Friday, March 10, 2023

Jesus. I've heard the conspiracy theories but could this be true...

 

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Xi Jinping basically states "you want war...ok...we want that smoke!"

 Thanks to Remington Steele for the link!

Wow.

The US military has been talking about competition and conflict for the past two years and now China is saying cool.  

We're down with that noise.

I'm not a bible thumper or a peacenik (do they even still say that), but a war with China NOW will be terrible for both sides.

I think it'll break both countries and will facilitate that multipolar world so many elites fear because of the huge power vaccum.

Oh and make no mistake.  MANY NATIONS WILL CHEER A WAR BETWEEN THE US AND CHINA!

That will be the opening many need to charge forward and assert influence.

If China is taking this stance then war is all but certain.  All the happy talk of "competition" is as hollow as it sounded and the prep for a big time war better begin in earnest.

If we were smart (and we're not), we'd toss the Ukraine war issue over to the Europeans and focus 110% on the no holds barred fight thats coming.

We won't but we should.
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"Wolverine Shield/Strike"

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CHINA got Saudi Arabia and Iran to talk????

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Largest bank failure in the US since the great depression?

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Pope says the conflict in Ukraine was fuelled by "imperial interests, not just of the Russian empire, but of empires from elsewhere."

 

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Berger's call for more large amphibious ships is puzzling.

 via Defense News

Since the Biden administration released its National Defense Strategy last year, Berger said, he’s faced the same questions: “Are they still viable? Do we still need them? Should we be buying them? Their survivability, their cost, we’ve heard all the arguments before. Are they really useful in deterring? Are they really useful in winning a conflict?”

“The amphibious fleet is exactly the right tool to deter our competitors,” he answered.

Berger said the fleet is critical to deterring the Chinese, but the Pentagon isn’t giving the Navy and Marine Corps a sufficient budget to support that amphibious deterrence.

&

 Berger said the pause would shrink the fleet inventory, which would create a problem if a conflict or humanitarian crisis emerges and amphibious ships with embarked Marines aren’t ready to respond.

Here 

Berger's call to retain 31 large amphibious ships is puzzling.

The ENTIRE Marine Corps is going to a large, recon/counter recon, stand in force concept.

The MTVR, and ACV are the largest, heaviest vehicles that will deploy aboard those ships.

Its easy to see that the Marine Corps has EXCESS capability if operating ashore with those vessels.

If the idea is to use them in other roles for the sea battle then surely the Navy would be well served to put them aboard dedicated warfighting ships.

It just doesn't make sense.

On one hand he bemoans that the Marine Corps isn't task organized to face future threats so he makes the Marine Corps smaller and lighter and tosses most of the armor that these ships were designed to carry, but on the other he insists that the Navy hold onto ships that were built to support a Marine Corps that no longer exists.

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Thursday, March 09, 2023

Berger clearly told us that HE was going to change the Marine Corps. We just didn't think it would be this bad....

 Today’s Marine Corps, despite many surface adaptations to the demands of the past two decades of counterinsurgency operations, is at its core optimized for amphibious forcible entry and sustained operations ashore.

...I am convinced that the defining attributes of our current force are no longer what the Nation requires of the Marine Corps. 

The above is from "The Case For Change", Marine Gazette 2020.

I'm somewhat amazed that I missed this.

Berger told us what he was gonna do but few people took him seriously.

Side note.  This is why I consider any attempts by this "new" Marine Corps to link itself to the past to be fraudulent.  It is tossing away its past in order to remake itself into a coastal defense unit.

  

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America Is Too Scared of the Multipolar World....

 via Foreign Policy

After the United States moved from the darkness of the Cold War into the pleasant glow of the so-called unipolar moment, a diverse array of scholars, pundits, and world leaders began predicting, yearning for, or actively seeking a return to a multipolar world. Not surprisingly, Russian and Chinese leaders have long expressed a desire for a more multipolar order, as have the leaders of emerging powers such as India or Brazil. More interestingly, so have important U.S. allies. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder warned of the “undeniable danger” of U.S. unilateralism, and former French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine once declared that “the entire foreign policy of France … is aimed at making the world of tomorrow composed of several poles, not just one.” Current French President Emmanuel Macron’s support for European unity and strategic autonomy reveals a similar impulse.


Surprise, surprise: U.S. leaders don’t agree. They prefer the expansive opportunities and gratifying status that come from being the indispensable power, and they have been loath to abandon a position of unchallenged primacy. Back in 1991, the George H.W. Bush administration prepared a defense guidance document calling for active efforts to prevent the emergence of peer competitors anywhere in the world. The various National Security Strategy documents issued by Republicans and Democrats in subsequent years have all extolled the need to maintain U.S. primacy, even when they acknowledge the return of great power competition. Prominent academics have weighed in too—some arguing that U.S. primacy is “essential to the future of freedom,” and good for the United States and the world alike. I’ve contributed to this view myself, writing in 2005 that “the central aim of U.S. grand strategy should be to preserve its position of primacy for as long as possible.” (My advice on how to achieve that goal was ignored, however.)


Although the Biden administration recognizes that we are back in a world of several great powers, it seems nostalgic for the brief era when the United States didn’t face peer competitors. Hence its vigorous reassertion of “U.S. leadership,” its desire to inflict a military defeat on Russia that will leave it too weak to cause trouble in the future, and its efforts to stifle China’s rise by restricting Beijing’s access to critical technological inputs while subsidizing the U.S. semiconductor industry.


Even if these efforts succeed (and there’s no guarantee they will), restoring unipolarity is probably impossible. We are going to end up in 1) a bipolar world (with the United States and China as the two poles) or 2) a lopsided version of multipolarity where the United States is first among a set of unequal but still significant major powers (China, Russia, India, possibly Brazil, and conceivably a rearmed Japan and Germany). 

You read the issue. Below is the problem.

Even if these efforts succeed (and there’s no guarantee they will), restoring unipolarity is probably impossible. We are going to end up in 1) a bipolar world (with the United States and China as the two poles) or 2) a lopsided version of multipolarity where the United States is first among a set of unequal but still significant major powers (China, Russia, India, possibly Brazil, and conceivably a rearmed Japan and Germany).

Yeah you read that right.  China, Russia, INDIA (FOR CERTAIN!!!), Brazil and I would also say certainly Japan/S. Korea. 

What would this look like?

What sort of world would that be? International relations theorists are divided on this question. Classical realists such as Hans Morgenthau believed multipolar systems were less war-prone because states could realign to contain dangerous aggressors and deter war. For them, flexibility of alignment was a virtue. Structural realists such as Kenneth Waltz or John Mearsheimer argued the opposite. They believed bipolar systems were in fact more stable because the danger of miscalculation was reduced; the two main powers knew the other would automatically oppose any serious attempt to alter the status quo. Moreover, the two main powers were not as dependent on allied support and could keep their clients in line when necessary. For structural realists, the flexibility inherent in a multipolar order creates greater uncertainty and makes it more likely that a revisionist power will think it can alter the status quo before the others can combine to stop it.

I hope it makes for a more stable world.  I believe it will be a series of short, sharp, "real deal" wars that cause massive damage and loss of life.

Under the above scenario I can see the world falling into camps and a world war being on the horizon.

Read the entire article here. 

One thing is certain.

Leading with the US military instead of the clowns in the State Dept (as terrible as I think they are) is a losing proposition.

The bully phase is over.

Definitely time for diplomacy to reassert itself.

 

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Catastrophic equipment malfunction

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Marlon Brando was a titanic glutton with consumption habits that strike fear into the hearts of ordinary men.

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Open Comment Post. 9 Mar 23

 

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Wednesday, March 08, 2023

A massive Russian wave of cruise missile attacks is underway against Ukraine.

 

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This lady was killed committing a robbery while pregnant...

Not making a judgement about our laws but I wonder. If she survived and her child died would she be charged with murder? If the opposite occured and she was killed, along with her child while being a victim of robbery the offender would be charged with her murder and the murder of the unborn child.

How do we make sense of the twists and turns in our laws?  Maybe I'm being too simplistic but it just don't make sense.
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SecNavy admits that we can't keep up with Chinese ship building...

Uncrewed arsenal ships, LHDs turned into UAV carriers, and finally putting every cent we have available into building a metric shit ton of long range high speed missiles that can go hundreds of kilometers is the way.

The Navy is paralyzed by analysis and has no way forward so they've lost before the first shot is fired.

Are we seeing the worst military leadership in the history of the nation?

The focus should be on warfighting but its on everything else.

Only God can help us but I think he's tired of our shit.
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22nd Special Tactics Squadron water jump

Anyone know why the last guy didn't have his fins on?
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GA-ASI new air-to-air armed LongShot UAS

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Chinese troops in Austria for military competition...

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China continues to increase its defense spending. Are they're trying to do to us what Reagan did to the USSR?

 

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Eight Type 055 Destroyers are in service...even destroying the Marine Corps by the Commandant won't change the math...

The reality is stark and simple.

The Commandant can come up with a half baked plan to make over half the Marine Corps into coast watching, missile launching, recon/counter recon specialist that "operate within the enemies weapon engagement zone" but the amount of firepower that will be brought to bear won't matter in the deep water fight that is coming.

Even the US Army with there multi-domain constructs won't help much.

The Chinese have gone beyond being a brown water creature and have morphed into a beast that is looking to take the US Navy out into the deep water and to strangle them till they're all dead.

Congress, the President, the Joint Chiefs and the American people are gonna have to accept the reality.

We have too many worldwide commitments and something is gonna have to give if we're actually talking about taking on China.

Gimmicks and games just ain't gonna do it.

The MLRs that rely on stealth to survive will be located, fixed and destroyed.

The Navy and Air Force are gonna have to MAN UP and face the challenge.

Confidence in those two services is not high.
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