[Alberta's Child]

Bump for later. I think this guy spent too much time in the military, and is surprisingly simplistic in his assessment of U.S.-China capabilities.

[MeneMeneTekelUpharsin]

He is spot-on correct.

[Travis McGee]

I think he’s dead-on accurate in his assessment. Tragically.

Our super high-tech DDs can’t even stay out of the way of tankers, much less salvos of hypersonic missiles.

Our brass is 10X more concerned about their diversity reports than their war fighting readiness.

A bad check about diversity (such as for firing an incompetent bridge watch stander of a protected race, gender or gender ID) can end a career tomorrow, where these cowardly captains might get through an entire career without fighting in a war.

So they kow-tow slavishly to PC nonsense, while their ships rust and rot.

I was a naval officer in the 1980s. Our ships at sea gleamed with fresh paint. We knew the Soviet warships by their bleeding rust.

Now it is our warships that go to sea bleeding rust. I take that as a harbinger.

[cuban leaf]

I think this guy spent too much time in the military, and is surprisingly simplistic in his assessment of U.S.-China capabilities.

---

I think you are right. Even ex-generals make bad arm-chair generals. We have highly paid people that to exercises based on various models. i.e. this information and wisdom he shares is more for the public. Our military and geopolitical planners have been on that train since we lost the Vietnam war. As long as Democrats are not in charge, we’ll be fine, or as fine as we have the ability to be.

[nathanbedford]

While the author's observations are certainly not new and his criticism of our war planners is probably to a great degree unwarranted, I think his observations about the neutering of flag rank in favor of political correctness is right on.

Worse, I think the situation is worse than he paints. If a situation arises in which we must confront China militarily, be assured that we will not be doing so from secure, or even relatively secure, bases in places like Korea and Japan because these self-serving nations will have long before put American power in the balance relative to China and found it wanting. We will be very much alone.

I said that the criticism is not new, I found an old reply of mine submitted May 20, 2009, about a decade ago which says as follows:

the end of the Nimitz class construction program was… in the natural order of things. My fears about the eclipsing of American power projection capability do not have much to do with the loss of this technology which is inevitable, as another poster points out, in the age of drones, missiles, and satellites.

So many of us on this forum have posted long and often about the folly of directing so much of our precious resources into a platform which is already a relic, as much as a British gunboat of the 19th century, and increasingly vulnerable to asymmetrical attack when the enemy is a superpower and not a Third World dictatorship such as the author describes in Saddam Hussein.

The question is, what is to be in the space force? It is inevitable that space be weaponized. It is unthinkable that any nation other than the United States be the first to do so. Is it politically correct to do so? Evidently, the Trump administration is not intimidated by political correctness from taking proactive steps to protect the nation from this new age of warfare. The push for the Space Force is good evidence of that.

If the new cold or hot war is to be fought with China and if it is to be fought with whizbang weapons we had better make damn sure that we own artificial intelligence, drones, lasers, cyberspace and outer space. Here again, it appears that the Chinese are undertaking to swarm us. Our universities are graduating 500,000 STEM graduates while the Chinese are producing 4 1/2 million annually.

The authors warnings about quantity having a quality of its own also applies to this new world accessible with the keyboard.

[Shane]

“I think this guy spent too much time in the military”

You clearly do not know Kurt Schlichter.

[central_va]

We’re hanging our whole maritime strategy in the Pacific Ocean around a few of these big, super-expensive iron airfields. If a carrier battle group (a carrier rolls with a posse like an old school rapper) gets within aircraft flight range of an enemy, then the enemy will have a bad day. So, what’s the super-obvious counter to our carrier strategy? Well, how about a bunch of relatively cheap missiles with a longer range than the carrier’s aircraft?

I am ex Navy and this is what the above sounds like to me(sarcastically of course)

We are hanging out entire land fighting capability on human soldiers where, if the get with in rifle range of the enemy, can be killed by a $0.20 bullet. They will have a bad day.

Army does not understand the Navy.

[an amused spectator]

The Chinese are the only ones in the world who are dealing with the Musloids like they should be dealt with.

Let that sink in.

[logi_cal869]

Agreed. He conveniently-ignores Sun Tzu’s maxim, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

That battle has been ongoing for decades.