F-35 News. Italian plans to reduce by half the number of fighters looks more likely.

Eric Palmer blog has the full story you can read here....but a juicy tidbit....

Other areas he mentioned were reducing the number of municipal companies paid for by the state, fighting tax evasion and cutting 150 million euros of spending that had been earmarked for the F-35 fighter.
Renzi did not give details on the "review" of spending for the jets. Italy now has committed to ordering 90 of the planes for about 12 billion euros, but some in his party have said the order should be halved.

I made the call earlier but stick with it.  The death spiral is already here, they're just using fancy accounting gimmicks to keep it from being fully realized.

Additionally the pain for the program is just beginning.  They can't get costs down and soon or later tens of thousands of servicemen and millions of vets are going to wake up to the fact that people are being sacrificed on the altar of the F-35.

Without this one program our entire defense procurement agenda, for ALL THE SERVICES, would be totally different.

Must Read!!! American Mercenary on the professional officer corps!

Read it all here but a quick primer....

First off, Iraq wasn't a failure any more than the War of 1812 was a failure, or the Civil War was a failure. Iraq has been on its own for a while now, and yes the killing is on an uptick. Iran is a right bastard to have for a neighbor. Peace is that brief moment of time where everyone pauses to reload....
I wonder how the British Army felt after Yorktown? Were there calls for reforms? Was blame passed about? Or did someone realize, "You know, fighting an expensive foreign war a long distance from our lines of supply is never a recipe for success."

But in terms of what the US Military could do, and did, in Iraq, was definitely a "success" in terms of kicking ass and taking names in six weeks, then spending almost a decade trying to rebuild some semblance of representative government. It's like a carpenter with one tool, a sledgehammer. Great for knocking down walls, but just not the right tool for doing finish work on cabinetry. But when your only tool is a sledgehammer, that is what you use.
Afghanistan, same story as Vietnam. We win in every engagement, but we are supporting a corrupt government that everyone knows is corrupt.
In terms of actual fighting, we've kicked ass and always kicked ass. If you want us to do something other than fighting, like Somalia, Lebanon, the rebuilding of Iraq an Afghanistan, by the very definition of what Armies are, we kinda suck at that.

Its been a long time since I've actually cheered when it comes to a post on the military and its been a positive story.

Much needed and spot on.

Sidenote:  I still believe we have Flag Rank bloat and perhaps too many officers overall but that won't be solved till we thin the herd at the top.

Partnership missions are pure insanity. Chinese troops to train in Australia.

Thanks for the link Kristoffer!

via SMH.com.au

Chinese troops could end up exercising alongside the diggers in Australia’s north, perhaps even in conjunction with US Marines.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott raised the possibility in the final press conference of his north Asia trade trip in Beijing, declaring these issues had been ‘‘well and truly discussed’’.
He said Australia’s already strong defence ties with Japan and South Korea had now strengthened further.
‘‘Here in China, as a result of this trip, I am now quite confident that we won’t just have high level meetings between our respective militaries,’’ he said.
‘‘We will have exchanges and exercises between our respective militaries and also multilateral exercises.’’
"That's got to be good for peace and understanding in our region and the wider world," he said.
Mr Abbott said he would not speculate on who else could be involved in exercises involving Chinese forces.
‘‘Thanks to the rotating elements of US Marines in Darwin, there’s potential for multilateral exercises in Australia involving the US,’’ he said.
When Australia and the US announced the program of training US troops in northern Australia in 2011, China expressed strong concerns.
Mr Abbott said that was then, not now, and the issue was not the troop rotation but that it had come as a surprise at the time.
‘‘Once people were fully aware of what was happening, the concerns fairly quickly dissipated,’’ he said.
Starting from a low base, Australian defence ties with China have expanded steadily in recent years.
Australian and Chinese defence leaders hold annual talks and Australian and Chinese warships have staged reciprocal port visits.
Australia already cooperates with New Zealand and China on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief drills, and the prime minister said that would be the foundation on which he hoped to build on, perhaps even involving United States marines based in Northern Australia.
“Thanks to the rotating elements of the US marines in Darwin, there’s potential for multilateral exercises in Australia involving the United States,” he said

Wow.  So much to say about this.

I consider this to be a sad remnant from the War on Terror.  Both the Obama administration and the previous one, both used the military in a diplomatic role instead of the State Dept.  In seeking to gain allies in the War on Terror, military to military exchanges and training took place.

It made sense then.  Global Terrorism looked like the disease that would gobble up the world, but since then things have changed.

We played this game before with both the Russians and the Chinese.

What did we get from the experience?  In my opinion nothing but more professional forces that would menace our real allies.  Russian and Chinese units that started looking more and more like Western forces and became more and more effective.

The latest example is what we're seeing in the Ukraine.  The Russians have always been efficient in war but now they're acting with almost US Army Special Forces professionalism.  Not surprising considering the training that they've received...and now Ukraine is paying the price.

BMT Tank Landing Ship.

The party at the Bundy Ranch.

They're throwing a party at the Bundy Ranch and liberal news media is in a tizzy this week over the incident and the fact that conservative, survival, prepping, oath keepers and militia sites are cheering the win.

But the party.

I don't get it.  Are they not thinking?  You can bet that the FBI, ATF, BLM and probably but I hope not, US Marshals are all scouring the internet, going over communication recordings, going over vehicle license plates and gathering info on every person that was at the confrontation...and now at this party.

I'm not a secret squirrel type person but they're making it too easy for their organizations to be penetrated and compromised.  Additionally you can bet that they won't risk an agent to do it either.  They're going to stack charges on some trusted member of each group, and then make him a deal he can't refuse.  Sorta like 75 years in prison, your family impoverished (from all your property being seized) or you turn government informant.

Geez.  This is too easy for the feds.  The way this is going down it won't even be a contest.  I've wondered why no one has been arrested and now its obvious.  They're gathering intel.

F-35 Selected Acquisition Report...

What are the experts saying after reading this report???

Engine costs are, as predicted, rising.
Once the F-16C/D costs as listed are adjusted for single seat only, the F-35 O&S costs per flying hour are hovering around 1.4 times those for the F-16C with costs under the heading of "Maintenance" double those for the F-16.
Then there are the real costs for engine O&S.
And the list goes on......

If this was any other program, this report (and several before) would have doomed the plane to the scrap heap of history.  As it stands, extreme cost will accomplish what military planners lack the courage to do....say enough is enough and start looking for alternatives.

  218876001-F-35-2013-SAR

Delivery of a mechanized raid force to a launch point. We're reinventing the wheel!!!

This post is prompted by an interview by SeaPower Magazine of General Gleuck.  Read the entire article for yourself but this part has me punching walls...

It was planned to travel in the water at 25-plus knots. That was all predicated
on launching from 25 miles, having the sea base at 25 miles and understanding that the EFV would leave the water and maneuver deep inland. Under some conditions, we may start operations from further out to sea, changing our previous EFV assumption and increasing the importance of speed and range.
Given current technology, we could not achieve the ability to maneuver through the sea from beyond 25 nautical miles and seamlessly maneuver inland with protection and firepower. More significantly, in the time of reduced budgets, the EFV became unaffordable. Maneuvering in the littoral sea-land environment means maneuvering in tough, complex terrain. Most of that mission occurs on the land — about 90 percent.  We relooked at that 90 percent on the land mission and the EFV fell short given today’s technology.
Similar problems with current technology and high cost forced a halt in the EFV replacement program, the original Amphibious Combat Vehicle [ACV].

What has me pissed off and shouting at the moon is that several exercises were done that looked at the anti-access threat.  Even if the threat has us moving back to 100 miles off shore that does not mean that the EFV was not viable.  It does not mean that amphibious assault vehicles are not viable.  It just means that you transport them to a launch point.  But the bigger problem is that the Marine Corps seems to rapidly be forgetting its history.

Everyone forgets the name of one of the Marine Corps greatest minds. General Paul K. Van Ripper.

General Van Ripper made the term asymmetric warfare popular in the Pentagon and his work (read that to mean brilliant strategic thinking) in Millennium Challenge 2002 war game is estimated to have cost the Navy a sunk Carrier Battle Group, a sunk Amphibious Ready Group AND 20,000 servicemen dead.

But now you're asking me, what does this have to do with "delivery of a mechanized raid force to a launch point"?  Its simple.  We've been dealing or rather learning to deal with anti-access threats in the Marine Corps for quite a while now.

We've been planning on moving amphibs further offshore for quite a while now.  I talked about this in 2012 but consider this a refresher.  This page is from MCRP 3-31.1A  Employment of Landing Craft Air Cushion.

We have the tools, we had the doctrine, the only thing we're lacking is the understanding of leadership that air power alone will not win the next war.