Author Topic: Military Science, Military Issues, and the Nature of War  (Read 392329 times)

ccp

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Fbi and Fang Fang
« Reply #850 on: December 30, 2020, 05:03:25 AM »
I was wondering how Fang Fang left the country
so easily if the FBI knew about her

did they let her to see where she goes and follow her?
did they want to avoid a Chinese - US incident?
did she like all Chinese spies simply outsmart us?
wanted to protect Eric the democrat?

other?

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Military Science, Military Issues, and the Nature of War
« Reply #851 on: December 30, 2020, 09:25:03 AM »
Indeed.

Similarly I wonder if Smallwell tipped her off.


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Israel's F-35s
« Reply #853 on: January 30, 2021, 04:30:21 PM »

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Re: Military Science, Military Issues, and the Nature of War
« Reply #856 on: February 13, 2021, 07:10:38 PM »
In this case because it contains factual information on an issue of interest to us. 

Agreed they are what they are- the woke folks of the Pentagon-- but they address issues of interest to us which are lightly covered elsewhere.  Also, good to know how the powerful factions for whom they write think.  Occasionally we might learn something--- it is not like anyone on our side is be followed blindly. 

The world is shattering assumptions left and right.

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The new Woke Navy oath
« Reply #857 on: February 15, 2021, 03:30:24 PM »

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Military Science, Military Issues, and the Nature of War
« Reply #858 on: February 15, 2021, 07:12:18 PM »
 :-o :-o :-o :x :x :x :x :x :x

G M

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The Woken Dead of the Biden Pentagon vs. "White Nationalism"
« Reply #860 on: February 17, 2021, 06:49:32 PM »
Obviously genuine nazi types are not who we want in our military, but OTOH for the  Woken Dead of the White House and the Pentagon all traditional  Americans are Nazis.

https://www.rollcall.com/2021/02/16/pentagon-report-reveals-inroads-white-supremacists-have-made-in-military/?fbclid=IwAR3pjQ-AqE5BBilIQOi1f2p_V7BFUKy-jrnGkUKO0lsOTcnoqwh708tlNQ0

G M

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Re: The Woken Dead of the Biden Pentagon vs. "White Nationalism"
« Reply #861 on: February 17, 2021, 07:04:37 PM »
 :roll:

Remember when an US Army officer was obviously a jihadist and his superiors were too scared to do anything about it?

And after the "workplace violence" the biggest concern was diversity?

http://blogs.reuters.com/talesfromthetrail/2009/11/08/general-casey-diversity-shouldnt-be-casualty-of-fort-hood/


Obviously genuine nazi types are not who we want in our military, but OTOH for the  Woken Dead of the White House and the Pentagon all traditional  Americans are Nazis.

https://www.rollcall.com/2021/02/16/pentagon-report-reveals-inroads-white-supremacists-have-made-in-military/?fbclid=IwAR3pjQ-AqE5BBilIQOi1f2p_V7BFUKy-jrnGkUKO0lsOTcnoqwh708tlNQ0

G M

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WOKEmil doomed
« Reply #862 on: February 22, 2021, 04:18:52 PM »
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/392826.php

We totally outclass our near-peers on trans-acceptance!


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D1
« Reply #864 on: February 24, 2021, 07:41:30 AM »


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« Last Edit: March 14, 2021, 01:08:13 PM by Crafty_Dog »

G M

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« Last Edit: March 14, 2021, 01:08:36 PM by Crafty_Dog »



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Fighting the Last War that Never Happened
« Reply #881 on: June 04, 2021, 08:51:16 PM »

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Re: Fighting the Last War that Never Happened
« Reply #882 on: June 04, 2021, 09:40:39 PM »




Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Biden budget not up to the threats
« Reply #886 on: June 16, 2021, 04:50:53 AM »
President Biden is telling the world in Europe this week that “America is back” as the leader of global democracies. Sounds good. But China, Iran and Vladimir Putin would be more impressed if Mr. Biden wasn’t cutting America’s defense even as he rightly stresses the challenge from the world’s authoritarians.

Unremarked in the White House spending deluge is that its trillions for “infrastructure” include little new for defense. Mr. Biden’s $715 billion Pentagon budget for fiscal 2022 is a 1.6% increase over last year. Adjusted for inflation, this is a cut. The bipartisan National Defense Strategy Commission and other experts say the Pentagon needs steady 3% to 5% real increases annually to address threats from “near peers” such as China and Russia.

President Trump increased defense spending modestly, but that fillip has passed and spending is still at its modern norm of about 3% of GDP. America is rapidly piling up debt past 100% of GDP while shrinking its defenses.

***
The brightest budget spots are places where the Administration declined to make matters worse: The Administration didn’t slash the Army; active-duty end strength holds at about 485,000. But the service requested about $3.5 billion less than last year’s enacted budget, in part due to a drawdown in Afghanistan.

The Biden Team also overruled progressive critics and asked to fund upgrades to an aging nuclear deterrent. The anachronism known as the “overseas contingency operations” fund will be folded in the normal budget, a more honest accounting.

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But nowhere is underinvestment clearer than in the stormy forecasts for the U.S.Navy. At roughly 300 ships the Navy soon won’t have the size or capability to compete with the more than 350-ship fleet China is minting. In April China reportedly commissioned three warships in a day.

The Navy’s 2022 proposal would hasten the retirement of two cruisers to save money. The Navy would procure eight ships; only four are combatants. The request for the shipbuilding account is down about 3% from last year’s level. The Navy is worried about readiness, particularly overworked carriers, and that a larger fleet won’t be properly manned or maintained, which are real concerns. But that is a case for more investment.


A consensus in Congress agrees the Navy should grow to 355 ships, but the officer briefing reporters on the defense budget conceded that with “a 300-ship navy and a 30-year life, you have to recapitalize at 10 per year and so eight is not going to do it.”

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The 355 number is not holy writ, and Pentagon press secretary John Kirby weighed in with the obvious that “a fleet of 355 tugboats” wouldn’t mean much for American defenses. But as many naval experts have noted, what a carrier and a frigate have in common is that they can only defend one sea at a time, and quantity has a quality all its own. There is a narrow window to turn around the decline. Building ships takes years, and the U.S. is deciding today the fleet the country will have if China provokes a maritime conflict in 10 or even 20 years.

The Biden team says it will “divest to invest,” or send about $2.8 billion in old stuff to the bone yard to free up dollars for more modern equipment. As ships and planes age, they become expensive and time consuming to maintain, draining readiness accounts. And the military does need to spend more on innovations like hypersonic missiles.

But new equipment seldom arrives on time or as promised. In any event, proposals like the Air Force plan to retire more than 40 workhorse A-10 bombers are unlikely to survive impact with Congress. The Biden Administration also undercuts its tut-tutting about “hard choices” on spending by marking $617 million for climate change. This money will inevitably be spent in ways that make the F-35 fighter program look cost-efficient.

***
The responsibility for these budget shortfalls doesn’t fall only on civilian leaders. The case for more resources is tougher to sell to the public when flag officers take shots at cable news hosts over the culture wars or promote progressive books about “anti-racism.” The brass need to be honest about actual threats rather than indulge in woke politics. It took a decade for the military to rebuild after the damage from Vietnam, and decline can come again as Hemingway described bankruptcy—gradually, then suddenly.


Congress will massage the Biden request, and members should level with the American public: A military that is large, modern and ready to fight is expensive. We’ll be the first to endorse military health-care changes or civil-service reform to reduce ballooning personnel costs.

But the choice America is facing is not whether to buy more ships instead of tanks. It is whether to defend itself adequately or pretend to do so while shrinking defense to fund an ever-growing social-welfare state. Adversaries can see the trend even if the White House would rather not acknowledge it.



ccp

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Crafty_Dog

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Prosumer drones have us fuct
« Reply #893 on: June 28, 2021, 08:07:04 AM »
One last thing about small drones: For at least the past year, CENTCOM's Gen. Frank McKenzie has been sounding the alarm bells over the disruptive and dangerous threat from unmanned aerial systems and armed small drones—not that there are a whole lot of countermeasures widely available, as we've reviewed in our podcast as recently as this past October:

"The UAS threat, the small drone threat, the quadcopter less than the arms length of a human being, is what really probably concerns me the most in the theater," he told reporters April 22. "I would note, those things concern me greatly because our air defense system and our patriots and our other radars, they're very good at seeing the larger objects, be it ballistic missiles or be it larger land-attack cruise missiles or larger drones. The smaller drone is a problem, and [the] smaller drone is the future of warfare, and we need to get ahead of that right now."

"I argue all the time with my Air Force friends that the future of flight is vertical and it's unmanned, and I believe we are seeing it now," he said on June 10, 2020, at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. "And I'm not talking about the large unmanned platforms which are the size of a conventional fighter jet that we can see and deal with as we would any other platform. I'm talking about one that you can go out and buy at Costco right now in the United States for a thousand dollars, you know a four-quad rotorcraft or something like that that can be launched and flown and with very simple modifications it can be made into something that can drop a weapon—a hand grenade or something else. Right now, the fact of the matter is we're on the wrong side of that equation."

Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Is our navy ready?
« Reply #894 on: July 12, 2021, 08:11:44 AM »
WSJ:
Is the U.S. Navy ready for war? A new report prepared by Marine Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle and Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, both retired, for members of Congress paints a portrait of the Navy as an institution adrift. The report, reviewed exclusively by the Journal, concludes that the surface Navy is not focused on preparing for war and is weathering a crisis in leadership and culture.

The impetus for the report was a series of recent catastrophes—a ship burning in San Diego last year; two destroyer collisions in the Pacific in 2017. Were these isolated events? Or did they indicate “larger institutional issues that are degrading the performance of the entire naval surface force”? The report surveyed active and recently retired service members of various ranks, conducting 77 candid hourlong interviews. A key finding: “Many sailors found their leadership distracted, captive to bureaucratic excess, and rewarded for the successful execution of administrative functions” rather than core competencies of war.

“I guarantee you every unit in the Navy is up to speed on their diversity training,” said one recently retired senior enlisted leader. “I’m sorry that I can’t say the same of their ship-handling training.”
Adm. Montgomery told me in an interview over the weekend that when he was a junior officer in the 1980s there was “an intense focus” on a likely confrontation with the Soviet navy—learning about classes of ships or the missiles aboard. After decades without a peer adversary at sea, “the same focus is not permeating the Navy today.”

The Navy has improved its pipeline for surface-warfare officers since the 2017 collisions, reversing a 2003 money-saving mistake of training junior officers by giving them 23 compact discs loaded with reading material. But the Navy doesn’t spend the money and time training surface warfare officers that it does submariners or aviators, and has revamped training so many times, usually in an effort to spend even less money, that commanding officers are left with “inconsistent, often ill-prepared wardrooms.”

Civilian Pentagon appointees of both parties have been poor stewards of the surface Navy’s capabilities. The report estimates that 20 ships a year are extended on deployment, and keeping them at sea creates “a host of problems.” The ship is late to postdeployment maintenance, which can mess up the yard’s schedule for work on other ships. Longer deployments tend to mean more repairs, and delays can cut into training time.

The report also details a deep culture of risk aversion: If the missiles start flying, will a destroyer captain be ready to make quick decisions and take calculated risks, even if his communications are jammed and he can’t reach his superiors?

G M

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Is our navy ready? NO!
« Reply #895 on: July 15, 2021, 09:07:40 AM »
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/079/309/430/original/dbb6f107f93aa399.png



WSJ:
Is the U.S. Navy ready for war? A new report prepared by Marine Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle and Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, both retired, for members of Congress paints a portrait of the Navy as an institution adrift. The report, reviewed exclusively by the Journal, concludes that the surface Navy is not focused on preparing for war and is weathering a crisis in leadership and culture.

The impetus for the report was a series of recent catastrophes—a ship burning in San Diego last year; two destroyer collisions in the Pacific in 2017. Were these isolated events? Or did they indicate “larger institutional issues that are degrading the performance of the entire naval surface force”? The report surveyed active and recently retired service members of various ranks, conducting 77 candid hourlong interviews. A key finding: “Many sailors found their leadership distracted, captive to bureaucratic excess, and rewarded for the successful execution of administrative functions” rather than core competencies of war.

“I guarantee you every unit in the Navy is up to speed on their diversity training,” said one recently retired senior enlisted leader. “I’m sorry that I can’t say the same of their ship-handling training.”
Adm. Montgomery told me in an interview over the weekend that when he was a junior officer in the 1980s there was “an intense focus” on a likely confrontation with the Soviet navy—learning about classes of ships or the missiles aboard. After decades without a peer adversary at sea, “the same focus is not permeating the Navy today.”

The Navy has improved its pipeline for surface-warfare officers since the 2017 collisions, reversing a 2003 money-saving mistake of training junior officers by giving them 23 compact discs loaded with reading material. But the Navy doesn’t spend the money and time training surface warfare officers that it does submariners or aviators, and has revamped training so many times, usually in an effort to spend even less money, that commanding officers are left with “inconsistent, often ill-prepared wardrooms.”

Civilian Pentagon appointees of both parties have been poor stewards of the surface Navy’s capabilities. The report estimates that 20 ships a year are extended on deployment, and keeping them at sea creates “a host of problems.” The ship is late to postdeployment maintenance, which can mess up the yard’s schedule for work on other ships. Longer deployments tend to mean more repairs, and delays can cut into training time.

The report also details a deep culture of risk aversion: If the missiles start flying, will a destroyer captain be ready to make quick decisions and take calculated risks, even if his communications are jammed and he can’t reach his superiors?

G M

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Re: Is our navy ready? NO!
« Reply #896 on: July 15, 2021, 09:09:26 AM »
https://www.9news.com.au/world/navy-says-its-charting-a-new-course-after-rash-of-problems/71506cd7-4f02-4dfb-b161-85109b28d636

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/079/309/430/original/dbb6f107f93aa399.png



WSJ:
Is the U.S. Navy ready for war? A new report prepared by Marine Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle and Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, both retired, for members of Congress paints a portrait of the Navy as an institution adrift. The report, reviewed exclusively by the Journal, concludes that the surface Navy is not focused on preparing for war and is weathering a crisis in leadership and culture.

The impetus for the report was a series of recent catastrophes—a ship burning in San Diego last year; two destroyer collisions in the Pacific in 2017. Were these isolated events? Or did they indicate “larger institutional issues that are degrading the performance of the entire naval surface force”? The report surveyed active and recently retired service members of various ranks, conducting 77 candid hourlong interviews. A key finding: “Many sailors found their leadership distracted, captive to bureaucratic excess, and rewarded for the successful execution of administrative functions” rather than core competencies of war.

“I guarantee you every unit in the Navy is up to speed on their diversity training,” said one recently retired senior enlisted leader. “I’m sorry that I can’t say the same of their ship-handling training.”
Adm. Montgomery told me in an interview over the weekend that when he was a junior officer in the 1980s there was “an intense focus” on a likely confrontation with the Soviet navy—learning about classes of ships or the missiles aboard. After decades without a peer adversary at sea, “the same focus is not permeating the Navy today.”

The Navy has improved its pipeline for surface-warfare officers since the 2017 collisions, reversing a 2003 money-saving mistake of training junior officers by giving them 23 compact discs loaded with reading material. But the Navy doesn’t spend the money and time training surface warfare officers that it does submariners or aviators, and has revamped training so many times, usually in an effort to spend even less money, that commanding officers are left with “inconsistent, often ill-prepared wardrooms.”

Civilian Pentagon appointees of both parties have been poor stewards of the surface Navy’s capabilities. The report estimates that 20 ships a year are extended on deployment, and keeping them at sea creates “a host of problems.” The ship is late to postdeployment maintenance, which can mess up the yard’s schedule for work on other ships. Longer deployments tend to mean more repairs, and delays can cut into training time.

The report also details a deep culture of risk aversion: If the missiles start flying, will a destroyer captain be ready to make quick decisions and take calculated risks, even if his communications are jammed and he can’t reach his superiors?

G M

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Re: Is our navy ready? NO!
« Reply #897 on: July 15, 2021, 09:15:39 AM »
https://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2021/07/culture-is-upstream-of-everything.html

https://www.9news.com.au/world/navy-says-its-charting-a-new-course-after-rash-of-problems/71506cd7-4f02-4dfb-b161-85109b28d636

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/079/309/430/original/dbb6f107f93aa399.png



WSJ:
Is the U.S. Navy ready for war? A new report prepared by Marine Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle and Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, both retired, for members of Congress paints a portrait of the Navy as an institution adrift. The report, reviewed exclusively by the Journal, concludes that the surface Navy is not focused on preparing for war and is weathering a crisis in leadership and culture.

The impetus for the report was a series of recent catastrophes—a ship burning in San Diego last year; two destroyer collisions in the Pacific in 2017. Were these isolated events? Or did they indicate “larger institutional issues that are degrading the performance of the entire naval surface force”? The report surveyed active and recently retired service members of various ranks, conducting 77 candid hourlong interviews. A key finding: “Many sailors found their leadership distracted, captive to bureaucratic excess, and rewarded for the successful execution of administrative functions” rather than core competencies of war.

“I guarantee you every unit in the Navy is up to speed on their diversity training,” said one recently retired senior enlisted leader. “I’m sorry that I can’t say the same of their ship-handling training.”
Adm. Montgomery told me in an interview over the weekend that when he was a junior officer in the 1980s there was “an intense focus” on a likely confrontation with the Soviet navy—learning about classes of ships or the missiles aboard. After decades without a peer adversary at sea, “the same focus is not permeating the Navy today.”

The Navy has improved its pipeline for surface-warfare officers since the 2017 collisions, reversing a 2003 money-saving mistake of training junior officers by giving them 23 compact discs loaded with reading material. But the Navy doesn’t spend the money and time training surface warfare officers that it does submariners or aviators, and has revamped training so many times, usually in an effort to spend even less money, that commanding officers are left with “inconsistent, often ill-prepared wardrooms.”

Civilian Pentagon appointees of both parties have been poor stewards of the surface Navy’s capabilities. The report estimates that 20 ships a year are extended on deployment, and keeping them at sea creates “a host of problems.” The ship is late to postdeployment maintenance, which can mess up the yard’s schedule for work on other ships. Longer deployments tend to mean more repairs, and delays can cut into training time.

The report also details a deep culture of risk aversion: If the missiles start flying, will a destroyer captain be ready to make quick decisions and take calculated risks, even if his communications are jammed and he can’t reach his superiors?