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Wheels Within Wheels: Complexity is Real in War

by | Apr 18, 2024 |

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“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tent-show whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.”

– Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Sober observers may find another reason for the Iranian attack against Israel this month in retaliation for the Israeli bombing of the Iranian consulate annex building adjacent to the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria on April Fools Day.

May I suggest it is more important in this case to exhaust the kinetic Israeli/US air defense assets and accuracy doesn’t matter as long as exquisite munitions are exhausted; whether shoot/shoot/look or shoot/look/shoot which is a slight permutation on dynamic retasking, controlled pairs or more of air defense munitions are launched as a matter of course to service incoming ordnance. If the object here is to empty the western magazine cupboards by sending your older and less effective munitions aloft (Iran), mission accomplished and you have a very sufficient intelligence mapping of Israeli Anti-Access Air Defense (A2AD) dispositions and tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) for follow-on responses.

Nations and regions do stumble into war precipitously but there are conflicts in history where the weaker opponents plan and shape the conditions to prevail before the conflict is started; Vietnam is the best example in recent history of reading the tea leaves and setting the stage for success against superior forces.

The west has a manufacturing crisis right now that is existential in restocking and reconstituting the emptying stocks of war materiel. One can either favor or oppose doing that but the fact remains the manufacturing base and capability is an open question for America and its allies.The chaos avalanche of the competency crisis, the reproducibility problems in STEM research & application and the very real infrastructure failures increasing in frequency year by year doesn’t bode well for those wishing to replenish the diminished war stocks potentially reconstituting with stuff that simply doesn’t work.

The second 155mm artillery shell manufacturing plant in the west just went up in flames in the UK in less than a week. One in Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in PA and the BAE Systems Glascoed Plant in Monmouthshire, UK.

In war, there is a lot to be said for how to leverage shaping the conflict left of bang.

I’m fond of saying that many people are in charge but no one is in control.

F35 Fat Amy Follies: The Gift That Keeps on Giving

by | Apr 17, 2024 |

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Two Trillion Dollars…

Pretty soon, we’re talking real money.

So we put this in perspective: Two trillion U.S. dollars in $100 notes would be 1,356 miles high. If they were one dollar bills, it would be 135,600 miles high (the moon is 238,900 miles from Earth).

During testimony with Rep Matt Gaetz, the U.S. Air Force Secretary testified that only 29 percent of F35 aircraft are fully operational.

“While the Pentagon now expects the plane to fly until 2088, GAO found the services are planning to slash flight hours, which can help hold down the program’s topline.”

The cloudy sustainment picture comes as the F-35 program is failing to meet mission capable rate goals, which GAO covered in the September 2023 sustainment report. The program is meeting 17 of 24 reliability and maintainability goals as of August 2023, GAO found today, but woes ranging from depot capacity to a dearth of spare parts continue to drag down fleet readiness. Still, the program has managed to eke out some relatively good news in recent months, the most recent being the mostly symbolic move to approve the jet’s full rate production after years of delays. 

In total, GAO said DoD has implemented just 13 of 43 recommendations the watchdog has made since 2014 on operating and sustaining the F-35. Lawmakers plan to further probe the program’s performance in a hearing the House Armed Services tactical air and land forces subcommittee is scheduled to hold Tuesday.”

Source Article

New Hampshire GOP Adds ‘Defend the Guard’ to Party Platform

by | Apr 17, 2024 |

With a resounding “Aye,” Defend the Guard was made an official part of the New Hampshire Republican Party platform.

On Saturday, April 13, the New Hampshire GOP held a meeting to vote on platform amendments. Among the list of proposals was the following text:

“Demand that Congress exercise their sole authority over war declarations and protect the New Hampshire National Guard by requiring a Congressional declaration of war prior to any National Guardsman deployment to overseas combat zones.”

After some remarks from supporters, and one or two in opposition, it went to a voice vote, and the “Ayes” had it by a large margin. This means that Defend the Guard legislation is officially a plank of the the New Hampshire Republican Party platform, located under the “Federalism” section on the state party website. The platform can be read here.

This marks an important step in proving the demand for this legislation, especially as H.B. 229 sees a rocky committee recommendation in the New Hampshire Senate. The Finance Committee voted 7-0 to send the bill to Interim Study, which is a soft way to kill the bill, but it will still see a vote on the Senate floor. It is imperative that Republicans in the Senate are encouraged to defeat the IS motion, and to honor the Republican platform by passing the bill. Democrats, too, may be convinced to support the bill, even if it is not part of the Democratic Party platform, and it is important for them to be encouraged to do so.

The vote is on April 18; therefore, if you have time, please contact the NH Senate and encourage them to defeat the IS and pass the bill.

Failure Follies: The US Navy Continues the Race to the Bottom

by | Apr 16, 2024 |

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The collapse of western martial civilization is sticking to its schedule.

The Wasp class LHD, USS Boxer, has suffered yet another engineering casualty. On this, the Navy delivers with a spectacularly consistent track record of failure with the Little Crappy Ships, the Zumwalt class and the 20 billion dollar USS Ford that cannot reliably launch and retrieve aircraft (you had one job!).

Keep in mind the USN already lost the USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD 6) to a catastrophic fire in July 2020.

Will anyone in uniform ever be held accountable? Don’t hold your breath.

Expect the chaos avalanche of engineering and mechanical failures to continue apace. In good news for the world, it makes American foreign policy’s armed jeremiad against Earth a little more problematic with the inability to reliably project naval power.

The ship got underway again at the end of March without issue.

A defense official told Military.com in March that the Boxer had originally been slated to deploy late last year, but it was held up thanks to a series of delays and mechanical issues that were driven, at least partly, by poor leadership aboard the ship.

Two previous command investigations conducted on at least three different engineering breakdowns showed “a lack of procedural compliance, substandard supervisory oversight, and general complacency by the crew,” according to the ship’s strike group commander.

Those breakdowns, information on which was released to Military.com as part of a Freedom of Information Act request, revealed that the ship had experienced damage to two “forced draft blowers” on Nov. 8, 2022. A separate investigation into that incident, also provided to Military.com via FOIA request, faulted “poor quality craftsmanship, lack of industry repair skill set/capabilities” and a “lack of supervisory oversight” from the Navy offices overseeing the work.

Then on May 14, the ship had a “boiler safety” breakdown. That investigation “once again revealed a lack of procedural compliance and overall complacency of all personnel involved,” documents from the strike group commander revealed.

Troubled USS Boxer Returns Home 10 Days into Deployment Due to Maintenance Issue

More on Immigration and Public Property

by | Apr 16, 2024 |

Inspired by scholar Simon Guenzl, it occurred to me that regarding “state-claimed” so-called public property, people have been wronged not primarily as taxpayers but as potential homesteaders. (See Guenzl’s “Public Property and the Libertarian Immigration Debate,” Libertarian Papers, 2016 vol. 8, no. 1, and listen to his conversation with Bob Murphy’s Human Action Podcast.)

Guenzl properly distinguishes between state-claimed land and state-seized land, such as that acquired through eminent domain. In the latter case, government personnel took land from identifiable owners, but state-claimed land never had owners. The state foreclosed homesteading.

Among the people prevented from homesteading are would-be immigrants, people from other parts of the world. In times past, many came to America to stake out parcels on the frontier to make better lives for themselves and their families. They demarcated, cleared, plowed, planted, and harvested it. They built homes with it. They “mixed their labor” with it, Lockean-style, and made it their own.

By foreclosing homesteading to this day of a vast portion of America, the government harms their modern-day counterparts as much as it harms those politically defined as citizens. Libertarians (and others) who would treat citizens from foreigners differently in this matter are obliged to justify that seemingly arbitrary distinction. So far they have failed to do so.

The F35: The Gift That Keeps on Giving

by | Apr 15, 2024 |

f35 moneydump

“Soon after publication ‘Superiority’ was inserted into the Engineering curriculum of MIT, to warn the graduates that the Better is often the enemy of the Good, and the Best can be the enemy of both, as it is always too late.”

– Arthur C. Clarke

Superiority by Arthur C. Clarke should be required reading for the modern technocrats.

It’s tax day so what better way to celebrate than to see how those tax dollars are spent.

The F35 has been a very expensive disaster for the American Department of Defense. Betting the farm on emerging unproven technology instead of iterative engineering is a gamble that doesn’t pay off in large scale programs.

There are, of course, major problems with the software upgrades in the F35 platform. This has plagued the program since its inception. By the time everything is 100 percent operational with this aircraft, it will be a biplane in the twenty-first century. As sexy as stealth is to the attention deficit disorder fantasists at the Pentagon, in a future near-peer and peer fight, it will be quickly obviated by technical workarounds.

There are apocryphal stories that some of the F22 aircraft in the boneyard at the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) at Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, AZ are there because they missed two consecutive software patches and were bricked.

“To provide some perspective, the F-35 has been in production since 2008-9. That’s 16 years and we still don’t have full combat-capable aircraft due to software delays. Just as we’ve begun retiring LCSes without them ever having had fully functional modules installed, we may see F-35s retire without ever having been fully combat capable.

I am a big fan of the Navy Matters blog.

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