Thursday, May 30, 2019

I Don't Do This By Throwing Darts At A Board While Blindfolded


Just one of 10,000 outrages in the past 25 years















From comments to the last piece:
"The rot of PC had already thoroughly infected the U.S. military by the time of Gulf War One; in order to predate the pernicious influence of Cultural Marxism (PC writ large)upon the armed forces, you have to go back before the advent of the much-vaunted but somewhat overrated "all-volunteer force" (AFV) during the mid-1970s.

The uncomfortable, inconvenient truth for those who think the current AVF structure is ideal, is that it has a very mixed record when it comes to winning wars. Moreover, the AVF has never been tested in combat against a peer opponent."
Sorry, but no, my time placement was accurate.
I was pointing the time of peak military capability, not to the last time there was some mythological ideological purity of thought, which has existed within the military never, and no place.
The point of choosing 1991 was that at that time, we hadn't yet started RIFing out entire squadrons and regiments.

And we had no peer nor even near-peer opponents, anywhere in the world.
Which was the entire point.

Iraq was the sixth-largest land army extant, and we completely rolled it up in 6 weeks of air campaign, and three days of ground combat. Its air force had completely ceased to exist.
Doing the same with #2 through #5 would merely have been an exercise in additional time and ordnance, at that point, had we been so inclined.

It also marks the last time the US military was used as a military, rather than as the Meals-On-Wheels Diversity Scout Patrol.
Nota bene how well it works when you use an axe as an axe, and not as a butter knife. Nor some perverted fetish sex toy.

It turns out the reverse of the former Soviet military philosophy is also true:
Quality has a quantity all its own.

And after that, we started ruthlessly culling men, equipment, and capability, of a type that could have taken on the pre-AVF military from anytime between 1946 and 1976, and stuffed it in a wastebasket with one hand tied behind its back.

The Navy peaked at 592 ships in 1989, but in 1991, we had 15 aircraft carriers.
Now we have 10.
In the late 1980s, we had 69 destroyers, 115 frigates, 102 attack submarines, and 39 ballistic missile subs on patrol.
We now have, respectively, 59, 29, 53, and 14.
We went from 592 ships at our peak, to 267, (+ 8 Little Crappy Ships that cannot do anything useful, and would be, in wartime, a liability, not an asset). USN Ship Strength, year by year

The last time it was as pathetic as it is now was from 1923-1930, and even then, bridge officers managed to not run into civilian shipping, as a general policy, and were qualified watch standers.

Yet we still have 271 admirals: virtually one per commissioned ship!?!
This is far beyond recockulous, and I'm betting we could fire 240-250 of those braid-heavy @$$holes with no loss, and probably a great improvement, in naval efficiency. Not to mention the savings in salary and pensions.

The Air Farce was slashed even more drastically. Like halved.

And the Army went from 3/4s of a million men to hovering at around 500K, most of that taken directly from frontline capability, going from 17 active duty divisions to 10, currently. We got rid of two armored and five infantry divisions. The entire US Army, in one place, would be a speed bump to an actual peer adversary, and we couldn't get the entire army to one place anywhere if we had to in less than a year, probably more like three, and only by stripping it from five other commitments which it cannot keep either, even at present.

Strategists have long recognized that we are trying to play "Twister" with an octopus, strategically. That won't end well.

(For reference, the entire active US Army, 10 divisions at present, is smaller than the 14-division Third Army that General Patton commanded, and used to break the siege during the Battle of the Bulge. We had more troops in Vietnam at the height of that conflict than the entire US Army has at present. Think about that.)

That would be bad enough, given that our overseas commitments since 1991 have doubled, rather than halved, but add on top of that the vigorous gaying and diversity-cornholing of the military, to the point that now transgenderism, instead of being a medical and psychological bar to enlistment, is actively encouraged, and the uniform lowering of all standards in all units for every metric that matters. (If you think Chelsea Bradley Manning's treason was an aberration, I have a bridge for sale, cheap.)

You have sailor-chicks who can't handle basic damage control tasks, which means you have 95-pound weaklings who can't pull a hose pack through confined spaces, or heft DC 4x4s into places to plug a hole in the hull.
That means ships will die.

The pregnancy rates and non-deployability of women on sea duty is legendary.
They are, in short, a disaster for the Navy. At least, if it was meant for combat.
Clearly, that's now a tertiary function.

You have Air Farce ground service troops who can't heft basic ordnance into place and plug it in by hand, even with 150-200% of the requisite male staffing for that function.
That effects manning levels required, aircraft turnaround, ability to operate at high tempo, and basic combat readiness.

In the ground combat arms, Army and Marines, you have the can't-cut-it Combat Barbies who're either going to be literally carried when war comes, or fragged in self defense, whether enlisted or officerettes. (And I'm cheering for the latter, if you're wondering.)

One fouled up Barbie can take out a platoon.
One fouled up platoon can screw up a company, a battalion, and a brigade, and undermine an entire operation.
All for the want of a horseshoe nail.


The first thing they need to do is expunge women from service outside of CONUS, or in any combat arm or position they are simply incapable of performing, under non-elastic standards from Before The Rot. That would be, by actual reality, about 99% of them.
Ditto for gays, although they, at least, can claim to meeting equal standards in times past, unlike any women in the service since 1865.

Let's be clear; the military's job is to kill people, and break things, as a team.
If you have any legal-historical evidence that women, gays, and the other 57 genders can do that better than the military did prior to their deliberate inclusion, or even as good, on the whole, bring it out. I'm open to rational discussion. But the military's fundamental purpose isn't and never should have been to "look like America". It was, and always should be, to make America's enemies look like blobs of festering chum. Anything that doesn't advance or improve that mission has to go, and that means 98% of the chicks and the queens should be gone, forever, and good riddance.

Including them has been a disastrous social experiment, that has chiefly proven that the derelict officer corps and careerist NCOs will fudge any rules and lower any standard, knowing full well that those rules and standards were written in the blood of earlier generations.

Anybody in the current military with stripes or brass is therefore complicit in getting future generations killed. If the boot fits, wear it.

It's like cops that look the other way when the criminal fraction within them go hog-wild: the blue wall of silence goes up, and they all become the problem, not the solution.

So just as an entire police department becomes a criminal gang, the entire military becomes a criminal conspiracy to defraud the nation and weaken the US' military capability, because no one will put their rank and career on the line to tell the obvious truth.

Total number of general (or any other rank) officers to resign over these lowered standards, to date: 0.
QED

Thus the honest and conscientious types get out, and/or refuse to go in, and the military's decline becomes a death-spiral. We are now decades into that terminal spin.

Nations have been at this crossroads before.
Like Rome, at the point when they stopped demanding citizens serve, and turned defense of the entity to foreign-born mercenaries.

The end that follows is not pretty.
And anyone espousing some magical return to pre-1900 isolationism, and/or cheering on the inevitably following Dark Ages is an ahistorical idiot, and a five-star jackass.

Our military is near-hopelessly broken. It would take woodshedding the abortion of which we've been gifted with a meat axe and a flamethrower, and throwing trainloads of money at it we don't have, because we gave it to giant banking cartels instead. We're beyond broke, we're 90 years in debt.
What cannot continue, will not. And the bill is going to come due, sooner or later.

That makes what comes next rather predictably horrible.
I yell because I care, but the patient is probably terminal at this point, and that's only the first-order effect.

You don't even want to think about the second-, third- and fourth-order effects to that inescapable reality.
But you'll see this material again, kids.

32 comments:

  1. All well-said. I've been out of the Navy for thirty years now, and I don't recognize it anymore. Didn't I write about the problem with women on active duty a while back? NavSecGruAct Adak was about 40% women because women needed sea-duty to advance in rate, and Adak was the only sea-duty station for female ETs, RM, and CTs in 1980. The pregnancy rate amoung the sailorettes was a pretty steady 25%; every week, another planeload of preggies ready to deliver lifted off for Anchorage. None of those women returned. Now we have mixed crews on combat ships; the Navy didn't learn the lesson.

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  2. I find myself feeling less respect for the military with every passing year.
    I do still think most who sign up are first grade material; they just don't have the leaders.

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  3. It is slight comfort to know that our "peer" is still learning basic CV flight ops. Five years hence they will be our better if current trends continue - and I see no reason they won't.
    I can't but conclude this was malice forethought aided and abetted by most of the GO/GO's of two generations at least.
    I do take some comfort in the notion of a large bunch of 21st century yeoman-farmers being able to hold our own territory. Cold comfort to be sure.
    Boat Guy

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  4. Boot women out, period. Start there. Administer a swim test. That’ll solve a lot of problems totally unrelated to swimming.

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  5. The Roman legions were the envy of the world as a combat force in their time. Many of the "barbarians" that later sacked Rome were Goths trained as troops in the legions.

    We have farther to fall.

    The core mission of the military is, as you rightly said, to kill people and break things. When any group deviates from the core mission, it begins to focus on the deviation, because the deviation is easier than the core mission. The military, the CDC, and NASA come to mind. NASA produces braille books about eclipses for blind kids. That's a great thing, unless it's not your mission, and it's certainly easier than actually spending your time and effort putting people and things into space.

    This explains why Musk can put cargo into space and develop new rockets for a fraction of the cost and time of a NASA program - Musk is actually serious about space.

    Not that I have any opinions.

    Yeah, my blog post is about this tomorrow. Now I'm gonna reference this.

    Great post.

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  6. Sal (Cdr Salamander) has a LOT of support for this in his DivThur post at: http://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2019/05/diversity-thursday_30.html


    You could look because he has all kinds of graphs -n-shit.

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  7. I joined up in 1994, and the cold warriors were still around, in the more senior ranks, but most E-5 and below were those who came in after GW1.
    I told everyone who would listen when discussion in the office would turn to how screwed up the Navy was that the rot started during the post-Cold-War draw down, and I still firmly believe it today.
    The first thing to be severely affected post cold war was procurement, and the Navy was not immune. A-12, the replacement for the long ranged strike aircraft A-6, cancelled. S-3s retired with plenty of useful life, without replacement. OHP frigates, Spruance destroyers, all gone without replacement. And all the while, commitments stayed the same or increased.
    Regarding females, every carrier looses something like 25-35 female crew every deployment due to pregnancies, and the fraternization NJP charges fly weekly. During my squadron tour, a girl in my office, who had already gotten pregnant to miss a deployment once, did it again. She waited until 2 days before we were due to get on the plane to fly to Norfolk to tell the command, making us deploy a body short in my office.
    Consequences? Nope, she went on to make 1st class, last I heard. Still single, never married, but two kids.
    My last last deployment in 2012-2013 I heard that the guy in charge of the tire storeroom, where un-built tire carcases are stored, was renting his storeroom out for couples.
    There was a 4'10" girl who was on that ship when I got there, and she worked in the flight clothing store room, and later was sent to Stock Control. No way in hell could that woman perform any useful physical task, either for damage control, or just the general stores humping that comes with being in supply.

    The Navy is going to lose many ships if they get into a fight with someone who knows what they are doing. The professionalism is just gone, it hasn't been a promotion priority for decades now. Mission oriented people just do not get promoted. Ask me how I know...

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  8. Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy....

    This ain't my father's Navy. The Navy has suffered a lot of embarrassment since the bombing of the USS Cole and it will see a ton more before sanity has a chance at command again.

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  9. Please accept my congratulations, sir. It's not often I read a "Patrick Henry quality" post but you have done it. Like Mr. Wilder at wilderwealthywise, this gem will be referenced and recommended in Woodpile Report. Fittingly, it will be on the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

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  10. The inward focused no more Team America World Police world may not be worth cheering but its going to happen in a few decades, before or after our next civil war or when we become Brazil 2.0

    If we start to unwind this mess now we can make the transition a hell of a lot easier than holding on to our Empire to the bitter end. As J.M. Greer often says "Collapse Now and Save the Wait."

    Also who exactly is our military supposed to fight? The only real threat anyone faces is China and we cannot defeat them for a myriad of reasons

    Every other fight for the next few decades at least would be a a police action at most . besides the real threats and the thing killing the US are all immigration related and/or come from D.C.

    Now sure time will change things and we won't be able to stint on military spending forever, but no one is having babies in any developed nation and that's been the case for nearly half a century with little sign of stopping

    To paraphrase Stalin "no people, no problem." and we ought to relish the brief opportunity to the opportunity to gradually get a catch our breath and for nearly the first time in history to maybe not be at war.





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  11. I come from a family with a pretty long history of our male kin serving in the military. In the extended family I know of at least 6 that have left over the past 5 or maybe 8 years or so. With the exception of 2, all actual combat veterans. From what they've related to me they're all pretty disillusioned with the state of things for one reason or another and their offspring aren't joining up. There's one lone male left in the Army running out the clock. After he leaves I don't think we'll have any family left in uniform with two exceptions. Both females who to be brutally honest joined the AF and the Navy for the dick and the benefits. I hear through the grapevine how one always is valiantly struggling with some sort of nebulous ailment or injury and how the other one is producing yet another bastard. Fearsome warriors they are not. Though the one seems to be hell on haagen dazs judging from the pics that were passed around last Christmas.

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  12. Aesop,

    I have seen all that you outlined. Sadly, your excellent synopsis of the rot in the former War Department, is accurate.

    Thanks for pointing out the truth.

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  13. @Anon 8:40P

    Evidently Cdr Salamander's prominent spot on my Blog List sailed right over your head...?

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  14. Pbbffbfbfbffftttt!!!

    Open a history book, kids. In WW1 the US went to war (the war to end all wars) in a state far, far worse than this. Same thing happened in WW2. Not only that, it did so during times of technological advances that would have boggled the minds of everyone before the war. The Calvary became obsolete in WW1, for example, and ghastly new weapons took to the field like poison gas and machine guns. The airplane added a new dimension to exploit. In WW2 guided missiles and atom bombs replaced trenches and artillery.

    People are smart and resourceful. Americans especially so.

    If the balloon goes up, you can bet the bar will too. All the idiocy brought in by Obutthole ‘with his pen and cell phone’ will go out the same way. The legions of combat Barbies, chubsters, and perverts will be gone in the first 60 days of a real engagement. The few women of tactical worth will quickly be mustered out of jobs they can’t do, and slotted into ones they can. Political Correctness will just go away the way it did when Obama got kicked to the curb. During his presidency America was consumed with race baiting, feminism, and making sure that 40 year old men could go into the washroom to pee with 7 year old girls. Trump chit canned all that crap on day one. Last I heard he refused to let trannies play in the military.

    America can go from minivans, running shoes, and political correctness to an industrial/military powerhouse in the blink of an eye - provided the motivation is there. As for the faggotry, perverts, wahmens, pozz and the other trappings of progressive liberalism... it’s on its way out as we speak. The Democrats have destroyed themselves with it, and without them to drive it... the writing is on the wall.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for your words of encouragement. Nobody thought full employment, industries returning to America, shit free trade deals spiked, better deals signed, China made 70% accountable etc were achievable, yet Trump pulled off all that. And the Democrats with their combat Barbies and perverts are looking weaker and more pathetic every day. Any conservative leader with cojones anywhere can turn around the rot. Amen.

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  15. TL;DR: There is no one left in the services who remembers what 'right' looks like.

    Everything bad begins with the denial of reality. We have been doing that since 1965. We're just reaping the benefits of collectively closing our eyes, putting our fingers in our ears, and chanting "La la la! I can't hear you!" for generations.

    Mountains of skulls and rivers of blood.

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  16. "Quality has a quantity all its own."
    Was this reverse order intentional?

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  17. @Glen Filthie
    The United States of the 1940’s doesn’t exist anymore. America at that time was a manufacturing powerhouse. Shipyards existed along all the coasts, factories across the land churned out products that were bought by Americans.
    The massive industrial/manufacturing industry is a shell of its former self, the education system is turning out progressive socialists, SJW’s and dolts, the media and academia are for the most part the enemy and the government is hugely bloated and ineffective.
    The destruction of the military as a war force steeped in readiness began long before Obummer and his path was paved for him to complete wanton destruction of readiness.
    Pollyanna beliefs in the capabilities of a long gone Republic will win no wars.
    I see no evidence that the progressive socialists are losing their war to radically transform the country. Perhaps if November 2020 brings massive defeats of the Dims at the federal, state and local levels that clearly sends commies the message that the United States will not become Venezuela, then I will agree that their influence is waning.
    I hope that you are right and I am wrong.

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  18. Brilliant essay, damning and depressing, but true.
    This photo, along with photos of our warships rammed by tankers, will be the epitaph of our military.
    https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/west-point-graduates-black-female-cadets.jpg

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  19. Again, June - read a history book. America was lolling in The Great Depression before WW2. Unemployment reached 25%. People starved to death in those days. Prior to the Manhattan Project nobody had ever built an atom bomb before. The military was down to almost nothing prior to the war. Consider Pearl Harbour - what percentage of the Navy survived that? A couple years later Japan was on the ropes. And the other Axis powers. Military fortunes can turn on a dime.

    As for evidence of the tide turning? Look at Trump's election. Hillary and the media slobs were were getting the party ready to rip right up until election night. Couple years later with the entire deep state howling for his blood, Trump is still there. People like you and I are getting up off the couch and we're voting. And most of us in this demographic are sick and effing tired of watching our military take it up the shorts from degenerates and the mentally ill.

    Western fortunes ride on people like us - not the queers, the pedos, the sexually disturbed. I am not denying anything our blog host or his peers have said - I am saying that we CAN turn it around if the motivation is there. If we can't beat the guys arrayed against us in a serious pissing match - then perhaps we deserve to lose.

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  20. "Never begin a sentence with "Pbbffbfbfbffftttt!!!" -my third grad English teacher.

    I swear on my ancestors I would never have put on those red high heels. "Conduct unbecoming a soldier in the US Army" I would have said. Even if I got reduced in rank and had to clean latrines for a year at least there would be no picture of me on the internet parading like a drag queen.

    old grunt

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  21. The follow up article had comment(s) noting that the rot portends well tactically for Team Liberty should TSHTF, which is true. Also true that such would make it more likely for our opponents to be the PLA rather than the American Army. (George Washington's vision?)
    Just a thought, but don't we buy a lot of our military electronics from Huawei? How is this a good idea?
    _revjen45

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  22. @Matt Bracken:
    Yes, Matt, the reversing was intentional.
    "It turns out the reverse of the former Soviet military philosophy is also true:
    Quality has a quantity all its own.
    "

    Because in GW1 we had outnumbered battalions taking out brigades, and individual tanks making kill shots from so far away the Iraqi tankers couldn't even see them. Turned out the war shots were even more accurate than the training rounds. I also have a baby brother with an ArCom from NTC, when he was an OPFOR TC, and took out a battalion task force, single-handed. Including one very pissed off Cobra jockey, who'd never been shot down by a main tank round before.

    Our forces, though less numerous, were so much better than what they faced it made the "Mother of Battles" turn into the Highway of Death - for Achmed and Habib.

    Our qualitative edge overcame large quantities of Iraqi opposing forces, and made them just that many targets.

    I also talked to A-10 pilots freshly back in the summer of '91, when we assigned pairs of A-10s to approx. 5 mi X 5 mi "kill boxes", and they described in detail how we did it.
    By limiting air strike authority to one pair of wingmen, it reduced fratricide, and anything they saw in their neighborhood was fair game.

    "Anyone that lit off a radar was going to catch a Shrike or Maverick in about 10 seconds, so we didn't worry much about SAMs. We'd circle around at about 10K', up above AAA range, and look for targets. The first pass, one of us would come screaming down and pull up at 5K', firing no ordnance, to stop an entire column. We'd circle for about 60 seconds, to give the Iraqi crew members a chance to pop the hatches and take off running in all directions, which they'd do without fail after the second week. Then on the second pass, we'd unload, and rip all the tanks and tracks, now helpfully stopped, into flaming pieces of junk. Same for subsequent passes, until we were either out of targets, out of ordnance, or bingo fuel. Then they'd pull out their white t-shirts, waving them overhead, and go looking for someone nearby to surrender to. Killed hundreds of Iraqi tanks and APCs that way."

    Hence the flip-flop of the old adage about Ivan's order of battle.

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  23. Not so, Glen.

    1) We didn't lose that much at Pearl Harbor, except the misperception of the battleship's invincibility. All but a couple of ships, including the fleet submarines, and all our then-few carriers, were in action within days to weeks afterwards. We only lost a couple of obsolete battleships, like Arizona and Utah.

    2) We aren't going to have 2-4 years of prep time in the next war.
    It'll be come-as-you-are, and by six months in, it'll be all over but the crying.
    That's why the forces we cut were so critical. They take years to create, and we won't have that. It's not 1941, or 1916. A war will be over in a month or two, and be a fait accompli long before the first person to run to the recruiter when it started would even get out of basic training.

    3) There is no sign of things in the .mil turning around.
    Rather the opposite. it takes 20-30 years to make generals and admirals, and we'd only be starting on that now. And we don't have the budget to replace what we sacrificed, and all evidence points out that restoring the military to where it was 25 years ago will take an equal period of time, if we even had the national will to try. We can't even find that will inside the Pentagon.
    Heart from snuffies at the mud level just means that they're going to die, with surprised and disappointed looks on their faces, when the idiots in charge bumble them into a slaughterhouse.

    We aren't going to rally around the flag. Instead, as a nation, we're going to be Steve McQueen at the end of The Sand Pebbles, with a hole in our chest, bleeding out, and screaming "What the hell happened?!?", until the coup de grace brings things to an end.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h60_CwmF5g

    Fixing that would take three consecutive Trump presidencies, and cost two trillion dollars.
    We have neither.

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  24. @Glen Filthie
    The America that responded to the Pearl Harbor attack was 90% white. The America that will respond to the next Perl Harbor will be minority white. That America will not rise to the occasion, if it is even given the time to, which it will not.

    Modern warfare means you have to fight with what you bring, not with what you can build, and what we can bring is rapidly wearing out or not being bought in sufficient quantity to sustain losses (F-22).

    That the Air Force is still flying F-15Cs that were built in the early 1980s should be criminal.

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  25. @ Glen The army and America you believe in are long gone. The Army that fought in GW1 is setting in the bone yard or the DRMO. Un-replaced so that the pentagon could spend money on the F-35 and F-22.The so called "White Elephants" The tanks transport ships and air force are just ...gone. Worse the people that manned and repaired are GONE too. That skill set was considered un-needed ,and so not passed on. It was replaced by SJW and environmentalist's. The factory's of 1939 are gone. Even if we could perform the greatest feat of construction in history. Any war involving the small force of "inclusive" warriors will be over long before the first brick is laid. That America is long dead. I know because I collect the artifacts. The US military of 2019 could not out fight the force that fought in Korea in 1953 or the one that fought in Vietnam in 1965. The only good news in any of this is that the MILITIA really could kick this army's ass when the government go's for the guns. And don't worry about the use of "contractors". The US is broke, and those guy's don't work for free.

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  26. It's not just the military either. Look in any USFS/BLM office and you'll see women leading the pack, went kayaking in Grand Teton NP the last several weekends, women Rangerettes everywhere. Men are the minority, while women rise to all levels of leadership.
    Totally FUBAR on all counts, and by design.

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  27. Legend has it that Bismarck, commenting on the size of the British Army of his time and comparing it to the Prussian Army, said that if the British were to ever land on Prussian soil he would send a Gendarme to arrest it.

    Same applies to the size of the US Army and the Chinese.

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  28. In the past I wondered when we would pass the rubicon. Now I wonder when we actually passed it. A colonel friend of mine once answered a question about a general becoming president name redacted. He answered you don't want that. His explanation was excellent and in so many words, they are socialist since they have been living on the government teet all their lives. I was stunned at that brilliance. Aesop that Admiral statistic really has me pissed. God help the U.S.A. and the world, no one else can. I pray that we as his tools can right the ship.

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  29. Ever wonder why admirals have never really run for president?

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  30. Unknown, re: F-15's

    Building advanced aircraft requires a long chain starting with intact families and going all the way to steady and consistent jobs in engineering and aeronautics

    We don't have any of those things with most of thee going bye bye in the 1980's

    Its a miracle we can do all that we do.

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  31. "America can go from minivans, running shoes, and political correctness to an industrial/military powerhouse in the blink of an eye - provided the motivation is there." -- Glen Filthie

    You Sir are living in the '40's.

    Lets look at some stats. Time to build --

    * A Electric Substation -- 36mos, and that is the large custom built Xfmers from some place like SK or DM.

    * A Steel Mill -- 5 years. Oh and add two more years if there is a Eco challenge to the construction.

    * The F22 -- As I recall it took 8 years from plan to prototype to get it off the ground.

    Now lets look at GW I. --

    * From planning to deploy was 7 mos.
    * Engagement to defeating the enemy was 3 weeks.

    Bottom line:

    Construction has a massively longer lead time than Destruction. So you engage with what you got. And modern war burns thru material at a furious rate. So if you don't have it on the shelf when the curtain goes up you won't have it when the PRC is marching down Pennsylvania Avenue.

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