HMS Defiant has a long, somewhat depressing, yet pretty accurate article that he titles "The Coming War". Here's a short excerpt.
I have always believed that war is a come as you are affair and that there is no substitute for what we used to call the Fleet-in-Being. If we didn't have all the line of battle ships and craft we needed to fight off the likeliest adversary then we would likely not have the time to build them or train crews to operate them and the same pretty much goes for all the weapon systems and ammo stockpiles. You better start your next war with a massive surplus of all that before you let your mouth and State Department imbeciles talk you into a war that you cannot win.
Well I don't think it will surprise anybody to learn that we simply don't have any of that any more and despite the shrieking you hear from over by the Pentagon it has been like this since roughly 2005 when the War ended and the spatter of all those idiot Victory-thru-Powerpoint slides started to fade into the rear view mirror.
. . .
People started writing books about 5th generation warfare a long while ago. Nobody in power reads them and let's be honest, none of them ever will and you know why? There is no money in 5th generation warfare for the giant defense contractors and their supporters and for all the congresscritters that float their boats and stock portfolios on their continued acquisition of pathetic scrappy hardware with procurement dollars unmatched by any Operations and Maintenance dollars so all that shiny new stuff turns into rust covered bayfill clogging the waterfronts at the few remaining naval bases we have.
. . .
How EXACTLY are they going to win a war with China? Let's be honest, the last time we won a war we bombed the enemy's cities into ruins, laid a blockade on them that strangled all imports and most essentially strangled all food imports so the people starved and were in such bad shape they kept starving for years after we relaxed the blockades and we carried out massive regime changes right down to the policeman in the street.
Do you think we have the WILL to do that to China? I guarantee we don't have the means to do it so it isn't really an issue. Thanks to the nitwits running this country and the greater darkness that is the West none of the countries in NATO or the EU are capable of taking on the equivalent of Baden Powell's boy scouts with any chance of success. On top of not having the gear or the men to fight with the countries all lack the WILL. The foolish british snobs and elites that declared that they would not fight for king or country are now thick on the ground at every level in every city in the West and remember, it's a come as you are war and they don't have any war materials at all. Seriously they're in worse condition then Canada or the Netherlands. Unready, unable and unwilling, is no way to fight a war.
There's more at the link. It may be depressing, but it's an honest look at our current situation. Go read the whole thing. It's worth your time.
I hope and pray there won't be another war . . . but we all know how slim the chances are for that. The old Roman saying was "Si visi pacem, para bellum" ("If you want peace, prepare for war") - and throughout history that's been proven to be true, time after time, the hard way. Civilizations and nations that allowed themselves to grow soft, to disarm, have always faced invasion from others who were better armed and more determined. Most of them were duly conquered and subdued. Very few, comparatively speaking, were able to buy enough time to rearm, reacquire a national will and sense of purpose, and fight back successfully.
Right now, after twelve years of monumentally incompetent leadership from left-wing progressive administrations and fund-slashing by Congress, the US armed forces are in a parlous condition. There needs to be a wholesale re-evaluation of what we need them to do, and what they need to do it. Those who've fiddled with inadequate weapons systems and doctrines and tactics need to be removed wholesale, and the Department of Defense needs to regain its sense of mission and purpose from the top down. (For a start, let's fire at least 50% of all the General and Flag Officers, if not two-thirds of them. There are far too many of them for an armed force our size. For example, the US Navy has 470 vessels in its active and reserve fleets, and 223 admirals of all grades. That's just over two ships for every admiral! The USAF and US Army are no better by comparison.)
I hope President Trump and his nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, will crack the whip right away, as soon as they take office. It'll be a mammoth job to turn this mess around - certainly more than they can accomplish in a single Administration. Here's hoping they can handle the load.
Peter
13 comments:
When you go around seeking "Sports Wars" against soft 2nd or 3rd rate militaries for decades....
Rob the military of "Unneeded" for Sports wars support ships and ability to build enough weapons for a "Real War"..
And then act surprised that a near peer can eat up your Wunder weapons and adapt quickly to your terrorism.
You deserve the beatings that school yard bullies used to get before "woke" protectionism.
To accomplish what needs to be accomplished will require putting lots of blood on the floor and doing it in a very not-so-gentle manner. That will require substantial courage on the part of the new administration, along with a willingness to ignore the whining and wailing from the anti-American Left, especially the media.
I hope Trump, Vance and Hegseth have it in them, and I hope the American people can learn enough about all the damage the Left - willfully aided and abetted by the Democrat party - has done to America to understand the whys and wherefores of it all.
Hey Peter,
We were lucky in the past, we started arming up in 1940 when President Roosevelt saw the storm clouds forming over Europe, and got the ball going, but it took us getting really embarrassed at Kasserine Pass to finish getting rid of the peacetime deadwood that had collected during the interwar period. We again dealth with unpreparedness with "Taskforce Smith" at the beginning of the Korean War when we sent a poorly equipped poorly trained soft occupation troops from Japan to stem the rout in Korea when the Soviet equiped North Koreans blew down the 38 parallel after the American politicians in foggy bottom made comments that Korea was "Outside our sphere of concern". Sounds familier to today don't it. In my war the first Gulf War, we trained after the loss and embarrassment of Vietnam, we didn't want to "lose the first battle" as is traditional for the American Army. So we trained hard and had NTC, Red Flag exercises, OPFOR and many other things to train against a "peer Adversary", and the Army that was trained to go against the Soviets, crushed the 4th largest army in the world. it introduced "hyperwar" for the first time and "Combined Arms" on a massive scale. And it also gave us "The BIG HEAD". We since 1991 have forgotten everything that we have learned due to the hard lessons of Vietnam, I have friends that are getting out now, after doing 30 years or longer in some cases, and they tell me that the Army has forgotten how to fight a peer adversary, how to prep a battlefield, all the little things that is necessary to win, but they by God make sure that the DEI directives are completed, because those metrics determine promotions. I am more than comcerned, if we get into a major fight, do we even have the will to fight? After several generations of "America Evil, the Western Civilization is Evil," how can you get her sons and daughters willing to fight to defend her? Also we have damm near drained our stocks to danger level sending munitions to the Ukraine, and modern War will go through war stocks like a shark through a surfer, and do we have the munitions to replenish what we fire away? I don't know...Munitions ain't sexy but it is necessary to win, as is fuel and we had that clown in the white house drain the Strategic Petroleum reserve, that is stuff we would need to supply our armed forces. I could go on and on. but you get my drift. Sorry for the rant.
Granted, quite a few Admirals are performing non-ship jobs such as Special Warfare & logistics, but still...
We are not ready to fight a war. Begs the question; at what level are we able to respond to such an event?
The systematic castration of our military, along with the subtle poisoning of our food supply and the rise of feminism/DEI/leftism; has left the good old USA impotent in any global conflict.
We won't be able to respond at WW2 levels. Maybe that's why we only seem to be able to respond at the "secret squirrel" level. Regime destabilization.
Not willing to fight for king or country, are king and country worth fighting for? If your gov't continues to give you the shaft you are not likely to want to fight for it.
We are at war with China, or at least China is at war with us. It is not yet kinetic, but in an industrialized era you start with the economy first. Japan knew she would have to fight America. America choosing economic sanctions pushed us closer to WWII and effected the timing. Not doing so would have had other negative consequences. The US was getting ready for war with Japan, Japan just didn't follow our time table.
I don't think China or the US could successfully invade one another. The logistics are too challenging. How about trade? Imagine what would happen if China cut all imports to the US. What if they got BRICS to go along? Could they blockade our ports? What hypersonic missle and drone capability do they have? They have 100X our shipyards, so they can do a war of attrition. Is the aircraft carrier about to go the way of the battleship? Can our subs evade hypersonic missiles and torpedoes, how real a threat are they?
By the way, we've declared war on Russia. We've just been using proxies. We confiscated Russian assets and gave them to the Ukraine (with a healthy percentage for the facilitators I'm sure). Plus we've given Ukraine weapons and intelligence. Putin has all the moral justification for escalating but has not. Maybe he knows in US war games the US tends to go nuclear first, or maybe he doesn't want us to release the next pandemic. I'm not sure why, but I'm thankful he has shown restraint.
If we go to war we will get spanked. We used to talk about our oceans protecting us, but they also insulate Russia and China from us. Currently, neither needs to go kinetic against the US. Their options are 1) trade embargo, 2) quit accepting US dollar and insist on gold, 3) sell off us debt that they hold, 4) insist payment for US debt that they hold in other than dollars (federal land would be nice), 5) Crash our internet 6) Crash our banking electronic network (pretty sure that's on their list) 7) Crash our power plants (or simple external attacks on station transformers). 8) Release a real pandemic 9) Incite illegal migrants to riot.
The point - we have a lot of internal issues that preclude us from being ready for a war. China and Russia have no need to go kinetic. They just have to tip the first domino. That they haven't mans some of the anti-Chinese and anti-Russian rhetoric is equivalent to, "Hey look, a squirrel!"
Any foreign leader with any sense can see we're a pushover and can't possibly win a real war because it's as plain on the nose on my face. The only ace we have is the nuclear arsenal and I don't know if that's even usable.
As for "twelve years of monumentally incompetent leadership from left-wing progressive administrations" - that's being far too kind. Most, if not all, of it has been intentional destruction of our country by the "transnational" morons trying to take over the world. (The WEF, Soros, and many more).
the biggest problem is the clowns running the show still think we can fight and win like we did back in WW2. not going to happen. item one, and it is a big one. we do not have the factories or the machines or the semi skilled workforce to do that anymore.
compared to 1940, we don't make shit here anymore. 2. we do not have a semi skilled workforce at all. that is what happens when craft shops and trade school close down.
over 90% of people do not even know what a
micrometer is, let alone how to read one !
the EPA shut down the last lead smelter years ago. and mining lead or copper is a no-no anymore as well. and just where are we going to get troops from ? most people under 25 today would have a hard time doing a pushup .
let alone a pull up or 2 mile run.
and last but not least. most of our "weapon systems" are over priced junk. we waste a 2 million dollar missile on a 2 grand drone ?
so, yeah. the days of WW2 are long behind us.
hell, just look at the Korean war to see how bad the Gov't can fuck up even 5 years after winning a war. the stockpile made for WW2 was either sold off or given away (?)
instead of keeping what worked, we sell it or give it away. we can always buy more !
I do realize that drones are a real game changer , but we still need people to man them
and hold a rifle. something we do not have anymore. the sheer will to fight and win.
they have fucked up the military so bad, no one in their right mind wants any part of it !
I have even talked a few kids into doing ANYTHING ELSE besides joining the military !
and I put 15 years in myself a long time ago.
unless things change. the military is fucked.
even then, it will take more than 4 years to fix what they have done to it over the last 20 years.
I imagine we would win all or most of the battles with the ChiComs and still lose the war. Japan did the same, tying up more than a million soldiers that could have been used elsewhere.
China last military adventures were against Vietnam and India 50 years ago. Their pilots, soldiers and naval officers have no direct combat experience. The technology they have are copies stolen or licensed manufactured by the PRC well known lack of quality.
What works in their favor is a huge country to retreat into and the ability and willingness to take large amount of casualties.
No amount of technology or logistics by the US will change that.
I'm a one trick pony, so here it is again.
(((They))) asset stripped (financialized) Western industry/business, offshored manufacturing. Long marched through everything TO crash the West. Goal: Remove us as a moral, political, military, financial force in the world. Then subjugate us into a much reduced population of sick, stupid, zombified slave force. Why would they do that!? They'd lose too much money!
Their goal is power for the sake of power, money is just a tool to manipulate (((Their))) agenda. Their Agenda is to rule the world through their One World govt. The Bible lays it out pretty well. Ya need to add some secular ideas and language to get through to SOME of the normies.
(((They))) are The Commie, Satanic, everything perverted, Cabal. (((They))) are willing to destroy as much as necessary to have absolute rule over what's left.
The best we might get from Trump is a reprieve for some more futile prepping. We MAY get (((Them))) pulling the pin on collapsing our financial house of cards. They may activate Antifa and/or the sleeper cells of foreign agents we've been importing for decades, They may do any number of false flags including truly mass death scenarios, cause a nuke exchange with a reluctant Russia.
The end is coming, when? HA! THAT is the 64,000 dollar question.
I'm OK with whatever happens, thanks to the Lord Jesus Christ, I made peace with reality long ago.
Are militaries, collectively, are in abysmal shape. And we definitely ought to fire 2/3rds to 3/4ths of the general and flag-grade officers in the military in the U.S., as has been true for decades, and longer than most people in the military at the top tier have even served.
IOW, we've institutionalized medicority (pointedly, under every Democrat presidential and congressional regime since the too-late-departed Jimmah Peanut, et al, which administrations and congressweasels have made actively rotting the military a feature of their regime goals, with a vigor).
China, OTOH, would be hard-pressed to sustain their fleets more than 100 miles offshore for five minutes, and when last we looked, their new ships sink at dockside on the reg.
Lying by overstating the problem is still lying, at the end of the day. It turns out the "missile gap" Kennedy was on about after Sputnik was non-existent the entire time, but it was a great talking point, furthered by the exact MIC that was probably responsible for offing him when he became inconvenient.
Step One is an honest appraisal of our potential enemies, and their actual (not imaginary 10-foot tall) capabilities.
Step Two is to design a military built to deter, or if needs be, destroy that.
Step Three is to bring what we have into conformance with what we need, and damn the pork barreling and rice bowl protecting.
Step Four is to put everyone opposed to Step Three out the door with bootprints on their hindquarters for certain. Repeat offenders need to be put up against a wall, or at the end of a rope. Figuratively and metaphorically, at minimum. Literally, if necessary.
Most people don't even have the stomach for Step One, and the national intelligence apparatus hasn't gotten it right, nor even close, so much as once, ever, since 1910.
In that environment, any dream of getting to Steps Two through Four are based on an overconsumption of hopeium.
So things are going to get very grim, indeed.
We are not even close, and most of our weapons are already into the 'war reserve' for ammo... with no relief in sight. Sigh...
Hey at least the USN doesn't have more admirals that ships, which is the case with the Royal Navy, and has been for at least a decade.
But that's really just a symptom. The real issue is that the US military (and UK etc) has forgotten how to wage wars to achieve victory. This article discussing mostly the IDF talks about the loss of political will at the top of all modern (western) militaries in recent decades
https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/israel-zionism/2025/01/whats-wrong-with-the-postmodern-military/
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