By all accounts, "Top Gun: Maverick" was a great movie, according the folks I know that saw it in the movie theaters. Folks came out of the theaters feeling good about the US military and life in general.
From what I have seen from various scenes on YouTube, it checked all the boxes. I ask them if they stayed to see the alternate ending after the credits. They all say, "No, what happened???" I tell them that while the cast are all doing the celebratory hugging and kissing on the flight deck at the end, they look up to see dozens of hypersonics dropping upon them, and they all die.... Yep, folks didn't like that ending... It was a great movie, but it was a fable, a fantasy, NOT reality. But, it made a lot of money, and probably influenced the construction of more carriers and aircraft... The mass media, Hollywood, is in with the ACIBC as well...
I remember a military magazine decades back where some brave Naval man suggested that the future of the Navy would be submersible carriers that hosted fleets of hundreds to thousands of unmanned drones. It would go underwater to avoid air power and either surface to launch off massive drone attacks or even fire them upwards out of the water from a safer depth. It seemed both brilliant and obvious.
Having served on carriers in my younger days, I am relatively familiar with how the operations and logistics are done. The fact that they were obsolete behemoths even when I was in didn’t strike me til much later owing to the fact that there was no near peer able to interdict us then. Missile tech and drone swarms have changed that in an irreversible way. Billions of dollars of boat and hundreds of millions in aircraft are destroyed or disabled or unrecoverable with perhaps a million dollar missile. Power projection is cool when you are the only one capable, it is foolish when those in charge can't or won't see that we don't hold that advantage, at all, any longer.
I love this article. A thought on this point: "In the conventional world of the Pentagon follies, they will not alter or eliminate the self-licking ice cream cone of the broken defense acquisition system in the West that has delivered the parade of program failures I have described here and in the past."
I had a long JOC discussion with a Navy amigo 2 a few years ago on ship system modularity. Admittedly, I'm an Army guy, so I could be way off on this, but I have to replace my personal laptop every 2-3 years because it becomes slow and obsolete. Presumably, Aircraft carriers should also replace their tech every 2-3 years for similar reasons. Nothing in the ship is modular though - it's all built to spec and outrageously expensive. Might we save a fortune on the electronic guts of our boats by just stripping the proprietary tech and replacing it with much cheaper and more easily installed plug-and-play stuff? I imagine we'd gain performance too.
With the current model, by the time the ship is back in the water, it's tech is obsolete.
Tell me why I'm wrong on this. I certainly could be.
Tho I haven’t any military experience to speak of Bill my humble opinion is that the US has never really lost a major excursion. Sure the families and loved ones who fight them do but the mega elites that plot them have not. At least not until now.
Take for example: Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and the minor conflicts we have seen throughout. All have those entrenched in the MIC have enriched themselves even further. Though some of these excursions have been minor setbacks none has really left any serious damage to the hegemonic order. With that in mind, I would call of them successful to one degree or another.
Enter the conflict in Ukraine. I suspect those UkroNazi battalions and other legitimate AFU forces were probably the toughest most formidable army NATO had at its disposal. Especially when it came to fighting on their home turf. I would venture to guess a majority of the initial players have become KIA’s by now. Sending any other NATO army over there would be suicide at this point.
Sure the mega elites and others connected in the MIC have made out like bandits once again. However I believe not only was this a solid left hook thrown into the face of Intl Rules Based Order, it was mostly likely a fatal blow. In order for the money changers on top to have undisputed power they must have a dominant military and currency. This conflict has caused major slippage for both.
This will be the first major actual loss in maybe a century or more. I don’t believe the West can recover from it either. And now the knives are out. It’s only a matter of time before the system gives way. At this point forward every stupid silly ass Clown World stunt they pull is just another cut leading to the death.
Have tried to wargame what that might look like. All I can tell you is if it implodes America and it’s allies are sitting on so much debt the only thing that will work is a new system. I believe smaller homogeneous societies could survive it but after years of divide and conquer rule it is much harder to imagine success.
One of the more interesting possible technologies American naval architects might develop is the submersible nuclear aircraft carrier. It would inevitably be limited in the number and types of aircraft it could deploy, but if these were drone aircraft for the most part, a large nuclear sub air and missile platform might be a game changer. Of course, thinking that far out of their assorted boxes would involve the having of imaginations for anything but the grift and luxury living it brings.
It has been some time since the military industrial financial complex was anything but a grift machine. It is really good at feathering nests, not effective at generating flight capable birds that might venture out of that nest. Lovely metaphors there.
In order to be ashamed of abandoning the Red Sea, especially at the Bab el Mandeb strait, the people in the gooferment would have to be even slightly interested in world trade on behalf of American trading companies. Bad news. Seizing Russia's hundred of billions in foreign reserves in Europe and the USA spells the end of dollar based trading, wrecks the largest import-export banking systems, and is truly a wrecking ball for importers. I'm not sure the didn't earn it crews involved in major companies are going to be able to work out how stupid that is in time to avert it. Losing dollar hegemony would make military hegemony very unlikely.
You also don't see much sign of interest in the oil, natural gas, and coal industries that make America warm and power all those electric cars. So the disinterest in whether super tankers can navigate the Bab is perhaps understandable. The Houthis, by the way, recently announced they have air superiority over the Hormuz as well, which kind of makes the continuing investments in Kuwait, Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE significantly more risky. Not that I'm complaining.
Barack Obama and his boyfriend Michael/Michelle appear to be what is running the Biden thing as it fouls its pants on the way to the end of Obama's fourth term. (If you believe Trump had meaningful control over foreign and military policy during his term, you are a silly person imo.) Now, our conversation was brief, not more than 15 minutes, probably not less than 10, but the man is a Maoist. He really likes to see people suffer and die. I met him on campus at Columbia in the fifth month of 1983, during "stop week" so right around this time of year forty-one years ago. He was on campus writing up all the anti-war groups that had devastated world opinion in the tenth month of 1982 with our "die in" on campus to signify what things might look like if a nuclear war took place and lower Manhattan were hit. He wanted to talk to me because after the 11th month of 1982, I had made myself scarce at meetings of Students Against Militarism. I had a term time job at a bank in Midtown and needed the money to supplement my full academic scholarship ride.
Obama's hit piece in Sundial magazine that same year (1983) lists all the dirt he could dig up on every member of the two prominent anti-war groups, except me. God saved me from that difficulty, praise God, amen. So when he asked me if I planned to be active in the anti-war groups in the Autumn semester, I said, no, the job at the bank was more important, plus I had met the new chairman of Students Against Militarism. I said the new guy was a graduate student in Chinese studies and a Maoist, and so I couldn't be involved any more. Obama asked me, "Why? What's wrong with Maoism?"
For me, that signified the end of the conversation. I said, "You know. All the dead people?" And I walked off to my rendezvous with Furnald grocery's cheap all-nighter study foods and caffeinated beverages.
So if you seek a major world government that wants its economy to be ruined, its currency to be hyperinflated, its world trade reduced to tatters, its border open to murderers, rapists, and reprobates, and its global reputation sullied as much as possible, you need only look around. As the Romans said when asked to show tourists to the monument to Julius Caesar, "circumspice." You have but to look about you.
I don't fear for America. The people of America are God-fearing, good, hard working, and resilient as anything. Nor do I care a whit for the nationalist socialist communist dictatorship posing behind the plantation slavery constitution. The district of corruption, which Bill calls Mordor on the Potomac, is not worth saving. A reckoning comes, and some people are going to be involved in bringing it.
At this point, it appears that military industrial happiness (spending) is more important than winning wars. I mean, what good is a short-successful war? Where's the money in that?
Sadly, many lives will be sacrificed on this altar. Because there is little chance for justice in this world, the lives lost will not be those who schemed for these boondoggles.
By all accounts, "Top Gun: Maverick" was a great movie, according the folks I know that saw it in the movie theaters. Folks came out of the theaters feeling good about the US military and life in general.
From what I have seen from various scenes on YouTube, it checked all the boxes. I ask them if they stayed to see the alternate ending after the credits. They all say, "No, what happened???" I tell them that while the cast are all doing the celebratory hugging and kissing on the flight deck at the end, they look up to see dozens of hypersonics dropping upon them, and they all die.... Yep, folks didn't like that ending... It was a great movie, but it was a fable, a fantasy, NOT reality. But, it made a lot of money, and probably influenced the construction of more carriers and aircraft... The mass media, Hollywood, is in with the ACIBC as well...
I remember a military magazine decades back where some brave Naval man suggested that the future of the Navy would be submersible carriers that hosted fleets of hundreds to thousands of unmanned drones. It would go underwater to avoid air power and either surface to launch off massive drone attacks or even fire them upwards out of the water from a safer depth. It seemed both brilliant and obvious.
Guess they demoted that guy a long time ago.
Having served on carriers in my younger days, I am relatively familiar with how the operations and logistics are done. The fact that they were obsolete behemoths even when I was in didn’t strike me til much later owing to the fact that there was no near peer able to interdict us then. Missile tech and drone swarms have changed that in an irreversible way. Billions of dollars of boat and hundreds of millions in aircraft are destroyed or disabled or unrecoverable with perhaps a million dollar missile. Power projection is cool when you are the only one capable, it is foolish when those in charge can't or won't see that we don't hold that advantage, at all, any longer.
I love this article. A thought on this point: "In the conventional world of the Pentagon follies, they will not alter or eliminate the self-licking ice cream cone of the broken defense acquisition system in the West that has delivered the parade of program failures I have described here and in the past."
I had a long JOC discussion with a Navy amigo 2 a few years ago on ship system modularity. Admittedly, I'm an Army guy, so I could be way off on this, but I have to replace my personal laptop every 2-3 years because it becomes slow and obsolete. Presumably, Aircraft carriers should also replace their tech every 2-3 years for similar reasons. Nothing in the ship is modular though - it's all built to spec and outrageously expensive. Might we save a fortune on the electronic guts of our boats by just stripping the proprietary tech and replacing it with much cheaper and more easily installed plug-and-play stuff? I imagine we'd gain performance too.
With the current model, by the time the ship is back in the water, it's tech is obsolete.
Tell me why I'm wrong on this. I certainly could be.
Tho I haven’t any military experience to speak of Bill my humble opinion is that the US has never really lost a major excursion. Sure the families and loved ones who fight them do but the mega elites that plot them have not. At least not until now.
Take for example: Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and the minor conflicts we have seen throughout. All have those entrenched in the MIC have enriched themselves even further. Though some of these excursions have been minor setbacks none has really left any serious damage to the hegemonic order. With that in mind, I would call of them successful to one degree or another.
Enter the conflict in Ukraine. I suspect those UkroNazi battalions and other legitimate AFU forces were probably the toughest most formidable army NATO had at its disposal. Especially when it came to fighting on their home turf. I would venture to guess a majority of the initial players have become KIA’s by now. Sending any other NATO army over there would be suicide at this point.
Sure the mega elites and others connected in the MIC have made out like bandits once again. However I believe not only was this a solid left hook thrown into the face of Intl Rules Based Order, it was mostly likely a fatal blow. In order for the money changers on top to have undisputed power they must have a dominant military and currency. This conflict has caused major slippage for both.
This will be the first major actual loss in maybe a century or more. I don’t believe the West can recover from it either. And now the knives are out. It’s only a matter of time before the system gives way. At this point forward every stupid silly ass Clown World stunt they pull is just another cut leading to the death.
Have tried to wargame what that might look like. All I can tell you is if it implodes America and it’s allies are sitting on so much debt the only thing that will work is a new system. I believe smaller homogeneous societies could survive it but after years of divide and conquer rule it is much harder to imagine success.
One of the more interesting possible technologies American naval architects might develop is the submersible nuclear aircraft carrier. It would inevitably be limited in the number and types of aircraft it could deploy, but if these were drone aircraft for the most part, a large nuclear sub air and missile platform might be a game changer. Of course, thinking that far out of their assorted boxes would involve the having of imaginations for anything but the grift and luxury living it brings.
It has been some time since the military industrial financial complex was anything but a grift machine. It is really good at feathering nests, not effective at generating flight capable birds that might venture out of that nest. Lovely metaphors there.
In order to be ashamed of abandoning the Red Sea, especially at the Bab el Mandeb strait, the people in the gooferment would have to be even slightly interested in world trade on behalf of American trading companies. Bad news. Seizing Russia's hundred of billions in foreign reserves in Europe and the USA spells the end of dollar based trading, wrecks the largest import-export banking systems, and is truly a wrecking ball for importers. I'm not sure the didn't earn it crews involved in major companies are going to be able to work out how stupid that is in time to avert it. Losing dollar hegemony would make military hegemony very unlikely.
You also don't see much sign of interest in the oil, natural gas, and coal industries that make America warm and power all those electric cars. So the disinterest in whether super tankers can navigate the Bab is perhaps understandable. The Houthis, by the way, recently announced they have air superiority over the Hormuz as well, which kind of makes the continuing investments in Kuwait, Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE significantly more risky. Not that I'm complaining.
Barack Obama and his boyfriend Michael/Michelle appear to be what is running the Biden thing as it fouls its pants on the way to the end of Obama's fourth term. (If you believe Trump had meaningful control over foreign and military policy during his term, you are a silly person imo.) Now, our conversation was brief, not more than 15 minutes, probably not less than 10, but the man is a Maoist. He really likes to see people suffer and die. I met him on campus at Columbia in the fifth month of 1983, during "stop week" so right around this time of year forty-one years ago. He was on campus writing up all the anti-war groups that had devastated world opinion in the tenth month of 1982 with our "die in" on campus to signify what things might look like if a nuclear war took place and lower Manhattan were hit. He wanted to talk to me because after the 11th month of 1982, I had made myself scarce at meetings of Students Against Militarism. I had a term time job at a bank in Midtown and needed the money to supplement my full academic scholarship ride.
Obama's hit piece in Sundial magazine that same year (1983) lists all the dirt he could dig up on every member of the two prominent anti-war groups, except me. God saved me from that difficulty, praise God, amen. So when he asked me if I planned to be active in the anti-war groups in the Autumn semester, I said, no, the job at the bank was more important, plus I had met the new chairman of Students Against Militarism. I said the new guy was a graduate student in Chinese studies and a Maoist, and so I couldn't be involved any more. Obama asked me, "Why? What's wrong with Maoism?"
For me, that signified the end of the conversation. I said, "You know. All the dead people?" And I walked off to my rendezvous with Furnald grocery's cheap all-nighter study foods and caffeinated beverages.
So if you seek a major world government that wants its economy to be ruined, its currency to be hyperinflated, its world trade reduced to tatters, its border open to murderers, rapists, and reprobates, and its global reputation sullied as much as possible, you need only look around. As the Romans said when asked to show tourists to the monument to Julius Caesar, "circumspice." You have but to look about you.
I don't fear for America. The people of America are God-fearing, good, hard working, and resilient as anything. Nor do I care a whit for the nationalist socialist communist dictatorship posing behind the plantation slavery constitution. The district of corruption, which Bill calls Mordor on the Potomac, is not worth saving. A reckoning comes, and some people are going to be involved in bringing it.
Up your preps gentlemen.
Winning wars is much less profitable than having them go on for decades.
War to Save Josef Stalin
This is pure gold, thank you.
The Defense Industrial Base does not profit from the efficient conduct of warfare.
At this point, it appears that military industrial happiness (spending) is more important than winning wars. I mean, what good is a short-successful war? Where's the money in that?
Sadly, many lives will be sacrificed on this altar. Because there is little chance for justice in this world, the lives lost will not be those who schemed for these boondoggles.
"the lives lost will not be those who schemed for these boondoggles."
Not unless there's court martials with death penalties, anyway.
Don't dismiss that out of hand, we still live under the Nuremburg regime.