Quotulatiousness

March 19, 2024

Greek History and Civilization, Part 5 – The Greeks Fight Back

Filed under: Greece, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published Mar 17, 2024

This fifth lecture in the course deals with the defeat of Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BC, ending with the creation of the Delian League and the varying fortunes of Xerxes and Themistocles.
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March 8, 2024

Know Your Ship #20 – Flower Class Corvettes

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

iChaseGaming
Published Oct 27, 2014

Episode 20 of Know Your Ship! In this educational video I cover the Flower class corvettes. These corvettes used by the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal Navy to great effect during the Battle of the Atlantic. The Flower class were built quickly and cheaply in order to provide as many ships for convoy duty and anti-submarine operations as possible. The Royal Canadian Navy in particular achieved significant success and became experts in anti-submarine operations. Sadly, these ships and their crews are mostly forgotten with the passage of time as attention is mostly given to the surviving capital ships. It is my hope that this educational video will help people to understand and know these important ships that helped safeguard the convoys during World War 2. The only remaining ship of this class is HMCS Sackville which you will see later in this episode.
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March 5, 2024

The 1st Punic War – Corvus, Rams and Drachma

Drachinifel
Published Sep 13, 2023

Today we take a look at the strategy and shipping of the 1st Punic War with expert Bret Devereaux!
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February 27, 2024

Greek History and Civilisation, Part 4 – The Ancient Greeks: The Great Invasion

Filed under: Greece, History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published Feb 18, 2024

This fourth lecture in the course deals with the Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BC, ending with the glory of Thermopylae and the burning of Athens.
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February 26, 2024

Rome: Part 4 – The First Punic War 264-241 BC

seangabb
Published Feb 25, 2024

This course provides an exploration of Rome’s formative years, its rise to power in the Mediterranean, and the exceptional challenges it faced during the wars with Carthage.

• Growth of Tensions between Rival Powers
• Differences of Civilisation
• The Outbreak of War
• The Course of War
• Growth of Roman Sea Power
• The End and Significance of the War
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February 25, 2024

Battleships – Ruling the Waves Across the 7 Seas – Sabaton History 124 [Official]

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Japan, Media, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Sabaton History
Published Nov 16, 2023

They were as much symbols of national pride as they were mighty weapons of war, but they were indeed MIGHTY. Dreadnoughts, battleships, super battleships — Sabaton has covered them in songs more than once, and today we dive into the battleship craze of the early 20th century: the Age of the Battleship!
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February 9, 2024

You can’t pro-actively synergize action-oriented metrics in the heat of battle

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

No, I’m not sure if that headline makes any sense, as I was never particularly receptive to the latest buzzwords of any given management fad that went through from the 70s onwards. They all seemed to share a few characteristics along with a bespoke sheaf of buzzwords, PowerPoint slides galore, and lots of spendy courses you had to send all your employees to endure. Is there anything more dispiriting to staff morale than a VP or director who’s just returned from a week-long training seminar in an exotic location on this year’s latest “revolutionary” “transformational” management fad?

It’s bad when companies that make widgets or smartphone apps or personal hygiene products fall for these scams, but it’s terrifying to discover that your military isn’t immune … and in fact revel in it:

Image from “Fads and Fashions in Management”, The European Business Review, 2015-07-20.
https://www.europeanbusinessreview.com/fads-and-fashions-in-management/

We spent these last few decades since the fall of the Soviet Union weaving a comfortable web of CONOPS and implemented “efficiencies” constructed of consultant-speak, weekend-MBA jargon, and green eyeshade easy-buttons bluffed from the podium by The Smartest People in the Room™ to an audience on balance populated by people who already had the short list of jobs they wanted once they shrugged off their uniform in a PCS cycle or two.

Agree, endorse, parrot, prepare …. profit!

War is New™!, Revolutionary™!, Transformational™!. Hard power is Offset™! If we change a bunch of simple words in to multi-syllabic cute acronyms … then the future will be ours, our budgets will be manageable, and our board seats will be secured! Efficiency to eleventy!

Facing the People’s Republic of China on the other side of the International Date Line … how efficient do you feel? How effective?

Something very predictable happened in our quarter century roadtrip on the way to Tomorrowland; we realized instead we wound up on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride instead.

I would like the record to show here in 2QFY24 that this exact problem was discussed in detail back when I was a JO in the mid-1990. This is not shocking to anyone who is wearing the uniform of a GOFO. They lived the same history I did.

We knew we were living a lie that we could sustain a big fight at sea. An entire generation of Flag Officers led this lie in the open and ordered everyone else to smile through it. Ignore your professional instincts, and trust The Smartest People in the Room™.

Once again, Megan Eckstein brings it home;

    If U.S. military planners’ worst-case scenario arose in the Pacific — having to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion — American military forces would target Chinese amphibious ships.

    Without them, according to Mark Cancian, who ran a 2022 wargame for the Center for Strategic and International Studies that examined this exact scenario, China couldn’t invade the neighboring island.

    U.S. submarines would “rapidly fire everything they have” at the multitude of targets, Cancian said, “using up torpedoes at a much, much higher rate than the U.S. has expected to do in the past.”

    Navy jets, too, would join in — but they’d run out of Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles within days, …

    It’s this nightmare scenario that’s driving the Navy to increase its stockpile of key munitions: the LRASM, the MK 48 heavyweight torpedo, the Standard Missile weapons and the Maritime Strike Tomahawk, among others.

Over a decade after the Pacific Pivot, a couple of years after the US Navy became the world’s second largest navy after being the worlds largest for living memory of 99% of Americans, and two years after the Russo-Ukrainian War reminded everyone that, yeah … 3-days wars usually aren’t.

And the defence industries of the 1980s and 90s have all swallowed up smaller competitors — again following “normal” business practices of the time, seeking economies of scale and manufacturing efficiencies and closing down less-profitable assembly lines or entire lines of business.

Let’s go back to SECDEF Perry’s 1990s “Last Supper”, you know, the one that was all about the efficiencies of consolidation of the defense industry.

Three decades later, what is the solution to the strategic risk we find ourselves in due to our inability to arm ourselves?

    … “the bottleneck is rocket motors” because so few companies are qualified to build them for the United States, Okano explained. To help, the Navy issued a handful of other transaction agreement contracts to small companies who will learn to build the Mk 72 booster and the Mk 104 dual-thrust rocket motor so prime contractors have more qualified vendors to work with, she added.

LOLOLOL … what “small companies?” That ecosystem is “old think”. If we need to go back to that structure, that will take decades not just to build, but decades of a viable demand signal.

Looks like we have started that as “small companies” perhaps repurpose part of their company to a military division. If we can just stop them from being gobbled up by the primes, it might be nice to return to a more robust, competitive ecosystem. Soviet-like consolidation and McNamaraesque efficiencies got us here, perhaps time to try something old as new again.

Nothing is less efficient to go to war with than a military designed for an efficient peace.

January 26, 2024

Canada’s sooper-sekrit warship program

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

David Pugliese on the cone of silence the federal government seems to have pulled down over the Canadian Surface Combatant shipbuilding program as it steadily escalates in total cost to the taxpayer:

An artist’s rendition of BAE’s Type 26 Global Combat Ship, which was selected as the Canadian Surface Combatant design in 2019, the most recent “largest single expenditure in Canadian government history” (as all major weapon systems purchases tend to be).
(BAE Systems, via Flickr)

National Defence has brought in a new and unprecedented shroud of secrecy around a controversial warship project now estimated to cost taxpayers more than $80 billion.

After withholding documents for almost three years, the Department of National Defence has released nearly 1,700 pages of records that were supposed to outline specific costs and work done so far on the Canadian Surface Combatant program.

But all the details of what taxpayers have so far spent and what type of work has been done by Irving Shipbuilding for that money have been censored from the records.

“I pretty much got nearly 1,700 blank pages,” Ken Rubin said of the access to information request he filed to National Defence in April 2021 about the warship program. “I have never seen this level of secrecy or lack of accountability over a project that is costing so much.”

Rubin, an investigative researcher who has used the access law to obtain federal documents for decades, said there was not a single cost figure contained in any of the 1,700 pages. One page noted that Irving was required to perform 19 specific tasks, but all details were censored. Others pages listed numerous amendments made to the CSC program, but all details were blacked out. Information about the annual profit Irving has made so far on the CSC project is censored.

Irving declined to provide comment, referring this newspaper to National Defence.

Defence Minister Bill Blair’s office sent this newspaper a statement noting the “minister believes strongly in openness and transparency, and expects the Department of National Defence to respect the rights of Canadian citizens, permanent residents and persons or corporations present in Canada, to access records of government institutions that are subject to the Access to Information Act“.

National Defence noted in a statement that, since some of the records involved Irving Shipbuilding, government officials consulted with the firm to determine if the records contained proprietary information of the firm. Irving objected to the release of information, the department added.

But Rubin pointed out that National Defence was not required to follow Irving’s orders on what records could be released to the public. The amount of tax dollars spent on the surface combatant and how that money was being spent shouldn’t be secret, he added.

In addition, National Defence originally claimed in a statement to this newspaper that the long delay in providing the documents was because Rubin had asked for 20 years of records. But, when challenged on that claim, the department acknowledged it wasn’t true. It did not, however, provide an explanation why it had provided false information to this newspaper.

The Canadian Surface Combatant project will involve the construction of 15 warships for the Royal Canadian Navy at Irving on the east coast.

January 25, 2024

USS West Virginia

Filed under: History, Military, Pacific, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to be Remembered
Published 26 October 2023

On December 7, 1941, the battleship USS West Virginia was at Pearl Harbor, moored on Battleship Row, next to USS Tennessee. During the Japanese attack, she was struck by seven torpedoes, sinking in shallow water. But the “We Vee” would rise again, and she would lead the American line of battle at the last battleship on battleship action in history. USS West Virginia deserves to be remembered.
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January 8, 2024

Royal Navy to retire their only two LPDs?

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sir Humphrey comments on the recently reported “leak” about several Royal Navy ships:

In an “inspired” leak that seems to fit the Yes Minister definition of a “Confidential Security Briefing”, the Daily Telegraph is reporting that the Royal Navy is to pay off two Type 23 frigates, HMS Argyll and Westminster early in order to find crew for the Type 26 frigates. Assuming this is true, this means that since 2010 the Royal Navy escort fleet will have been cut by 40%. Meanwhile the Times is reporting that the Royal Navy will mothball both LPD’s and no longer have an active amphibious assault ship command platform. This represents a 100% cut to the active assault ship force. The reasons given in both cases seem to boil down to the line that this is about providing sailors to crew the Type 26 frigate. It doesn’t seem to be linked to the rumoured huge budgetary challenges facing the MOD this financial year, which could equally be responsible for this decision.

There are different ways that this information can be interpreted depending on how you look at it. For starters we need to ask the question, why these two ships? The Type 23 force is elderly, with the ships intended for an original 18-year life span, worked hard in the North Atlantic and replaced quickly. They have all been extended in service for up to twice their original design life, while repeated delays to order the Type 26 has meant they are working far harder, and far longer than ever anticipated.

HMS Albion docked at Portsmouth, 26 July 2029.
Detail of a photo by David Crochet via Wikimedia Commons.

These are ships designed 40 years ago, with the original Type 23 design dating back to the early 1980s. It is no exaggeration to say that there is almost certainly no one left in active regular service who was serving when the Type 23 design was first conceived. This means the design reflects the 1980s equipment and capabilities and standards – be it in the structure of the messes (large mess decks for junior sailors) or the internal wiring and machinery. While still capable, be in no doubt that these are elderly ships with all the many challenges that this brings. To make up for the many and varied delays to the Type 26, the RN has funded life extension work to the force for some years, fitting new missiles, guns and sonar equipment over time. The modern Type 23 is a far cry from its original design in equipment and capability, but it is still at its heart a 1980s warship.

Westminster had gone into refit in 2022 to begin the process of extending her life out to the late 2020s. The refit for Westminster would have cost around £100m to provide a further 4-5 years of service. while HMS Argyll had undergone the life extension process which would have seen a planned decommissioning in the late 2020s (the precise dates are not clear anymore due to the “odd” MOD decision to currently no longer provide this information on the grounds of operational security).

The LPD force by contrast is in a different position. The two ships Albion and Bulwark were built to replace the venerable Fearless class in the mid 2000s. For most of their career one has been in reserve while the other has been active, the same pattern as occurred with Fearless and Intrepid, where the latter spent years in increasingly poor state in reserve. The timing for this decision makes sense operationally as Albion has come to the end of her commission and was due to pay off into reserve, while Bulwark is still being regenerated in refit and hasn’t yet gone to sea. It would be possible to put both ships in reserve and free up a reasonable amount of sailors in the process.

The question is what is the impact on the fleet itself? Currently the RN probably has a requirement for 19 escort ships – “probably” is used as the MOD has refused to provide a statement on target force numbers in the two most recent Defence Reviews, so this is an assessment based on the 2015 Defence Review. That we have to rely on a near decade old defence review to guess how many escorts the RN plans to have speaks volumes for the manner in which the MOD engages with the taxpayer.

HMS Westminster (foreground) and HMS Iron Duke, Type 23 frigates of the Royal Navy, in the naval base of Portsmouth, August, 2000.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

January 4, 2024

The Halifax Naval Museum – A Hidden Treasure

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Drachinifel
Published 15 Sept 2023

Today we look take a quick tour through Canada’s naval history as exemplified by the RCN Naval Museum in Halifax, Canada.
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December 7, 2023

Canada is great at gesturing on the international stage … far less so in doing anything substantive, especially militarily

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Harrison Ruess channels his inner Star Trek geekiness to illustrate the Kobayashi Maru situation the Royal Canadian Navy (and the rest of the armed forces) find themselves in:

Canada is, and has been for some time, caught between two irreconcilable positions. We don’t want to spend any money on the military but also continue to prioritize how important and influential we want to be in the world (“Canada is back”, etc).

Friends, either of these things is possible. We just can’t do both at the same time.

So let’s have an honest conversation and decide which road we want to go down, commit to it, and then do the best we can in whichever adventure we choose. Talking, domestically and internationally, about how determined Canada is to make a positive impact in the world, while not investing in the systems to give our words weight, sets both Canadians and our allies up for disappointment. The old adage that it’s best not to over-promise and under-deliver should be remembered. We seem to aspire to the reverse.

If Canadians really don’t want to invest in our military, then we need to be honest about the consequences of those decisions. It means a more inwardly focused Canada, less able to support our allies, with fewer seats at big tables, less able to respond to emergencies or disasters, and likely less able to help our own. Given our unstable world, I would not personally advocate for this road, but there is a case to be made for it. So if you are someone who thinks this is the right path, then make your case honestly. Explain why you think it’s swell that our navy will need to launch under-equipped vessels, or not launch them at all. Defend your ground. But stop trying to sell Canadians a fable that we can have a shell of an armed forces while at the same time having increased global influence and impact.

On the other hand, if we do think Canada has a positive role to play — and even a responsibility — in trying to bring some order to the world, help those who need it, and ultimately protect our own interests, then we need a military, and a military budget, strong enough to meet the demands of the task. This includes procurement budgets, maintenance budgets, budgets to offer competitive wages, and budgets to sustain missions, both training and the real deal.

Proponents of this position need to do a much better job of explaining why this is the best path to both improving the lives of Canadians and stabilizing our destabilized world. Then our governments must pursue and defend this road, even when defence isn’t top of the polling priority list — which it never is.

The current status-quo doesn’t work. It’s dishonest. And most importantly, it hurts Canadians and our awareness of what our country is — or isn’t — capable of doing. Kudos to V.Adm. Topshee for, in not so many words, trying to explain the impact of this reality on the navy.

Having a capable, equipped military costs money — starting with perhaps the NATO-agreed upon two per cent of GDP. That’s the cost of doing business as a serious, mature, supposedly globally oriented country. Are we that? Do we even want to be?

December 1, 2023

“You’ve reached the Royal Canadian Navy. Your naval emergency is very important to us, so please stay on the line for … a few years and we will send a frigate when one becomes available”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Paul Wells was disturbed by a recent extremely downbeat video posted on YouTube by the head of Canada’s Navy so he got in touch with the man himself for an interview:

That was a hell of a video that Vice Admiral Angus Topshee, the Commander of the Royal Canadian Navy, put on Youtube this week. Topshee depicts a Navy in a “critical state”, facing “very serious challenges right now that could mean we fail to meet our force posture and readiness commitments in 2024 and beyond”.

The Navy’s not alone — the Air Force and Army are “confronted with similar challenges”, Topshee says in the video. The biggest challenge is that the Navy’s getting smaller, about 14% smaller today than in 2014. The West Coast fleet is “beset with a shortage of qualified techs” and the fleet can only deploy one of its three offshore patrol vessels at a time. The Halifax-class frigates that form the basis of Canada’s oceangoing capability will need to keep floating for 15 more years, even though they should already have been retired. All of the 12 frigates: Topshee’s political masters have made so many commitments there’s no margin for a reduction in the Halifax-class fleet.

Here’s the video:

To borrow a naval term, it’s quite a broadside. So I emailed Topshee on Wednesday and asked for an interview. He wrote back promptly and we were on the phone within hours. Here’s our interview in Q&A format, edited for length.

PW: Are you in the habit of putting out videos that are this stark in their diagnosis? If I went back, would I find one of these every year?

AT: No, there was a unique combination of circumstances that led to video being produced. The promise I made when I took command of the Navy is that we have to be honest. Things are the way they are. They’re not necessarily the way we want them to be. And we’ve got to be very honest about that difference. And so I’ve tried to be frank, and we try and rebuild trust. And to be completely honest, we went through a cultural crisis in the Canadian Armed Forces. And my feeling is that if you want people to trust you, then you have to be completely open, transparent and honest with them. That’s the approach I’ve taken throughout my tenure in command of the Navy.

PW: Is the fact that this video’s on YouTube a reflection of any difficulty you’re having getting heard internally?

AT: No. I’ve shared my assessments with the leadership of the Department, up to and including this minister and the previous Minister. I feel I’m being heard and respected. This was more about, we wanted to put the message out internally. Unfortunately, there’s some very specific IT challenges around how we disseminate internal messages. And so [Youtube] was the channel we used.

[…]

PW: It’s slower to train up recruits in the Navy, because you have to put them on a ship, and that has logistical implications? Whereas in the army, I could take them to an open field?

AT: The commander of the army is going to hate me for saying this, but it’s always been easier to raise an army than to generate a navy or build an air force. Fundamentally, the basic core tasks of an infantry soldier really come down to those individual capabilities that can be trained relatively quickly. Now, actually commanding and controlling and employing that army is a fantastically complicated thing. But it starts with the infantry soldier: relatively easy to build. The training required to generate a sailor is pretty significant. The Mar-Techs that I talked about? [In the video, Topshee says the navy has been losing a highly-trained marine technician every two days.] You know, we’re talking five to 10 years to get to the level of training and experience that they require. So that’s why, you know, we need to make some immediate changes to stabilize ourselves. To grow back to health is going to take time. If we don’t change the system, it will take virtually forever to get back. So we need to make changes to allow us to accelerate how quickly we can do this. Because the honest truth is that while we’re short sailors at the moment, we would probably actually need more sailors to meet the needs of the future fleet that we’re building right now

PW: On the West Coast, you say you are having to prioritize the Halifax class [the big ocean-going frigates that form the Navy’s backbone] at the expense of the Kingston class [smaller ships primarily for coastal service and patrol].

AT: Historically, the West Coast has always had greater personnel generation problems. Partly because there’s a there’s a smaller personnel footprint over there. So when you’re short a number of sailors you feel it more acutely, because the denominator is smaller. So yes, that’s the coast where we’ve felt the pressures most acutely. We’re seeing similar pressures building on the East Coast, but we have not been forced to make any changes. So what we’ve done is we’ve made sure that we can continue to operate our frigates, because right now the West Coast is deploying two frigates, Ottawa and Vancouver, in the Indo-Pacific alongside Asterix [a supply ship]. We need to sustain that level of commitment to meet the requirements of the Indo-Pacific Strategy.

November 24, 2023

Freshwater Flattops; The Corn Belt Carriers Wolverine and Sable

Filed under: History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

[NR: These fascinating lake vessels first came to my attention back in 2013 – Lake Michigan’s carrier fleet.]

Ed Nash’s Military Matters
Published 8 Aug 2023

Sources for this video can be found at the relevant article on:
https://militarymatters.online/
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November 16, 2023

The US military may need to find a modern-day Patroclus

Filed under: Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Carter explains why the sudden swerve in US military recruitment from all-diverse-all-the-time to an ad that might have been created in the 1960s … and why it still won’t help:

He is the very essence of a modern major general.

    Sing, o muse, of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans …

Thus opens the foundational epic of European civilization.

Achilles is angry because his woman, Briseis, has been appropriated by Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks. He expresses this discontent by going on strike. While the rest of the Greek army fights and dies outside the walls of Troy, Achilles lounges in his tent, content to sit out the combat until Agamemnon comes to his senses and returns his war bride. If Achilles were simply any other warm body with a spear, this wouldn’t be such a big deal, but he is Achilles – the greatest warrior of the Heroic Age. Without him, the Greeks are at a severe disadvantage. Achilles’ petulance is therefore a problem for Agamemnon.

The lesson is hardly a subtle one. Kings and generals need to keep their soldiers happy. They especially need to keep their best soldiers happy. If they don’t – for instance, by taking their women from them – morale will suffer, and they may well find themselves without the crucial support of their warriors when it most matters.

Washington seems to have missed that lesson, and now, they’re paying the price.

For the last decade they have been relentlessly and mercilessly whipping American whites: defaming them as racists, mocking their intelligence and manliness, tearing down their statues, erasing the names of their ancestral heroes, replacing their fictional archetypes with diverse doppelgangers in the media, disadvantaging them in education and employment, demanding that they attend racial struggle sessions. The list of outrages and humiliations is long and all too familiar, permeating as it does every one of our institutions.

But now, the Empire of Lies faces a problem.

War has returned to the world. History, its rumoured demise notwithstanding, once again stalks the land. Russia mauls the Ukraine; Israel is beset with enemies; the Empire’s influence in Africa frays by the day; China salivates over Taiwan.

Meanwhile the American domestic economy, long since hollowed out by the extractive rent-seeking of financial parasites, lurches from one crisis to the next. The Great Satan remains powerful, for the present, but the young bucks can scent that the silverback is not what he used to be. Their provocations increase in daring and intensity. If they aren’t slapped down, their boldness will only increase.

The criminal regime that has insinuated itself into the halls of American power is running against a clock. They must have a war to cover the slow collapse of their fake economy. They must have a war to prevent rival regimes from displacing their American golem. But their golem is crumbling. Therefore they must have a war sooner rather than later, because with every moment of delay America becomes weaker, while China and Russia become stronger.

Their problem is that no one wants to fight for them.

The core warrior population of America has always been the Scots-Irish of the Appalachian regions, the good ol’ boys of the South, and the farm boys of the Midwest. Hillbillies and rednecks, in other words. Many families from these areas have multi-generational traditions of service. Dad served in Vietnam, Grampa in WWII, Great-Grandpa in the Great War, and Great-Grandpa’s Pappy fought under Lee in the War of Northern Aggression.

These are precisely the white populations that have been singled out for the most unrelenting and vicious racial abuse over the last several decades. They are the one group that it’s okay to defame in the media, depicted as ignorant, bigoted, backwards, and inbred. The people running Hollywood seem to have a special disgust for them. For generations they have born this with a sort of stoic good cheer, accepting their role as the heel in the great kayfabe of American political drama even as they shouldered a disproportionate burden of blood, tears, and sweat in America’s imperial wars.

The events of the last two decades seem to have put an end to that. It wasn’t just the psychotic frenzy of race communism that gripped the regime’s mind, although that certainly played a factor as the military has hardly been immune to it. Who wants to serve in an armed forces that has thrown meritocracy in the trash to make sure the commissioned ranks include as many strong black lesbians as possible, that spends more time making sure the enlisted ranks understand the nuances of pronoun usage and the finer points of critical race theory than training for war? Demoralizing as all that has been, the absolutely pointless debacle of the Neocon Forever War in the Middle East has played at least as large a role.

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