means is that you can undo the organizational and material lunacies he inflicted on you. And you should start doing so right the fuck now.

Before we get too deeply into Berger, though, a little Army and Air Force history lest you be too embarrassed to admit to a series of whopping great mistakes.

In the early 1940s, when MacArthur was in charge in the Philippines, Army officers were assigned down to the “divisions” of the Army of the Commonwealth of the Philippines. They had no authority. They had no power.[1] But they could expect to be held personally responsible for the training and combat effectiveness of those Filipino divisions. What did they do? What did they do when the Divine MacArthur[2] demanded a high state of combat readiness, even though it would have taken a series of miracles to produce that? Well, of course, being a god, MacArthur’s business was miracles and it would have been heresy to have denied it, even by implication. So those Army officers did what officers have done through history when their careers were on the line; they lied. Those lies led directly to MacArthur’s frankly idiotic decision to put ill-led, worse equipped, and abominably trained Filipino levies to face the Imperial Japanese Army. Maybe worse, the delusional belief that the Filipinos could hold led directly to MacArthur forbidding his G4 from collecting food inside Bataan. (Though, be it noted, a good deal was collected to where the IJA could grab it once they’d routed the Filipinos.)

Then there was the Gama Goat, beyond which there has probably never been a worse motor vehicle in military history. Oh, adopting it wasn’t idiotic; in theory it was a decent idea. But the execution was so brain-bustingly stupid, that it should have been eased out of service with all possible haste. Of course it wasn’t. Why not? Because none of the US Armed forces can admit to even a trivial mistake. Indeed, we both had to give up our beloved M151s, and take on Hummers which were far more, and far more expensive, that Jeeps, in order to have an excuse to get rid of the never-sufficiently-to-be-damned M561 Gama Goats. Which, come to think of it, is yet another set of lies, isn’t it?

And then there was the Pentomic Division, forced upon the Army by a bright light of the airborne mafia. It lasted about four years and never reached the entirety of the Army. And yet, incomplete four years or not, it did damage from which the Army never has fully recovered and never will.

This can become amazingly petty and trivial, too. Know why the RS-71 became the SR-71? Because President Johnson had a slip of the tongue and publicly announced it as the SR-71. Voila! It became the SR-71.[3]

Nomenclature rarely hurts anything, though. How about the Army colonel who told Reagan that resistance training (as in SERE, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) was only being done by the Navy. Well, that meant that Ranger School had to stop, for years, giving Ranger students any resistance training.

Your beloved Corps is no better, by the way. After having your doctrine subordinated to and perverted by the misplaced, indeed, outright moronic, notion of OODA,[4] rather than admit to the mistake, your just pushed it into the background and got back to what actually mattered and actually worked. Last I looked, OODA, Decision Cycle Theory, the Boyd Cycle had been pushed back to a single footnote in your Warfighting manual. So you can do this.

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(Sorry this is a day late; I was literally pissing blood yesterday.)

When we ask this question what we’re really asking is twofold: What is the ideal end state? What is the minimally acceptable end state?

Let’s wax lyrical for a bit and try to define what the ideal end state, maximal victory[1], would look like.

For the US, and for the people of Iran, too, for that matter, maximal victory would see the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, as corrupt and vicious a crew as we’ve seen since the unlamented end of the last Einsatzgruppen, utterly exterminated, as an organization, and any survivors working as penal slaves in the deepest mines that might be found in Iran. Or maybe in Greenland. It would see the mullahs destroyed as a political force, and both rare and none too well supported as a religious one. It could see a genuine republic – or possibly a constitutional monarchy[2], or just possibly a strong dictatorship; it really makes no difference to us – established in Iran, friendly toward or even allied to the United States.

It should go without saying that the minimal victory is included in the maximal victory. This is that Iran cease any attempt at acquiring nuclear weapons, or any weapons of mass destruction, dismantle its ballistic missile program, cease funding and directing external terrorist movements like the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, etc. It is also obvious that minimal victory includes opening up Iran completely to – and I cannot emphasize this enough – NON-UN inspectors and auditors, to ensure they are not still trying to build nukes, breed diseases, or fund overseas terrorists.

Here’s the problem; there is no minimal victory. Leave the IRGC in existence and/or the mullahs in control and everything in the minimal victory list is, at best, temporary. They will, at the first opportunity, and at every subsequent opportunity, break any terms to which they have agreed, ban any inspections and audits, and, depending on who is running the United States, either get away with it or, if Republicans are in charge, force us into war again to gain that maximal victory which is, again, really the minimal victory.

So let me wax more lyrical still; if the official maximum victory is really only the minimal victory, is there a real maximal victory beyond that?

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But first, your favorite subject and mine, a history lesson.

In the days, weeks, and months leading up to Pearl Harbor, the Defense of the Philippines Campaign, and the Great Pacific war, why was MacArthur so enthused and confident about the presumed capabilities of the Philippine Army, enough to put them, hardly equipped, wretchedly led, and barely trained, up against the Japs – who were no slouches – at Lingayen Gulf.

We had training teams down there with the Commonwealth Army “divisions,” who were told, in as many words, “You have zero authority but will be held personally responsible for the state of training of the Filipino troops.”

So what did they do? I am sure they did what American officers almost always do in these circumstances; they lied and put on a show. MacArthur[1] believed the show and the lies, because it was what he wanted to hear and see. That, and his delusions of godhood, where gods deliver miracles and it would have taken many miracles to get the Filipinos to stand under those circumstances.

I think he knew it was all bullshit, deep down, though, because he nearly collapsed, intellectually and morally, on the outbreak of war, slightly recovered, then collapsed again when the Filipinos[2] were sent scurrying by the Imperial Japanese Army.

History lesson is over; what do you imagine happened when the Junta demanded D, E, and I performance from the military leadership? What happened is exactly what happened in the Philippines, prior to Pearl Harbor; the officer corps put on a face of agreement and cooperation, and lied, at worst, or kept silent, at best.

Go ahead and put a little block on the Officer Evaluation Report (OER) demanding to know if an officer supported DEI, phrased as SHARP[3], EO, EEO[4]. Put in the pertinent reg[5] and guidance pamphlet[6] fairly explicit “must support Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” It doesn’t matter in the slightest, because raters and senior raters will rubber stamp it for anything but open membership in the Klan and the American Nazi Party. (The Panthers, Nation of Islam, and la Raza probably got a pass.)

So what do you get with that kind of supposed reform? You do not get officers who support your program. Instead, you get officers for whom integrity becomes something of a fuzzy concept rather than an absolute requirement. You will have forced them to lie in self defense or in defense of innocent others and that is all.

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In the first place, and this should help to put things in some perspective, it was not a “war.” Of course a lot of warlike activity was going on, artillery flying, aircraft bombing, while body counts and often enough bodies were piling up. But still, it was not a war.

Rather, what Vietnam was, was a campaign in a larger war, the slow-motion world war we call “The Cold War.”

What? The Cold War was a world war? Oh, yes. Think about it; it was fought, one way or another, on both oceans and every continent. The dead ran into the tens of millions, twenty to thirty million is a common figure, as compared to the Great War’s fifteen to twenty-two million.

Once you understand that the Cold War was a world war, with all the fighting that took place between 1947 and 1991, almost all of which was directly a part of the Cold War, there is nothing else you can call those action but campaigns, or battles, or skirmishes, though many were very long campaigns. Korea? A campaign. The Arab-Israeli Wars, after their War of Independence? Just battles. Malaya? A campaign. Castro’s revolution in Cuba? A campaign. Hunting down and eliminated Che Guevara in Bolivia? A skirmish. Rhodesia? A campaign. The French in Indochina? A campaign.

And Vietnam; just an extremely lengthy campaign.

In World War II, you know, we lost the Battle of Kasserine Pass. And you know what else? It made no difference at all because we still won the war.

So did we lose the Vietnam Campaign? Yes. (And I’ll discuss whether we had to in a bit.) Did it matter? Not really, other than the myth of America’s defeat in war being perpetuated, largely by the left and ignorant foreigners, to the limited moral extent these may differ. Indeed, it didn’t matter because we won the war, the war that mattered, the Cold War, and saw the Soviet Union into the dustbin of history.

Sadly, we didn’t manage to get rid of Marxist-Leninism entirely, because it still exists and is worshiped across most of Academia.

The second myth concerns our alleged poor showing in a counter-insurgency war, especially as compared to such luminaries as, say, those just too cool for words, counterinsurgency-wise, Australians.

This is one of those half truths that is wholly misleading. It’s true that, outside of Special Forces and a Marine sideshow, the Combined Action Companies (later called Platoons)[1], we weren’t great at COIN. But it’s also true that COIN wasn’t our job.

Instead, our job was what was called “mid intensity combat,” which is very heavy conventional combat not arising to nuclear, and not readily distinguishable from Aachen or Okinawa. It was to engage and displace, defeat, or destroy – to keep on the run – or to physically block, the main force Viet Cong units, in battalion, regimental, and divisional strength, as well as the well-led, well-trained, well-armed regiments and divisions of the North Vietnamese Army. These were hovering around the perimeter, sustained by the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the ports and roads of Cambodia, ready to pounce on the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the Australians, the Kiwis, the Filipinos, etc., the moment the opportunity arose. Take us away from that job, put us into pure COIN, and we, the Aussies, and the rest would have quickly found ourselves ass-deep in the South China Sea as those NVA troops – and, again, they were good[2] – struck, with us spread out, and defeated us in detail.

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I was the XO – executive officer, second in command – for B Company-3/5 at the time. A Lieutenant Jones was a platoon leader for First Platoon.

My CO at the time, normally kind of an idiot[2] but one with the occasional interesting idea, had a whopper. He wanted Jones’ platoon to kidnap somebody to demonstrate our vulnerability to terrorism in Panama.

He went to the battalion commander, one LTC George B. Utter, with his idea. Utter was not an idiot (well, no more than the rest of us, to include me). He thought about the potential targets and gave us a list of four or five, I misremember, whom we could grab. The list was based on who would take it in good humor and not hold eternal grudges against anyone involved, nor on B Company as a whole.

Now I suggested we were all idiots because there was one factor nobody thought of. This was that the lieutenants of the battalion, along with the senior non-coms, had taken to carrying concealed loaded pistols in the jungle, and some in garrison, to defend the troops[3]. I could not tell you if this had trickled up to any of the captains or majors but I could not rule it out, either, then or now. I know Utter was packing.

Jones was picked to lead the effort and I got tapped to oversee Jones and to add a surely minor degree of maturity to his efforts. We beat it around for several days and settled on kidnapping the adjutant[4], hereinafter Captain George. We also, after kicking around several complex plans, settled on something simple.

LTC Utter was duly informed of our choice of targets and gave his approval. George was the son of an old friend of his.

We wanted it to look real, not merely to be credible to George but to give him a chance to spot what was about to happen if we were paying attention. To this end, we dressed a dark-skinned Hispanic buck sergeant named Torres – good kid, fine young soldier – in one of Jones’ jungle fatigue shirts, complete with insignia and name tape, and Torres’ own jungle trousers. It was not impossible, mind, for there to be a dark skinned Hispanic in Panama named Jones; Gringos had been interbreeding and intermarrying with Panamanian girls for close to a century by this point; we had built the Canal using largely Antillian labor and they’d come with English names (descendants of slaves in Jamaica, etc.) and had also interbred; while nearly the entire coast of Central America was also replete with the descendants of slaves from the banana plantations and they, too, tended to have English names and also to have interbred[5].

It was not impossible but it was nicely suspicious.

Torres was issued a .44 Magnum, very bright and shiny, from Jones’ personal armory. He wore this – oh, yes, unloaded but with the chambers filled with expended brass – tucked into his trousers.

Jones’ team consisted of himself, Torres, and two other men from First Platoon. They rehearsed the crap out of everything that could be rehearsed, except for one thing, and had the timing down pretty well, really.

Went down like this:

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So we’re going to be exchanging eighteen Ohio Class ballistic missile submarine, each capable of bearing 24 Trident missiles (we only mount twenty, four of the tubes are closed for treaty compliance purposes) or a much larger number – one hundred and fifty-four, each – of cruise missiles, for four of the eighteen, for a dozen Columbia (really District of Columbia) Class ballistic missile submarines, each with only sixteen tubes for Tridents. On the face of it this looks like a pretty bad exchange, two hundred and eighty missiles and six hundred and sixteen cruise missiles gone and one hundred and ninety-two in return? The idea of presenting an enemy with a third less targets doesn’t precisely fill me with glee, either.

Against this we have the prospect of putting a lot more warheads atop a Trident, say eight W88, 475 KT warheads, or up to twelve W76, 100 KT bombs. So, yes, those hundred and ninety-two missiles could, if we choose to arm them that way, give about the same throw-weight, hence about the same deterrence value, as the two hundred and eighty plus six hundred and sixteen.

I’m not too concerned about this, actually. Moreover the maintenance and refueling process meant that fourteen Ohios were needed to keep ten in service, whereas the Columbia Class will, allegedly, never need refueling. (Until, of course, we decide that we’ll have to keep them for fifty years, in which case they are certain to need refueling.)

In any case, this is not the real subject of my column. That subject is just what the hell do we do with the eighteen Ohio Class. Scraping is, of course, an option. I suggest we ought not. And here I am going to get into some areas I am not expert in, so submariners and swabbies in general, feel free to pipe right in.

Our Navy is too small. It is too small even if we give up the mission of keeping the sea lanes open on behalf of our many – O, MANY – fickle, feckless, faithless, frightened, ungrateful, and above all useless pseudo-allies, where the word “ally” has been redefined to mean, “moocher on defense welfare on the American dime.”

Note that some of those Ohios are about forty-six years old. Note, further, that the four oldest are the ones we converted to carry cruise missiles. Their metal has surely gotten at least somewhat fatigued and their deep diving ability consequently is likely reduced. Some, however, are much newer. Much. The youngest of the Ohios is only twenty-eight years since commissioning. If the oldest were good for forty-six, surely we have another eighteen years, minimum, of service out of the newest of the Ohios.

Now let’s talk about navy ships and our national shipbuilding ability. We don’t have enough and we cannot build enough, at least for now[1]. We also seem to have a good deal of multi-starred idiocy within our naval flag officer ranks[2].

So, and I cannot emphasize this enough, until we are capable of designing better ships, and then building them in job lots, we should not be throwing anything away that can still be of use. This is true both for the surface and subsurface fleets, but especially for the subsurface fleet.

The Ohios, to include the very oldest and especially the newest ones, can still be of use. The HY80 steel used is quite good stuff. If it’s showing some cracks from metal fatigue here and there, those cracks can be repaired. Moreover, the boats themselves can be derated to operate only down to, say, five hundred feet. This still gets them below the layer, the thermocline, hence still gets them under where they can be readily detected from the surface.

Moreover, assuming we do manage to fix our shipbuilding capability, and expand the Navy to where it needs to be, we’re going to need trained crews. Where will those trained submarine crews come from? How about from older submarines, which may not be up to dealing with the best the PLAN[3] may someday build, but are plenty good for training purposes.[4]

But can we man them? After all, recruiting is…

…doing just fine, thank you.

Since the overthrow of the unelected, unconstitutional junta[5] that occasionally put President Shitstain Brainfog on display in the Oval Office, recruiting has been great, with every service meeting their goals and the Army and Navy exceeding those goals. The Marines could have but elected not to in order to stay within authorized strength. I think that, somewhere in a population of 330 million or so, we can find another three thousand or so sailors to man those submarines.

Ah, but we’ll have to refuel them; pricey…pricey.

So what? Pricier than a new sub? Not remotely, it’s a small fraction of the price.

But what would be the mission of those old, derated Ohios, beyond the training mission? The obvious one is sea denial, especially stopping any oil from leaving the Persian Gulf in the direction of China. Or possibly heading towards the EU. No, I am not talking about stop and search. I am talking about identify and sink without warning[6]. Further, note that you can put a lot of food and find or create storage for a lot of torpedoes in a SSBN that no longer has to hold Tridents[7]. Moreover, since China, for all its many hulls, has only a trivial long distance blue water force, and those can be handled by our much larger blue water fleet, the Ohios can operate pretty much free of opposition. And this will be true for many years to come.

So swabbies of the surface and subsurface varieties, pipe on in and tell me where I am wrong.[8]

[1] (2) The Case for American Shipbuilding - CDR Salamander

[2] This in inference on my part, to be sure. But how else to explain the Littoral Combat Ship? Yes, the admirals are in charge of the disaster; who else should take the blame? The other services are just as bad, to include the Marines. And then there’s the Constellation class frigate: (1) No, I’m Not Over What NAVSEA Did to Constellation

[3] Peoples Liberation Army Navy

[4] And, frankly, one doubts that they would not be up to dealing with the PLAN at any stage of its development, especially when reinforced by newer boats and ships.

[5] Though “Soviet” might be a better word.

[6] No, picking up survivors is not in the submariner’s job description. “No, ma hob, man!”

[7] Hell, you could put in a field brothel and thus put an end to those scurrilous rumors about submarine crews. I figure four to five girls would be enough. They’ll have to be cleared, of course. Yes, I know it would never be allowed. Sigh.

[8] Do I know anything about subs? Maybe a little more than the layman – all forms of war have interested me since before I turned three - but my only real insight was as a grunt – infantryman – in the jungles of Panama. There, it occurred to me that the jungle is a sea. It has a surface, the roads, trails, broad rivers, ocean and lake frontages, and occasional spots where the Tropic Test Center went wild with Agent Orange, and it has a subsurface which is the jungle, itself. Those on the surface cannot see and usually cannot hear into the subsurface. Those in the subsurface usually cannot see or hear onto the surface. To do those, they must take a chance and stick their heads out. Moreover, inside that subsurface, you cannot really see much besides big trees, and those in the perpetual twilight that exists under the triple canopy. Instead, you navigate by the map and you keep quiet while listening for the enemy. Be vewy vewy quiet I’m hunting wabbits!! 😂