In a rather remarkable segment on his Fox News broadcast, news host Tucker Carlson revealed he has received evidence that U.S. military aircraft and personnel are being used by the Biden administration to transport illegal aliens around the country. WATCH:
Fox News has confirmed that Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas, is being used as a distribution hub for Central American migrants who cross the border illegally. The commander of that base, Lt. Col. Matthew Burrows, has instructed people in his command to keep the activity secret. Tucker Carlson obtained emails from a whistleblower showing instructions from Burrows not to divulge the Air Force activity.
The speech Joe Biden delivered Tuesday in Philadelphia was not the rant of a righteous or confident man. [READ IT HERE] Instead the speech was a bitter, angry and divisive plea for help from those extreme leftists who supported his installation.
The need for control is a reaction to fear. That fear was what Biden displayed above all other attributes. A fear that more American people will begin to see the false construct of his installation. A fear that those who perpetrated the fraud of his election will be exposed because the scale of their manipulation is far too great to continue hiding.
The fear that a small amount of actual investigation, with more audits looming, will reveal how a few key corrupt counties coordinated a massive election fraud. Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, the location of Tuesday’s sanctimonious diatribe -delivered by a naked emperor- was the location of the largest fraud. Other locations include: Clark County (NV), Fulton County (GA), Maricopa County (AZ), Wayne County (Mich) and Milwaukee County (Wisc).
The angry speech was full of projection, denial and extreme defensiveness.
Yup, the need for control is a reaction to fear, and it was very obvious Joe Biden feels the control is slipping away. The White House has never been more defensive than they were Tuesday. Biden demanded the DOJ, FBI, DHS and every agency of the executive branch must initiate a full defense of his regime. It was not a good look… it reeked of FEAR. [Full Speech Here]
“The assault on free and fair elections is just such a threat, literally. I’ve said it before: We’re are facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole. Since the Civil War. … I’m not saying this to alarm you; I’m saying this because you should be alarmed.” ~ Joe Biden
Joe Biden Quotes Nazis, Lies Relentlessly, and
Generally Goes Nuts During ‘Voter Suppression’ Speech
I’ve heard a lot of Joe Biden speeches over the years and certainly gotten more than my fill the last six months. Yet, Biden delivered a speech today on “voter suppression” that is probably his most dishonest, most vitriolic rant to date, and that’s saying something.
Unlike many of his past speeches, the story wasn’t Biden’s brain breaking down as he attempted to read the teleprompter. Sure, there were moments where he looked as if he were going to pass out, but it was the substance that was far more disturbing.
The basis of Biden’s speech was the idea that Republicans are trying to stop minorities from voting by having normal standards for the election systems in their respective states. Texas is currently in the crosshairs by daring to attempt to outlaw ballot harvesting and no-request absentee ballots. If you’ve been reading RedState the last day, then you know about Texas Democrats fleeing the state in a ridiculous gambit to deny the Republican majority a quorum to vote.
Anyway, let’s get into it, and be warned, these clips may make you want to gouge your eyes out.
Of note here is that Biden is channeling Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels by using the phrase “big lie” to disparage Republicans who have concerns about the 2020 election. Yet, despite the phrase’s murderous, anti-Semitic past, the president seems to have no problem saying it repeatedly. In doing so, he echoed CNN’s Jake Tapper and others who have also been fond of the phrase.
But the lies today were not from Republicans. Rather, they were from Biden, including these ludicrous assertions.
There’s no evidence of any of that whatsoever. To the extent that there are guardrails being put in place in some states to prevent voter fraud (but mostly just returning to the pre-2020 status quo), those guardrails apply to everyone equally. Nothing about the laws somehow targets black people more than others. Democrats are only saying that because they have no substantive arguments against these various election integrity bills.
When Biden mentions “receiving ballots,” what he’s complaining about is Texas not allowing third-party groups to blast out absentee ballots to those that didn’t even request them. There is no logical reason that needs to be done, and doing so is a ripe breeding ground for ballot harvesting as we’ve seen in California.
The lies continued apace.
Jim Crow laws literally stopped only a certain race of people from voting, not indirectly, but directly. There is zero comparison between requiring voter ID of all voters, for example, and Jim Crow laws. That Biden continues to make that comparison is just as bad and disgusting as when someone makes a bad Holocaust comparison. Yet, the media only freak out about the latter. We all know why, but it doesn’t make it any less jarring. When Biden says this garbage, it’s a slap in the face to people who faced actual oppression. Outlawing drive-through voting, something that didn’t even exist until recently in Texas, and only in a few Democrat-led counties, is not Jim Crow.
Biden wasn’t done, though. Eventually, he just went full-blown nuts.
I don’t know who wrote this speech (we can be assured it wasn’t Biden), but whoever it was needed to lay off the internet message boards before opening up Microsoft Word. Where are Republicans throwing out Democrat ballots? How do Democrats always lose in non-Democrat areas when they made huge gains in 2018? On what planet is the GOP like the Kremlin? But hey, extra points for injecting Russia, Russia, Russia into this.
In short, this speech was absolutely insane. It was full of lies and offensive commentary. It’s also dangerous in how divisive it was. By Biden’s telling, Republicans aren’t just wrong, they are evil and must be dealt with. Remember when were assured this decrepit old man was a unifier? Do you feel unified?
If we had a media complex and “fact-checking” industry worth anything, they’d be going nuts right now with all this new material to tear apart. Instead, Biden will be praised because that’s how things always go. I’m not sure anyone outside the beltway is buying it, though.
Spain's top court has ruled that last year's strict coronavirus lockdown was unconstitutional.
The ruling leaves the door open for people who were fined for breaking the rules to reclaim the money they paid.
But
the court said it would not accept lawsuits from people and businesses
who want to sue the government because they lost money due to the
lockdown.
The government declared a state of emergency on 14 March 2020 to curb the first wave of Covid-19 infections.
At
the time, coronavirus cases and deaths were rising and hospitals were
quickly becoming overwhelmed. Since then, more than 81,000 people in
Spain have died with coronavirus.
Spain has three levels of emergency: state of emergency, state of exception, and the highest level, state of siege.
Under
the emergency rules almost all people in the country were ordered to
stay at home, and were only permitted to leave for essential reasons.
All but essential businesses were closed.
The
laws were in place until June 2020, though some restrictions were
reinstated later in the year when the country faced a second wave.
But Spain's Constitutional Court said in a statement that it had voted,
by a slim majority of six to five, to find that the state of emergency
was not enough to give the restrictions constitutional backing.
This is because the rules were equivalent to a suppression of fundamental rights, it said.
In
order to legally limit people's freedoms to the extent they did last
year, the court said, the government would have had to declare a state
of exception rather than a state of emergency.
The ruling was in response to a suit brought by the far-right political party Vox.
Liberal writer Thomas Chatterton Williams recently tweeted that “The Rufos and the KendiAngelos (sic) of the world feed off of each other’s excesses for their own benefit but not necessarily for the larger society’s. We desperately need cooler, more supple, more ambivalent, more open-minded heads to prevail.”
This remark is a continuation of his coauthored New York Times op-ed arguing that the growing number of state laws prohibiting critical race theory in schools and workplaces are “codified speech laws,” which he believes are antithetical to liberal democracy. He is not the only one. Lately, we have seen a few such examples of “centrists” turning on any actual attempt to roll back the neo-racist ideology.
Needless to mention, this equivocation is fundamentally fallacious. Ibram Kendi promoting CRT in schools is not the same as Chris Rufo opposing CRT in schools, just like pushing someone towards a train and pushing someone out of the train’s way are not the same because they are both acts of pushing.
In fact, such false equivalences are at the heart of a certain type of “centrist liberalism” in its purest form, which refuses any sense of an objective social good or bad, and manifests instead as a bizarre fetish for taking the median position on any given issue. Fence-sitting in and of itself is considered the biggest virtue in this niche. Acts of debating and reasoned discussion are what is considered prestigious, not reaching a position on an issue and acting on it. In its purest form, it is a kind of detached virtue signaling.
These arguments about maintaining studied neutrality in the face of the far left’s overwhelming top-down social restructuring are at best naïve and misleading, and at worst a surrender or sabotage. It manifests a curious play observed often in pro-CRT arguments. There is always a deliberate obfuscation of the real difference between teaching about race versus implementing a race-based policy towards egalitarian end results, a motte-and-bailey rhetorical effort.
For example, there is a difference between studying racism and slavery in early American history and arguing that the founding of America was based on racist principles, as The New York Times’s 1619 Project claims. To argue that there still are individual racists somewhere is not the same as saying there’s systemic racism that needs to be redressed by top-down measures in schools that strive for an equality of outcome. Such an outcome, of course, can never be achieved because people are not fundamentally equal in talent.
It also misunderstands CRT as a theoretical framework versus CRT as a praxis for social change. To give a similar example, Marxism should be studied as one of the major (if flawed) political and economic theories originating in the 19th century. But if Marxism is used as a governing principle to judge academic disciplines, as universities in the former USSR and East Europe used to do, then that becomes an issue.
Ultimately, the Marxist professors and intellectuals entrenched in Eastern Europe did not just give up power after the Cold War because they lost in the marketplace of ideas. When entire societies were “decommunized,” Marxist intellectuals were fired and their departments and disciplines abolished by legislation. That led to most migrating to Western universities or changing their party allegiance to Green and other left-wing parties. That is a lesson about CRT as well.
Liberals increasingly claim there is somewhere a true form of liberalism that is being corrupted by CRT. The reality is that historically liberals often pave the way for radicals to take power, and CRT is no different.
Many who are now fleeing burning cities, or lamenting about the state of universities and higher education, seem to live under an impression that it can all be solved by reasoned debate in the marketplace of ideas. That may be so in an ideal world, but we don’t live in an ideal world. Fanatics in power cannot be reasoned with. Legislation is required to bring back balance when the entire ideological edifice is tilted like this.
The idea that a marketplace of ideas can remain open and free without any legislative order and enforcement providing the space for such freedom is simply naïve. As Joy Pullmann and I showed in a recent paper, CRT advocates now control the funding and hiring at most major cultural institutions. Neutrality is not an option during an ideological hegemony, just like a monopoly is not a free market.
What we have seen for the past few years is a group of elites top-down social restructuring based on questionable theories about the fundamental character of the West in general and America in particular. That is now being reversed.
The common people, fed up with this wildly unpopular ideology, are electing those who support legislating these toxic ideas out of business. The parents taking over school boards and pushing state legislatures to ban CRT are enacting the same kind of revolt against corrupt elites as grassroots movements in Eastern Europe against communism in the 1980s. This is the system working as it is meant to work.
Mr Bolsonaro was seriously wounded in the attack and lost 40% of his blood.
He has had several operations since the stabbing.
Medical experts say the hiccups could be related to irritation of the esophagus following abdominal surgery.
Media reports say he has also been suffering abdominal pains.
After
two-and-a-half years of a controversial presidency, Mr Bolsonaro is
under growing pressure over his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
At
the beginning of the month, tens of thousands of people took to the
streets to protest over allegations of corruption involving the purchase
of vaccines.
I can recall only three instances of gasping aloud in response to a plot twist. Being a child of the 1980s, I had the privilege of seeing Darth Vader announce to Luke Skywalker, “I am your father,” as a surprise in the movie theater. But since then, most plot twists failed to measure up until October of 2017 when I learned that Hillary Clinton commissioned the now-infamous Steele dossier accusing Donald Trump of colluding with the Russians. Although holes had already emerged in the narrative, I had fundamental trust in the FBI up until that moment. Since then, FBI leadership, including current Director Christopher Wray, have confirmed my worst suspicions by working to protect the conspirators and resisting accountability.
But nothing beats the moment I learned that the sainted and holy Dr. Anthony Fauci advocated and helped fund “gain-of-function” research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the facility from which we now believe COVID-19 originated. Unlike Mary Shelly’s allegorical story in which Dr. Frankenstein’s unnatural creation follows him to the ends of the earth for a final reckoning, Fauci has largely shrugged off the damning evidence of his role in loosing the COVID-19 monster upon the world. He’s suffered some loss of legitimacy but nevertheless continues to be propped up as the face of the “expert” response to the virus. Even though he almost certainly knew better, Fauci stayed quiet while Big Tech censored legitimate stories pointing to evidence of the lab leak origin.
Likewise, Clinton’s duplicity in diverting campaign money to fund the dirtiest trick in campaign history remains unaddressed in the Federal Election Commission, in spite of a three-year-old complaint laying out the conspiracy in painstaking detail.
Meanwhile, the politicized criminal justice system has launched a prosecution against the Trump organization for providing untaxed corporate perks to its CFO. I’m not defending that practice but I question whether this theory has ever been applied to pursue politically compliant corporations. Are all corporate executives being taxed on their use of corporate-owned jets, apartments, and luxury skyboxes in stadiums? Or does that obligation only apply to Trump-aligned executives?
We’ve moved past the point where the Left bothers to deny the apparent double-standard in political prosecutions and censorship. There is no scale of justice anymore. There is no blindfold. The intellectual Left, to the extent it still exists, has largely forgotten the ideal that the law should be neutral and blind to political affiliation. It’s a weapon and the Left has no intention of holstering it out of fairness.
Similarly, a few leftist intellectuals have quietly acknowledged that the Big Tech censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop stories was a mistake. But the censorship worked and probably saved the election for Biden. So, for the most part, like the prosecutorial abuses, the ability to censor “dangerous” conservative speech is seen as a necessary tool to achieve greater agenda aims.
But there are loose ends unravelling even today. The leftist juggernaut has stepped on the toes of apolitical but influential forces within our society.
First, the COVID-19 response was so heavy-handed (and ineffectual) that a huge swath of the American people have begun to question the sacrifices they were forced to make. Talk of a COVID-19 Delta-variant lockdown remix is being greeted with a very chilly reception by ordinary Americans. And there is still a bill to pay for all of those people who died agonizing deaths in nursing homes because of Cuomo-style executive orders banning exclusion of COVID-infected residents. The Left’s legitimacy on COVID-19 is further undercut by the increasing evidence that effective COVID-19 therapies were suppressed and censored.
Second, the Russia Collusion hoax chickens are still coming home to roost. As noted by the ever-astute TechnoFog, there’s still litigation pending over the Steele dossier, which falsely accused Alfa Bank of being a front for a Russian conspiracy to interfere in the 2016 election. Perkins Coie (the Clinton law firm that commissioned the dossier) has been caught trying to buy off Alfa Bank by circumventing the bank’s attorneys. This is an apparent violation of D.C. Rule of Professional Conduct 4.2, which prohibits lawyers from talking directly to another lawyer’s client without permission.
While we know that Perkins Coie and any “get-Trump”-aligned attorneys are essentially immune to ethics complaints (we’re still waiting for convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith to be disbarred for lying to the FISA court to illegally surveil Carter Page), it’s still noteworthy that Perkins Coie is so desperate to avoid sunlight on their dark election shenanigans.
Likewise, while conservatives see business-as-usual in the left-wing censorship and authoritarianism under the COVID-19 response, other powerful but non-partisan interests have been surprised by the severe harm inflicted on them as collateral damage. Landlords, as one example, many of whom invested their life savings into rental properties, were forced to maintain living quarters for non-paying tenants for more than a year. Parents who once placed complete trust in their public education system suddenly found themselves called to action against counterproductive school closings and politicized classroom curriculum. Advocates who wailed crocodile tears over Trump putting “babies in cages” find themselves uncomfortably mute as censors failed to hide evidence of Biden filling detention centers with fresh batches of immigrant children separated from their families.
A great many suburban women permanently outraged by the recording of Trump’s ungentlemanly remarks about women are starting to notice the upswing in crime. The Black Lives Matter and “Defund the Police” posters in rich suburban neighborhoods are quietly coming down as soccer moms have discretely purchased a record number of handguns.
Conservatives are out-of-power in the first, second, and fourth branches of the federal government. Even in the Supreme Court, a split exists among the Republican-appointed justices. Yet the conservatives have a counterintuitive upper hand when it comes to ideas and legitimacy. As the Left increasingly requires brute force to win, it alienates apolitical America. With the exception of a not-insignificant number of political prosecutions (the Russia Collusion hoax and the January 6 dragnet), the Left has largely flinched at imposing the kind of terror tactics necessary to enforce its extreme ideology.
Americans are getting sick and tired of the Left. They’re assholes. They’re bossy and rude. And they’re really terrible at managing everything when they get power. Old-guard liberals have begun to criticize censorship and the cancel mob. The Left has morphed from a liberal philosophy to a neo-Maoist authoritarian movement. Without any help from conservatives, the Left is teaching a crash course on the perils of politicizing everything. Americans are starting to wake up. In Congress, the Left has failed to achieve many of its priorities as moderate Democrats feel emboldened to blue dog their own party.
Unless the Left starts cracking some skulls (literally), Americans will simply walk away.
Should you be a capitalist? There seems to be a fierce debate raging on whether capitalism is good or bad, and we're here to help you sort it all out with our decades of combined experience with capitalism.
To make it easy, we broke it all down in this handy-dandy list. Here are all the pros and cons of capitalism:
Pro: You reap the benefits of innovation and efficiency that socialist countries can only dream of
Con:Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2
Pro: A standard of living exceeding that of any time in recorded history
Con: Poor people can only afford an iPhone 8
Pro: Free speech!
Con: Alyssa Milano also gets free speech
Pro:An abundance of affordable culinary delights even the great Pharaohs of Egypt could never imagine
Con: Pineapple pizza
Pro: The poor get richer
Con: They get richer at a slower rate than rich people and that's totally not fair
Pro: Access to all the world's information in the palm of your hands
Con: Sometimes the wifi is a little spotty ...ugh
Pro: An environment of free expression results in iconic movie franchises
Con: Disney buys them all and runs them into the ground
Pro: Eating Taco Bell
Con: Digesting Taco Bell
Pro: A vast library of streaming entertainment to choose from
Con: You will never see any of it because your wife will spend the entire evening trying to choose
Pro: Liberty
Con: Responsibility
We think that pretty much covers it! Now go forth, and enjoy your freedom responsibly! And if you don't, don't worry-- the government will take care of you.
Ships of the U.S. Navy’s Destroyer Squadron 23 — led by the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Russell (front) — transit the Pacific Ocean, January 22, 2020.
Article by Jerry Hendrix, Captain US Navy, in The National Review
On the Eve of Destruction
Why a troubling new report on the Navy’s surface-warfare capabilities and culture matters.
With their report on “The Fighting Culture of the United States Surface Fleet,”
Senator Tom Cotton and Representatives Jim Banks, Dan Crenshaw, and
Mike Gallagher have provided an excellent example of congressional
oversight in action and a surprisingly nonpartisan, objective analytical
product. This report — and the analytical methodology behind it — was
triggered by the collisions and near sinking of two destroyers in the
Pacific, the outright surrender without resistance of two Navy riverine
boats in the Arabian Gulf to elements of the Iranian Revolutionary
Guards Corps, and the total loss of the billion-dollar light amphibious
carrier Bonhomme Richard to a fire while she lay tied to a pier in San
Diego.
The investigation was based upon standardized oral-history interviews
across a broad base of current and former Navy officers and enlisted
sailors stretching from the present day back to the late 1960s. In their
research, Cotton, Banks, Crenshaw, and Gallagher — all four veterans of
the recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan; Cotton with the Army,
Banks and Crenshaw as naval officers ashore, and Gallagher as a Marine —
discovered a range of consequences that have emerged since the end of
the Cold War that have combined to degrade the combat effectiveness and
overall fighting culture of the Navy’s surface-warfare community.
This community — the surface-warfare officers (“SWOs”) or
“ship-drivers” — lay at the very heart of the United States Navy. While
the submarine- and naval-aviation communities of the Navy have emerged
over the past century to claim their fair share of the service’s
historic glory, the U.S. Navy itself finds its cultural roots in John
Paul Jones’s Revolutionary War statement, “I wish to have no connection
with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm’s way”
and Oliver Hazard Perry’s hoisting of the famous, “Don’t Give Up The
Ship” flag at the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. This
ship-handling, fighting ethos extended through World War II where
Arleigh Burke famously led the “Little Beavers” of Destroyer Squadron-23
at 31-knots in the Battle of Cape St. George and Jesse Oldendorf and
his task force of battleships and cruisers “crossed the T” of a heavy
Japanese surface fleet at the Battle of Surigao Strait, defeating it
with superior ship-handling and fighting zeal.
Even in the long peaceful lee following the last great global
conflagration, leaders within the surface-warfare community such as Vice
Admiral David Robinson, who led “brown water” and later destroyer
surface operations in Vietnam, and Admiral James Stavridis, who led
surface actions ranging across Operations Ernest Will, Desert Storm, and
the modern counter-terrorism campaigns, were recognized throughout the
fleet during their careers for both their ship-handling skills and
demonstrated warrior leadership. Disturbingly, the report concludes that
such skills and ethos have been seriously degraded over recent decades.
Broadly, the investigators associated with this oversight process
asked a large number of former and current Navy personnel whether the
ship collisions, the surrender of the small boats, and the burning of
the Bonhomme Richard were part of a broader problem within the Navy. An
overwhelming 94 percent of respondents said “yes.” When asked more
specifically if the four incidents themselves were directly connected,
55 percent responded affirmatively, but only 16 percent said “no.” The
remaining 29 percent simply were not sure. In the end, the vast
preponderance of the respondents simply knew that something was wrong
with their Navy and their reasons behind this dangerous change fell
along several broad categories. First and foremost, they believed that
the Navy has placed an insufficient focus on warfighting even as it has
increased administrative burdens throughout the Navy over the past 30
years. Second, the report highlights the trend toward finding
“efficiencies” within the surface community specifically. This in turn
contributed to the report’s next finding: a decline in investments in
training across the surface force in particular, as well as an overall
decline in attention to ship maintenance, both in terms of schedule
discipline and overall investment. The report also raises the specter of
micro-management of individual Navy ships, an issue that is at odds
with the Navy’s long historical tradition of independence of command,
which eroded the confidence of individual ship commanding officers and
sapped their individual freedom of action. Lastly, the report cites
concerns with the Navy’s rising oversensitivity to media reporting of
Navy incidents.
Both as a historian and as an officer who served actively across the
three decades of surface-warfare decline highlighted in the report, I
must say that none of the conclusions come as a surprise. Following the
end of the Cold War, the Navy experienced a massive downsizing both in
terms of ships and manpower, shrinking from 592 ships and 605,802 men in
the fall of 1989 to 336 ships and 373,044 men just ten years later.
These declines transformed the force, evolving the surface fleet’s focus
from operating older, simpler destroyer and frigate in massed
formations at sea toward fewer, yet more complex Aegis air-defense
designs used largely to protect the aircraft carrier or project power
ashore via Tomahawk land-attack missiles. Leadership of sailors at the
deck-plate level was de-emphasized in order to make room for management
of more-advanced technological systems. Among both officers and enlisted
ranks, decisions about how to cull the force were difficult to make,
but they were made. Both officer and enlisted fitness reports and
evaluations were changed so as to discern any shortcomings or
weaknesses. Anyone who did not reach the highest marks failed to select
for promotion or was not allowed to re-enlist. A zero-defect mentality
crept into the daily life of ships and aviation squadrons.
Moreover, the service force sought out areas for savings and
efficiencies as budgets got tighter. Leaders became managers as the
teachings of Dr. Edward Deming made the leap from the business community
to the military — despite the fact that the military’s “bottom line”
was best expressed in wins and losses in battle rather than
spreadsheets. Lastly, the Navy experienced a series of public
embarrassments and scandals during the 1990s; the botched investigation
of the explosion of a turret on the battleship Iowa that killed 47
officers and sailors, the 1991 Tailhook Convention debacle that
ultimately forced the resignation of a chief of naval operations and one
of naval aviation’s greatest leaders in VADM Stan Arthur, and the
suicide death of another CNO, Admiral Jeremy Boorda, when his previous
valor was questioned. This string of incidents began the trend toward a
fear of scandal and a wariness of the media within the Navy.
As the Navy entered the 21st century, the core of one of its
supporting pillars in the surface-warfare community had already begun to
crumble. Cuts in military spending began that process, but even after
the spending cuts were reversed after 9/11, the surface Navy did not
benefit, and it continued to lose both ships and men in the following
years. Unlike naval aviation and the nuclear-powered submarine
community, the surface-warfare community lacked a “requirements written
in blood” rule book that it could fall back on to defend its men and
platforms. Aviators had data that showed that if money was not spent on
training and maintenance, planes fell out of the sky and aircrew died.
The submarine community had Hyman Rickover’s bible on nuclear safety
that showed that if money wasn’t spent and procedures were not followed,
reactor incidents would prevent acceptance of submarines and aircraft
carriers in homeports or submarines would sink to the bottom of the
ocean with their crews and weapons (as happened twice during the 1960s).
The surface-warfare community had nothing but their can-do spirit and
their willingness to do more with less, and so they were often tasked to
do just that.
The report from Cotton et al. reveals that in 2003, in a slavish move
toward Deming “efficiency”, the six-month surface-warfare-officer’s
school in Newport, R.I., was cut. Officers were then ordered directly
from their commissioning sources to their ships with nothing more than
23 compact discs to learn their trade, while they went about
“on-the-job-training” onboard their first ship. Naval aviators take
18–24 months to earn their wings and complete their training before
reporting to their first squadrons. Nuclear-trained submarine officers
take 15–18 months to complete their prototype-reactor training and
additional qualifications prior to reporting to their first boat.
Surface-warfare officers simply reported to their first ships, fired up a
computer, and started to stand watches on bridges and in machinery
spaces that they had never seen before, saddling their commanding
officers (and senior enlisted leaders) with un-prepared junior officers
even as administrative burdens on those same ship captains were
mounting. The ever-shrinking fleet was expected to do the same amount of
work, which resulted in compressed training cycles with shortened
underway periods wherein training simply became a planned sequence of
events. In effect, they became rote and lacking in real learning or
experience.
Ship maintenance also suffered. The new report reveals that planned
ship-maintenance schedules simply could not hold up under the strain of
continuous, lengthening, and often unplanned extending deployment
schedules and that once ships did make it into drydocks, the issues
revealed were too large to be addressed within the planned schedule or
budgets, causing overruns and delays that had downstream effects upon
the entire surface force. The surface force began to age, and its
material condition began to degrade. It entered a death spiral.
Simultaneously, the surface fleet’s ethos began to suffer under all the
added strain. Division officers, department heads, and even ship
executive and commanding officers failed to push back against the added
burdens, not wishing to collect a black mark in their records and thus
fail to promote to their next desired rank or assignment. At sea, the
ships found themselves patrolling in the Arabian Gulf or in the
Mediterranean — not in preparation for combat against another nation’s
navy but rather awaiting orders to launch their Tomahawk missiles
against targets ashore in Iraq or some other nest of terrorists.
Respondents within this new report highlight the perception that during
the past two decades, the surface Navy stopped being a surface-warfare
Navy and instead became a land-attack-from-the-sea Navy. As that
happened, the force began to lose its sense of professionalism and
fighting spirit.
In the end, under loads of new burdens, with a smaller fleet and
fewer sailors, the surface fleet was asked to do more with less, until
it no longer could. The report makes it readily apparent that, under
these circumstances, crews gave up their ships and presently are not
prepared to go into harm’s way, and that these conditions persist on the
eve of a great-power competition with a rising China that will be
largely carried out at sea. It is a sobering realization.
These elected officials have performed a public good by highlighting
the shortcomings of the previous generation of naval leaders who have
failed to adequately understand the requirements of the surface force
and to provide sufficient money, time, and materials to meet them. We
can only hope that the current generation of naval leaders — both
uniformed and civilian — will leverage this report to gain support for
increases in the Navy’s budget and ultimately for the surface fleet. If
what naval leaders such as retired Admiral Phil Davidson, who warned
that China could initiate a war in less than six years, or the current
intel chief of the Indo-Pacific Command, Rear Admiral Mike Studeman, who
said that the U.S. may already be “too late” to confront the Chinese
threat, are correct, then the United States will need a healthy surface
force soon that is backed by professionalism and filled with a
confidence that it can carry out the nation’s wartime tasks at sea. The
surface fleet is the heart of the United States Navy, and the nation
needs that heart to beat regularly and strongly in the years that lie
ahead.
