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.

 

This is (One Big Reason) Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Well, it's official.

The president* (as Pierce likes to call him, complete with the Maris Asterisk) signed the "John S. McCain, Jr. National Defense Authorization Act". Unsurprisingly, this monster is loaded with goodies for the armed forces, completely in keeping with the GOP-standard line about how We the People are headed for another Pearl Harbor because we just don't have enough things that can kill people and blow shit up.

(Oh, and apparently there's some pretty appalling idiocy in there handing out pork to GOP pals)

Some of this largesse seems to have some utility - apparently the USN really does have some issues with operational numbers - but the whole thing is just another uptick in the ridiculous "let's-throw-money-at-guns" Washington Rules idiocy that is unquestioned in D.C. and in the public press.

Nobody outside the usual dirty hippies of the Left is asking why the hell, in a remarkably Great-Power-untroubled world, We the People need all this stuff.

And, of course, nobody - no legislators, no cable talking news heads, no cabinet officers, certainly not the man in the Oval Office - is questioning or, perhaps, even wondering, why so much of this stuff will end up chasing raggedy-assed villagers around the mountains of Central Asia or the Horn of Africa or the islets of the Philippine archipelago in an endless pursuit of ideology and resentment grown of the death and destruction caused by last year's blowing-shit-up money.

Somehow poor people getting medical care, or building new highways and bridges, or replacing antiquated power plants with new technologies, are just "not affordable". But all this deadly bling? Hell, yeah! Let's throw MORE money at it!

All this would be a hell of a nonsensical way to spend the public coin even if we weren't in the process of handing our wealthiest citizens a massive tax break. But now?

And, yet, what seems to be the biggest single source of public outrage about this bloated monstrosity of a "defense" spending bill is that somehow the guy with the pen failed to tongue-bath the guy that the monstrosity was named for.

Dear Christ. WASSSSSSSSSSSSF.

Update 8/15: And to remind us again that presidential "signing statements" are one of the most pernicious anti-republican bits of claptrap floating around the Swamp, Comrade President sneaks in a bit of backhander to his pal Pootie:

Included in the bill is "...a ban on spending military funds on “any activity that recognizes the sovereignty of the Russian Federation over Crimea,” the Ukrainian region annexed by Moscow in 2014 in an incursion considered illegal by the United States. He said he would treat the provision and similar ones as “consistent with the president’s exclusive constitutional authorities as commander in chief and as the sole representative of the nation in foreign affairs.”

"Faithfully execute the laws"? Of course not. That's for the Little People.

And Congress, paper-trained by years of deference to Executive power, and cowardice in exercising their duties as the representatives of We the People, will do nothing but cringe, assuming they even bother to react to this.

This isn't even a Left or Right issue. The Chief Executive's job is to execute; execute the laws as written. If he's got a problem with that he needs to get his party to change the laws in Congress, or rely on the judiciary to strike them down. That We the People accept these nonsensical pronouncements is another symptom of the deep rot that has set into our putative Republic.

But, mind you, engaged and intelligent citizens of a vital republic wouldn't have voted in the millions for a tangerine-hued real-estate grifter that lies like a cow shits - endlessly and everywhere. Or for a party the promises to hurt the vast majority of them. A subtle reminder; if your "No. 1 motivating factor is Second Amendment issues" you are a goddamn moron who should not be trusted with the franchise, let alone a firearm.

But this is your republic, America. This is why We can't have nice things.

Unnatural Disasters.

Haiti, widely seen as a leading contestant on the reality show "World's Most Utterly Hosed Polity", got slammed by an M7.0 earthquake yesterday.

To put this in perspective, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 - also on a major branch of a strike-slip fault, also in the vicinity of a major city, has been estimated anywhere between 7.5 and 8.25. This was a big earthquake, but not a HUGE earthquake.We think of the Caribbean as being worked over by hurricanes, not earthquakes, but the tectonics of the region are nearly as nasty as southern California, and the Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden fault system, the projected source of the movement, moves about 7 mm/year, "half the overall motion between the Caribbean plate and North America plate" according to the U.S. Geological Survey.Again, to give you perspective, the slip rate on the San Andreas Fault Zone is roughly 25mm to 30mm/year.One thing to think about, though, is that we're going to hear a lot about this as a "natural disaster". But earthquakes have been happening since tectonics first began some time about 4.3 billion years ago. Unless you were spectacularly unlucky, if you lived in a wickiup and hunted or gathered your food, you probably lived through big earthquakes.

But a couple tens of thousands of years ago we began building ourselves permanent houses. Those houses were fairly ramshackle things, and when the ground shook, even moderately, they fell down on us and killed us. As in the Libyan fable, by our own feathers, and not by others' shafts, are we now striken.

We're going to hear a lot of hand-wringing about how awful a "natural disaster" this is. There'll be the usual assistance, the normal pantsload of helicopters, doctors and Red Cross volunteers. But call me a nasty, cynical son-of-a-bitch, but what we WON'T see is what Haiti needed and needs.The last big strike-slip earthquake in the U.S. was Loma Prieta, 1989. Another M7.0, almost exactly the same as this one. Total of 63 dead, some four thousand injured. Lots of homes damaged.

I'll bet that the death toll in Port au Prince will be at LEAST in the low hundreds, probably in the low thousands, possibly even in the tens of thousands...with thousands more maimed or damaged in some way. In a quake almost exactly like the 1989 San Francisco event that killed sixty-fricking-three. Why?I'll tell you why. We have a pretty good idea how to design and build things to resist much earthquake shaking. In an M8+ all bets are off, sure, but for most quakes, we can design buildings and communities to get most people through the shaking alive.

But this takes money. And the political insistence to enforce building codes. And those two things are things that Haiti has in very, very short supply. So today, as always, many Haitians are dead who need not have died.

Because in Haiti, as in much of the world, lives are cheaper than structural steel and people are more disposable than dimension lumber.

Sympathy, donations and talk are cheap. Soldiers come and go. Changing the way the places like Haiti function is hellishly hard, and it seems pretty hypocritical to me to talk today about our sorrow for the victims of this while we were perfectly happy to ignore them before the first temblor because it would have required us to give a shit and do something about their crappy "government" and impoverished existence.

So this is an UNnatural disaster. Earthquakes don't kill people - people kill people. Or, to be precise, the buildings we don't build to a standard of practice kill people. Lack of building codes kill people. Governments kill people.We can regret this. We can grieve about it. But until and unless we - and, more specifically, the Haitian ruling classes - are willing to commit large amounts of our money, political will and time to reorder the way people build, work and live in Haiti, we cannot change it.

(Cross-posted from GFT)