Scratching My Head.

Ahem. I don't know how to read into this.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy is taking major steps in an attempt to shake off years of false starts and setbacks with the Littoral Combat Ship program, an effort Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday said he’d oversee on his watch. In an exclusive interview with Defense News on July 16, Gilday listed LCS as a major priority, saying he will turn up the heat on efforts to get the ship to become a major contributor to fleet operations.“There are things in the near term that I have to deliver, that I’m putting heat on now, and one of them is LCS,” Gilday said. “One part is sustainability and reliability. We know enough about that platform and the problems that we have that plague us with regard to reliability and sustainability, and I need them resolved.”

My take on this whole spike in activity regarding these very expensive and grossly under-gunned, putting it politely, ships is related to news from Russia who started trials for her combat modules for project 22160 patrol ships.

Gilday’s goal of fielding the mission modules is well along already, according to two sources familiar with the progress, who spoke to Defense News on condition of anonymity.The mine-warfare mission module is on track for a final test and evaluation by the end of this year, a source with knowledge of the program told Defense News, and the individual components have already passed testing and are in initial low-rate production.End-to-end testing of the mine-warfare mission module is set to begin in fiscal 2021 and is on track to have its initial operating capability declared in 2022, another source said.The status of the ASW mission module, which has been a regular target of Congress-imposed budget cuts, is a little less clear.

Let's face it--the issue with combat modules for LCS is nothing new, as is the issue of preposterous costs for such a ship, in excess of $700 million per hull. What may become an issue, and a huge one at that, will be if Russians will succeed (I am pretty sure they will) with testing of their own modules, including ASW one, and appearance of project 22160, say in Mediterranean, carrying containers with Kalibrs or P-800s, or 3M22s together with ASW packages. This WILL create a shitstorm in appropriate Committees and subcommittees in Congress--remember, pr. 22160 are shitstorm corvettes--because the question will be this: why those fvcking Russians managed in few years to come up with several working modules for what amounts to their version of LCS (of sorts) and we cannot do it for more than a decade? I would say such a question, actually, will be a legitimate one. But then guess what--have you heard about F-15X lately? I heard:

And now the Air Force is doing just that. Last week, the Defense Department announced in its daily digest of defense contracts awarded that Boeing will produce an unspecified number of F-15EX aircraft over the next three years, at a total cost of $22.89 billion.

Oh baby, for around $90 million a pop for a venerable and slightly up-gunned F-15 that looks so...so... Pentagonish. But isn't it how the whole US Defense Budget is spent? I omit here all those "doctrinal" decisions such as producing a rather mediocre aircraft such as F-35, but it will do for attacking third world nations, and calling it "Stealth" because 1950s radar cannot "detect" it, but generally one has to wonder "where's the beef"?  Argument of "complexity" of US weapon systems is a complete bunk--I write about this for years and people at TAC question this too.

How Bells, Whistles & Greed Blew Up the Defense Budget. The hawks say we need to spend $740B a year because our weapons systems are so much more complex now. Here's the real story.

OK, let me cut to the chase--most American "hawks" are not hawks but chicken-hawks most of who do not know shit from shinola when dealing with military, because they lack proper education and experience which would allow them to pass sound judgements on the issue of actual warfare. US weapon systems are no more complex than many from Europe, let alone Russia. Term "sophisticated" is a false equivalency and is used merely to impress dumb-asses who sign the checks for Pentagon. Criteria of Combat Efficiency of the system has long been discarded in the US in favor of monetary gain (through ridiculous unreal costs) and making Hollywood movies. The issue is not even that SU-35C, not speaking of SU-57, will tear F-35 a new one, or that Patriot PAC whatever the version, looks like, using Publius Tacitus terminology, a Nerf Gun when compared to Russian Air Defense systems. The issue is that the US simply cannot produce decent weapon system on time, on budget and, most important, cannot make it combat effective in real combat environment. 

Come on, Russians know this, so do many many people in DoD in the US, but they are not talking because US warfare long ago became about money, appearances and propaganda, not about defense. Come to think about it, not about offense either, since the US military record as of lately is not that impressive. Ridiculous price tags of US weapons didn't help much in Afghanistan or Syria, once Russia got involved there. Well, as one of the pundits concludes:

Wood’s argument that the only way to deal with adversary technology is with better technology is also false. We don’t need to out-engineer the Russias and Chinas of the world, we need to out-think them. For virtually every high-tech weapon, there is a low-tech counter. Our struggles to deal with IEDs in Iraq is the perfect example of this. The Pentagon spent $20 billion to develop counter-IED systems only to come to the realization that nothing worked as well as a dog.

Out-think is a fancy euphemism for coming to terms with military reality and facing facts, which for Pentagon will be really painful and goes completely against Modus Operandi and Vivendi both in US military and the US Congress agreed upon for the sake of keeping a gravy train running. Well, the run may continue but the US realistically cannot win a war with the peer. In fact, it will sustain colossal materiel and reputational losses gigantic price tags of its weapons notwithstanding. Just yesterday I listened to one discussion between some totally delusional "Marxist" Alekseev and former Colonel from General Staff Vladimir Trukhan, who apart from wiping the floor with Alekseev, noted that as a former Officer-operator of General Staff he doesn't take militarily NATO seriously. Or as he said: "we don't even break sweat". He has a point, but then again, I can only repeat myself--the real danger is in the United States stumbling into open military confrontation with China, let alone Russia, see its expensive military hardware destroyed en masse, not to speak of human losses, and being pushed to the threshold of the unthinkable. This is the only "out-thinking" the United Sates is capable of today and that makes me scratch my head. I heard there was a proposition to put a ballistic missile on Zumwalt-class DDGs to enable these three white elephants with a whopper of a price tag to have missiles capable of carrying hyper-sonic glider vehicles within Prompt Global Strike paradigm. If that is "out-thinking" what can I say.... Sergei Viktorovich, help!   

When Everything Points To...

What Senator Kennedy stated yesterday. 

You know, I am on record that for all my revulsion towards GOP, I consider Democratic Party to be clear and present danger to what's left of the Republic. And yes, I agree with Kennedy that the United States was founded by geniuses and now is run by a bunch of idiots. I am not alone in that, albeit I wrote two books on this issue and write for years about sheer incompetence of US "elites". 

Now Stephen Walt provides this:

A third pillar, however, is broad confidence in U.S. competence. When other countries recognize the United States’ strength, support its aims and believe U.S. officials know what they are doing, they are more likely to follow the United States’ lead. If they doubt its power, its wisdom, or its ability to act effectively, U.S. global influence inevitably erodes. This reaction is entirely understandable: If the United States’ leaders reveal themselves to be incompetent bunglers, why should foreign powers listen to their advice? Having a reputation for competence, in short, can be a critical force multiplier.

As Daniel Larison goes on to observe:

The U.S. has had the luxury of being able to bungle things for decades at relatively low cost to ourselves, but that time is coming to an end. Ever since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has been able to make some staggering blunders without significantly compromising its position in the world, but over time all of these blunders have had the cumulative effect of proving that U.S. “leadership” is neither stabilizing nor wise. 

Well, I am really pleased that someone reads my books, but, as was pointed out non-stop--a main formative geopolitical factor which creates crucial conditions for growing of competent national elites, Continental Warfare on a major scale, a conditioning by war that is, is an unknown entity for the United States. Sure, there was a Civil War which devastated primarily South but as I wrote:

Scales and proportions always mattered, still matter and will continue to matter a great deal, especially once warranted comparisons are made. One of the pivotal moments of the American Civil War was Sherman’s burning of Atlanta, which at the time had a population of barely 9,500 inhabitants, that is more than 27 times smaller than Moscow of 1812.  Even Smolensk with its 1812 population of around 13,000, which saw a ferocious battle around it and was set on fire by French artillery, was still considerably larger. In the end, Russia’s population in 1812, which was around 35 million, matched roughly the American population of 1860 which was 31.5 million. Yet, the difference couldn’t be starker—Napoleon attacked Russia with what then was the largest military force in history, which represented much of Western and Eastern Europe. Napoleon’s Grande Armee, which numbered 685,000 troops, had under its banners French, Saxons, Poles, Prussians, Italians, or what Tolstoy called a “force of a dozen European languages or nations.”     

Until things are put into proper context and scale, one will not stop failing in explaining why the United States finds itself today in the state of being de facto ungovernable and with its "elites" which increasingly become the laughing stock around the globe. Larison arrives to this conclusion:

Because the U.S. has been able to get away with making such major blunders, there have not been enough demands for accountability for the policymakers who led the country into one failure after another. There has been no real penalty for costly incompetence, and so many of the same people that led us down the wrong path before are still in positions of influence and authority now. Trump’s election just accelerated the process by putting grossly unqualified yes-men into top positions in government to serve an even more unqualified president. For most of the last twenty years, the U.S. has been poorly led. For at least twelve of those years, we have had presidents who knew nothing and didn’t care to learn more. Administrations that promote ideologues and disparage expertise are bound to be tripped up by obstacles that they fail to see, and they will drive the country into a ditch over and over again while congratulating themselves on their fine steering. 

Here, Larison describes the effect not the main cause--the main cause, and Larison, having a Ph.D in History, should know this is in the fact that US political elite as a whole was never shaped by the realities of Continental Warfare, unlike it is true for the rest of the word. North American Continent, due to it being a "World's Island" was simply spared the scale of a violence which shaped the modern world, including modern West, which carried the seeds of self-destruction inside itself the moment economic and ideological realities of post-WW II Europe became evident. It was, to a very large degree, a reaction, both intellectual and cultural to a life-changing wound sustained in WWII. United States didn't get wounded in WW II--it emerged as the only nation standing in the midst of the global ruin and profited greatly from that. What's not to like? Studs Terkel was correct--it was "The Good War" for America. And, inevitably, wrong lessons have been learned. This is what in the foundation of the American incompetence--wrong lessons, all around. The collapse of the Soviet Union reinforced already grossly distorted American view on history and on its own "liberal model". 

We thought the Cold War vindicated our political system. Instead it only began an age of illusions.

The reinforcement, due to a delusional view of the world and of itself, of American exceptionalism is in the foundation of the modern American incompetence. What Larison describes, including the lack of accountability for non-stop failures, is just the the method of further idiotization of the American "elites" (or government, or political class, what have you) and this process is unstoppable within existing American political, economic, educational, intellectual and cultural paradigm. It is a cold hard fact of life. It is also a fact of practical geopolitics and of the systemic crisis of liberalism. Covid-19? Just an excuse for the economic collapse which started long before the world even heard about this virus and forecasts of the American decline were made based on a much larger number of contributing factors than economy, or what passes for it at the Wall Street, alone.  

Stephen Walt may write whatever he wants on the American future:

Americans will need to rethink a political system that recruits and rewards those who are most adept at selling themselves to the highest bidder. And there has to be something seriously wrong with a political system that has devoted many months and spent billions of dollars preparing for the 2020 election and ends up giving the country a choice between three old white guys. For that matter, Americans ought to rethink whether spending a full year electing someone to a four year term makes any sense at all. No other advanced democracy does it this way. And while we’re at it, let’s scrap the absurd Electoral College, an indefensible relic that systematically disempowers voters in most of the country.

And I don't see anything wrong with "white guys", them being truly old, that is another thing. It is not about the race, it is about competence. Obama was a first black two-term POTUS and it will take some time before competent historians will write a work on a catastrophic impact on the United States Obama Administration had. But here is the problem, the well of the American statesmanship is dry, it was for some time now, because mechanism which produces real leaders is broken and it cannot be fixed without massive, fundamental changes to America's "way of life"--a change America is not ready to implement... yet. The operation is very serious and dangerous and may result in patient dying but without it, the patient is dead anyway.   

UPDATE: Just stumbled upon excellent piece by Paul Craig Roberts. Totally relevant to what is being discussed. 

The only solution for the economy is debt forgiveness for the ordinary people and nationalization for the companies. Trump indicated that aid might be given in the form of an equity stake, and later sell the government’s stake for a profit in a privatization when things return to normal. This would be a partial nationalization. Much better to go whole hog as it allows a cure for concentration and deregulation. The pandemic has made it clear that a society of self-seeking individuals is not a society. A society is a social system. A successful social system is one that can support its members. Once a self-sustaining social system exists, then there is a basis for people to branch out on their own. But without a sustainable social system, there can be nothing.