Still here?

I can't imagine why.

I don't know what more there is to say about the kinds of subjects we once so loudly debated here.

Just the past year has been a bughouse of lunatic nonsense emanating from (or inspired by, or the result of actions and/or words issued from) the golden throne currently occupied by the capacious backside of the  47th President of the United States.

We only thought that the Cheney Administration was a sweltering clusterfuck of geopolitical idiocy.

Holy shit, did we underestimate how quickly and thoroughly the American Right would go full-on, bull-goose, pure-D, stomp-down batshit crazy. Rule of law? Hahahah! Laws of war? Pshaw! Fiscal probity? For losers! Geopolitical foresight? LULZ!

Now there's a USN task force farkling around South America exploding dinky motorboats with million-dollar missiles, while here there's tariffs on this, that, and the other...or maybe not, over there are Afrikaaner "refugees" while over here there's masked goons snatching people out of bodegas and drywall jobsites. 

The official "national defense plan" of the United States spends more time gibbering in terror about impoverished immigrants than assessing nuclear-armed peer, and likely rival, nations.

There's supposed to be an Arch of Triumph in D.C. A fucking Arch of Triumph. 

It seems, well, trivial to discuss geopolitics as though any of this made sense, or could be made sense of. It feels kinda like debating grammar inside a screeching loony bin. 

I wish I thought that 2026 was going to be...well, less nuts.

But I wouldn't sure as fuck wouldn't bet on it. 

Radio check

 It's been well over a year since I even looked at this site.

All the original contributors are gone except me, so it's unlikely anyone else has, either.

So I just wondered...is anyone else still here?

It now just seems empty and desperately sad, looking around the empty room and remembering the many boisterous conversations (and disputations, and digressions, and commiserations...) we shared that are now as gone as the smoke from a distant fire.

Aviator Al and Charles Gittings are gone forever.

Ranger Jim is...still somewhere, no longer speaking. 

Lisa, when last seen, was going Full MAGA, which makes me just want to weep.

And the rest of us are living through a time I never thought I'd see, in which a real estate grifter and serial liar is overseeing the gutting of the United States that ruled the last half of the 20th Century.

What is there for a blog about military geopolitics to say about that, other than "that seems like a bad choice"?

As we used to say around here:

WASSSSSSSSSF. 

Decoration Day, 2024

Yesterday, as I often do this time of year, I drove down to the southeast, to the big national cemetery up on Mt. Scott  in the Lents neighborhood to spend some time with my Army brothers.

Willamette National Cemetery was its usual peaceful, pretty self. Shining in the morning sun, colorful with rank upon rank of little flags...

(which made me think, as it always does, of the unlucky bastards detailed to work their way along the rows of markers shoving little flag-sticks into the lawn. Given the lack of available privates, tho? Probably contract workers. Shame, that's kind of a perfect distillation of Army tradition; detailed, painstaking, back-achingly wearying, and boring all at the same time)

...which the Coasties had, again, infiltrated with their special Coast Guard flag-planting strike force. What IS it with those guys? Overcompensation? I mean, I like the USCG; they are the only uniformed service with jobs that 1) they get to do 24/7, and 2) don't have to include killing people and breaking shit. They're builders, not destroyers. Isn't that good enough for government work? Why this obsessive need to let everyone who visits, on this one day we set aside to ostensibly remember our dead, those of which wore the Coast Guard blue by being the only dead people with their own little service flags?

I still don't get it.

I drove through the glossy lawns down to the back side of the hill, looking for plots X, Y, and Z, where most of the dead of my generation are buried.

I didn't find them.

Well, there was this one poor joker, an E-Deuce who'd done his time in one of the Gulf Wars and made it home sound only to go toes-up at 44. 

Damn, dude. Sorry.

But as always my contemporaries were lost amid the huge crowd of the Greatest Generation. The WW2 and, to a lesser extent, Korean War people. And, I noticed, many more of the Vietnam era folks who are now running out of time. 

But from the Little Wars of the Oughts and Teens? Hardly anyone, and (because of the crowds on this day, the only day the park sees crowds...) I got caught in the one-way traffic routing that spit me out on the far side, irked and with my can of Pfriem IPA - shit, guys, I tried! And brought the good stuff this time! - unshared.

So fuck it. I drove home.

I putzed around the house, splitting time between chores and helping my soon-to-be-ex with the divorce paperwork (and if you think that military paperwork is grueling, get divorced; it's ridiculous), until finally I couldn't stand it and threw on my gym shoes and went to PDXStrength for the annual Murph.

This is apparently huge for the CrossFit crowd and is named for a Navy SEAL officer who was KIA in one of the many "how the fuck did you even think this would work..?" SEAL operations in Southwest Asia.

But despite the CrossFit/SEAL connections that would normally give iconoclastic Army me the giggy, it's a Memorial Day thing that involves effort, so I shoved a 35-pound plate in my old rucksack and got stuck in.

(The gist of this Murph thing is that it starts with an aerobic event (a mile run, usually) followed by strength events (pullups, pushups, squats) closed out with another mile run.

Well, my replacement parts rule out running, so I rucked a half-mile and quickly recalled how much I hated humping that thing when I had to do it for a living. Christ it sucks, hammering your back and legs no matter how hard you try and glide-step instead of jogging.

And, since pullups aren't my friend (and they're more of a sailor and marine thing, anyway), I substituted situps, and knocked out my sets of ten until I reached my age in reps; 66 pushups and situps are kind of my limit these days, anyway, then rucked up again and set off into Cathedral Park.

Where I couldn't help thinking that this young woman was enjoying her holiday much more than I was:

But that's the weird thing about this "holiday"; it's not supposed to be about fun. 

It's supposed to be a reflective, sorrowful remembrance of people who died. Many of them in great suffering, and all of them because of choices We the People made, or refused to make.

But We the People kinda suck at reflective. And sorrow. So Memorial Day is what it is; barbecues, mattress sales, lolling in the grass on a sunny summer day.

Okay, then.

Finally I returned to the gym. Shook some hands, ate a deviled egg (or four. Or six; fuck, they we fine), yarded the plate out of the damned ruck, and returned home to cook dinner.

In all? It was yet another in the string of semi-dissatisfying Memorial Days I've been having. 

My connection with my service days is waning, my irritation with my nation increasing. Now that, as the old jingle runs, the "...danger is passed and all things righted/God is forgotten and the soldier slighted" it seems even more futile to pretend to mourn or revere the war dead of our recent wars.

There are so few; no wonder the silent crowd of the wars of midcentury shoves them into silence.

I can't help but worry that my generation of soldiers will always be forgotten. I will keep them in my heart, but I'm old and soon enough will join them, perhaps up on that green and shining hill, my last home festooned with tiny flags every last weekend in May, to remembrance wars and deaths my country would just as soon forget.

Still.

I promise. I will remember.

Here's to us.
Who's like us?
Damn few
And they're all dead.

As always today: this.

Commo check

 It's been so long I'd almost forgotten this place, but what seems deeply ironic is that just as I thought we had nothing more to talk about - the Forever Wars in SW Asia were winding down - the Putin government of Russia decided to re-imagine the last years of WW2 by attacking westwards into the plains of Ukraine.

Whoodathunkit?

Plus the Netanyahu government of Israel decided to respond to a bloody provocation raid by going from apartheid to active ethnic cleansing.

Let's say that I didn't have this stuff on my foreign policy bingo card.

Is there any enthusiasm for discussion of any of this?

Not sure what I myself can add; I don't see anything hopeful coming out of either conflict. Instead it seems increasingly likely that all the parties involved will end up worse off, proving that the destructive nature of modern warfare has gone a long way to reducing its utility as "politics by other means". 

But if there IS any interest feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments.

Gasbags

 So I'm kind of intrigued by this whole "eeeeeevil tricksy Chinese spy balloon" thing.

Apparently the Chinese are having a hoot with it, too:

I mean...I guess it seems deeply weird. The oldest "reconnaissance overflight" thing in the world seems to be "when you see the enemy hide under a bush".

How hard would it be to hide from this party favor?

The PRC obviously knows that the U.S., a hugely militarized nation bristling with surveillance gadgets would track this. Was it some sort of way of drawing aerial surveillance fire? Getting the U.S. to give away it's ability to track, umm...a big fat slow moving object?

And the PRC obviously has reconnaissance satellites, too - possibly not as sexy as the USAF/Spaceies have - and those are perfectly capable of looking down at the continental U.S.

Like I say...the whole thing just seems truly, deeply weird. I'd love to know what the fuck this goofy thing is and what it's supposed to do. Is it just stupid? Or, as my old drill sergeant used to say, if it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.

And speaking of deeply weird and stupid, this is the Republican U.S. Senator from Ohio, J.D. Vance...

...apparently guarding his woodpile from a Chinese balloon that is floating at something like 9 or 10 kilometers of altitude with an AR-15 knockoff that has a maximum effective (horizontal!) range of about 400 meters.

Don't look at me. I sure as hell didn't vote for this nimrod.

Update 2/4/22: Andy (in the comments) suggests this gasbag was basically a SIGINT thing...which sounds as reasonable as anything else. Kinda hard to go completely radio silence for the whole time this birthday party favor floats by, but who knows? 

Apparently this is a sort of thing; several more of these rascals over flew over the Trumpies' heads, too, but (I suspect) the biznay was kept on the downlow so Donnie didn't look like he was being cucked by his pal Xi.

Anyway...just kind of funny and kinda cool that here we are - flying faster and higher than anyone in the 18th Century could have imagined - but the Montgolfier Bros tech still works.

Update 2/16: Wins the Internet for today:

Last Call

 I think it's time to officially turn out the lights.

Unless there's any demand from whatever remains of the readership - and since we (well, I, since there is effectively no one left here other than me) haven't posted since April my guess is that's not much - to continue I think I'll see if I can delete this blog altogether. 

It's painful to see it just drifting here, there's nobody but me writing here, and if you want to hear from me you can stroll over to my personal blog Graphic Firing Table, where I still post about military affairs occasionally.

So.

Time, please.

Drink up, folks. It's...

Naval makeover! (cruiser-to-submarine)

 The cruiser Москва has passed on.

He is no more. 

(Russian naval vessels are by tradition "he's" rather than the "she's" of English or American sailor tradition) 

He has ceased to be, expired and gone to meet his maker. Bereft of life, he rests in peace, has shuffled off his mortal coil, rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.

Okay.

Rule #1 of war is "Shit happens", and the fact that this vessel is now full of water is not in itself either shocking or particularly interesting. 

If one was in a snarky mood one might make the same sort of observation Bismarck might have made about continental powers like Germany or Russia wanting (let alone "needing") large capital ships: "...the fuck?" (only in the original German, of course...). 

If one was in a snarky mood.

To me there are two interesting parts about this, though.

The first is that the Russian official line is that the cruiser was lost "under tow in heavy seas after an internal ammunition explosion". 

Not because nasty enemy missiles turned him into a flaming pyre, no, no! Just your basic head-on-collision-twenty-car pileup of fucked-up munitions handling and/or storage, piss-poor damage control, and incompetent seamanship.

I kind of get the dictator-grade level of "not wanting to admit that your enemy hurt you" propaganda. But to want to make the story "our sailors are lethally incompetent" seems...a bit louche' at best. Tell me...how does that make things in your navy sound...better?

Now, that said; damage control at sea is goddamn hard. It requires constant, repetitive, realistic training led by good petty officers and planned and overseen by competent and demanding officers.

Even the best navies have their bad days; we saw that back in 2015 when we talked about the loss of HIJMS Taiho during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. 

The 日本海軍 Nippon Kaigun - the Imperial Japanese Navy - was one of the best-led (at the tactical level, at least...) and best-trained in the world in 1944. But that didn't prevent the sinking of one of their newest carriers because of poor damage control after a single torpedo strike.

On the other end of the military scale, though? Damage control is one of those massive-training-fail issues that seems to be endemic in "gangster" military organizations. Think Idi Amin's or Saddam's "armies" if you want a model. 

If nothing else this Russo-Ukrainian War has done a pretty good job of throwing a nastily bright light on exactly how fucking brutally bad the Russian armed services are. As bad as the Ugandans or the Iraqis.

Turns out that when your national model is "kleptocracy" your national military is just about as good as you'd expect based on that. 

When your soldiers and sailors are "led" by people - from petty officers and NCOs through general officers to their political masters - whose whole mode of thought is "steal what you can, neglect what you can't, and lie about everything to everyone both above and below you"  and those troops are either not trained for shit (or completely untrained) and their "leaders" are often incompetent, either because the system is designed to ensure the leaders are piss-poor, or unable to demand they aren't, to find that the entire organization those soldiers and sailors are part of ends up being criminally incompetent at the difficult business of war, including the difficult task of naval damage control, should hardly be shocking.

If you choose shitty crooks to "lead" you, you shouldn't be shocked when they "lead" you into shitty crookedness. 

Which leads me back from the shores of Ukraine to the shores of North America.

Because you'd think that this sort of military clusterfuckery would be a cautionary tale for those of us here on the sidelines in the United States about the whole business of being all enthusiastic for dictators because, say, they hate homosexuals and you do, too. That getting your dream of "leaders" hating on liberal soy-boys and darkies and uppity women isn't worth the sort of incompetent "leadership" that ends up getting your sailors killed and their capital ships sunk. 

Even for the most foaming-mouthed-rabid MAGAt groupies of Tubby and his crooked little weasel pals.

But, no.

They won't believe that.

Ever.

And that's a problem, a problem deeper than the bottom of the Black Sea, where the Москва now rests.