Looking at the cat ladies of both sexes and all 57 genders who ruined Trashcanistan, it seems obvious that they skipped sexual maturity – they jumped straight from “tween-ager” to “menopausal”. Even the young women in the “Social Justice” movement look – and, crucially, act – like they’re pushing fifty, while the young “men” are neotenous. Most of them are what bodybuilders call “skinny fat” – scrawny yet flabby, with no muscle tone – and the rest are morbidly obese. A crowd of college kids, again of both sexes and all however-many genders, looks like the mosh pit at the Lilith Fair. Without their exaggerated displays of secondary sex characteristics – ironic facial hair on the lads, pussy hats on the lassies – who could even tell them apart?
So, too, with their mentalities. I spent many years toiling in the groves of academe, so obviously my social life (such as it was) contained a lot of post-menopausal lesbians. No creature is more solipsistic than this. Whatever maternal instincts she once might’ve had, have curdled into general naggy truculence, and since they have all the money and free time in the world in which to indulge their narcissism, if they can’t find any actual wrongthink around they’ll simply invent some. Before the Deplorables were driven to organize themselves for gaudy, suicidal, IRA-style violence, post-Oranzhevvy Trashcanistan felt, I imagine, a lot like a college campus …
… which the few people with normal serum hormone levels who were stuck there often called “the ivory gulag”. Make of that what you will.
Severian, “Hormones, or Lack Thereof”, Founding Questions, 2021-01-20.
December 4, 2023
QotD: The “ivory gulag”
December 3, 2023
“I find myself despising the elites I joined in ways that shock me. I have come to despise the woke left, their indifference to crime, their reveling in reverse-racism, their deep hatred of Western civilization”
I’ve been reading Andrew Sullivan’s Substack since he started and it’s always been a pretty clear indicator that as soon as the name Trump is mentioned, the rest of the piece can be ignored because he’s been saying the same things for literally years now. This week’s article is a significant break with that tradition. It’s not that he suddenly likes Trump but that he seems to have gained more understanding about why other people support him:
As old-time Dishheads may recall, I was one of a handful of pundits who thought in early 2016 that Trump not only could, but probably would, win the election. I could feel his appeal in my lizard brain, and had long studied the fragility of liberal democracy in my frontal cortex. But the moment I knew his presidency was almost certain was when the Brexit result was announced in June, when everyone still assumed Hillary was a shoo-in. Something was stirring. And that’s why, after my annual trip back to Britain last week, I’m feeling the nausea again.
[…]
Add to that anger a lockdown far more intense than in the US and a period of crippling inflation, and you have a recipe that will likely lead to a Labour landslide next year. And in so many countries right now, for a variety of reasons, you see the same “blow it all up” mentality, turfing out incumbents mercilessly, often in favor of performative populists of various hues and flavors.
Look at the Netherlands: a progressive country that just saw Geert Wilders’ hard-right anti-immigration party go from 10 percent in 2021 to 23.5 percent of the vote, and become by far the biggest party in the Dutch House of Representatives, with center-right parties open to joining them. Or Argentina, where a weirdly coiffed, former rock-singer, Javier Milei — who had a near mental breakdown in a televised interview during the campaign, complaining about voices that weren’t there — wiped out the Peronist establishment in a landslide.
Orbán’s decisive re-election, Meloni’s electoral victory in Italy, and Sweden’s lurch to the right all suggest a sudden widening of the Overton window in much of Europe. In Germany, the AfD, the far-right movement, is now polling at 21 percent of the electorate, compared with 15 percent for Chancellor Scholz’s Social Democrats and 9 percent for the Greens. None of it is particularly coherent. Milei is Steve Forbes in a very bad toupee — about as far away from Boris’ Red Toryism or entitlement-friendly Trumpism as you can get. The only truly consistent thing is the ridiculous hair, and contempt for elites.
And the fear of the crazy right has gone. Milei and Wilders instantly moderated on some of their most outlandish positions, as soon as power was within reach. No, Milei won’t dollarize the Argentine economy, it turns out; and no, Wilders won’t ban mosques, as he tries to build a coalition government. Meloni has talked up immigration control, but in power, she hasn’t done much about it, and her support for Ukraine and the EU has been a big surprise. Poland’s hard-right party showed it could not stay in power forever this year, and in Spain, Vox lost ground. But in all this, a taboo has been broken — the same kind of taboo that the election of Donald Trump represented. The small-c conservatism of the Western electorate has expired.
That’s why I find the re-election of Joe Biden so hard to imagine. Biden is the incumbent of all incumbents. He became a senator in 1973! He has been vice president for eight years and president for four. He’s extremely old for the job he is doing, and everyone knows it. He has presided over inflation higher than at any time since the 1970s, and a huge new wave of legal and illegal immigration. We may now have a higher percentage of the population that is foreign-born than in the entire history of this country of immigration. Americans’ support for a border wall is the highest it’s been since 2016.
And Gallup’s latest polling on how the public feels about crime should terrify the Democrats. Coming back to DC this week after seven months away, I’m struck by how stark the decline has become. It says something when a city is experiencing a massive wave of carjackings, bars the cops from pursuing them, and just hands out free AirTags so you can track your stolen car yourself.
And the key, lame argument from Biden will be that Trump is too big a risk to take. He’s right. Broadly speaking, I agree with Bob Kagan on the crazed ambitions of this tyrant wannabe. But how has that argument worked out so far? Impeachments and indictments seem to have strengthened, not weakened him. And what we’re seeing all over the world is that voters are rushing toward the risky candidates, not away from them.
And Trump has already been in office for four years, and … democracy didn’t end, did it? Or at least, that’s what his supporters will say. They’ll remember the pre-Covid years as the good old days (and economically they wouldn’t be wrong), and also vent anger at an elite that seems to care more about pronouns and “equity” than protecting the border or controlling crime — the core functions of government. I’d be worried if Biden were ahead of Trump by five points in the battleground states. But he’s actually behind.
And though I will never vote for Trump, in my lizard brain, I kind of get the appeal. Inflation and mass immigration, alongside a bewildering and compulsory cultural revolution, are the kind of uncontrollable things that make people vent, especially if the president seems oblivious to these concerns — as Biden does. When Elon Musk f-bombed on Andrew Ross Sorkin and the advertisers who are boycotting X this week, the rational part of me shook my head. He’s bonkers and may see his company collapse from his whims and rages.
But at some deeper level, I also wanted to yell “Fuck yeah!” I find myself despising the elites I joined in ways that shock me. I have come to despise the woke left, their indifference to crime, their reveling in reverse-racism, their deep hatred of Western civilization. I hate how they’ve taken so much of the progress we made on gay integration and thrown it all away in transqueer solipsism. I loathe their piety and certainty and smugness. I found their instant condemnation of Israel, even as October 7 was taking place, shocking.
Was Hürtgen Forest Worth it? WW2 – Week 275 – December 2, 1944
World War Two
Published 2 Dec 2023The bulk of the fight for Hürtgen Forest is now over, and today we look at the results. We also look at Soviet plans for their January offensive. In the field this week, the Red Army is still fighting in Hungary, the Allies are still trying to reach the Roer River in the west, and in the Pacific Theater the kamikaze menace is wreaking havoc with Allied scheduling.
00:00 INTRO
01:06 Soviet Offensive Plans for 1945
03:12 Red Army attacks in Hungary
06:19 The Port of Antwerp is clear for use
07:23 The Battle of Hurtgen Forest is Over
12:20 Allied advances to the Roer
14:19 Tension builds in Greece
15:32 The aerial situation in the Philippines
21:36 CONCLUSION
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Doctor What-are-your-pronouns
I don’t watch Doctor Who although I have fond childhood memories of watching William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton’s respective “Doctors” and I caught one or two episodes of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker in the role. That the show is still running on British TV is a wonder … but it got headlines for a recent installment that had the Doctor being told off for “assuming” an alien creature’s pronouns:
Remember when Doctor Who was fun? Watching it now is about as much fun as being publicly humiliated at work by some jumped-up nonbinary form-filler from HR who thinks he’s amazing because he’s painted one of his fingernails black.
A good example of this joylessness is a scene in the most recent special, “The Star Beast”, which has been treated by right-on broadsheet types as a moment of profound importance. Yet all that happened was a transwoman character – played by transwoman actor Yasmin Finney – lectured the Doctor about pronouns. In a moment of unforgivable Time Lord-cis privilege, the Doctor had assumed a diminutive alien called Beep the Meep used male pronouns. What was he thinking?
It is this sort of banal plot line that encapsulates the shrivelling ambition of science fiction. Once the genre dared to hold up a provocative mirror to contemporary society. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, sci-fi challenged lazy assumptions. Now it revels in groupthink that feeds the collective self-righteousness of indolent teenagers and adults with teenage imaginations.
This matters, because at its best sci-fi can dazzle and even inspire us with the potential strangeness of the imagined future. A few years ago I made a series presented by William Shatner tracing the cultural and technological influence of Star Trek. In one episode, the inventor of the mobile phone, Martin Cooper, told director Julian Jones how he had been inspired by the example of Captain Kirk’s hand-held “communicator”. Will anyone invent something inspired by the new Doctor Who? A new set of guidelines for pronoun use, perhaps?
You can tell how out of touch Doctor Who has now become by the fact its enormously pompous showrunner, Russell T Davies, seemed to think that the new series would shock viewers with its “progressive” radicalism. The only shock was the alien pronoun scene’s patent stupidity.
I mean, why on Earth would the Doctor assume the gender of any alien? He has been encountering aliens with no fixed gender since the 1960s. The Doctor has effectively been asking aliens for their pronouns for nigh on 60 years.
Davies may think he’s blazing a trail with the new series of Doctor Who. But the truth is that gender-bending in science fiction is as old as the frozen hills of Gallifrey. In The War of the Worlds, published 125 years ago, HG Wells regaled us with Martian invaders who reproduced asexually. And hermaphrodites pepper sci-fi, from the work of Philip K Dick to that of Ursula K Le Guin.
Every Construction Machine Explained in 15 Minutes
Practical Engineering
Published 15 Aug 2023A very quick overview of nearly every machine you’ll see on a construction site.
It takes a lot of big tools to build the roads, dams, sewage lift stations, and every other part of the constructed environment. To me, there’s almost nothing more fun than watching something get built, and that’s made all the better when you know what all those machines do.
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QotD: Intersectionality and the “American experiment”
Today’s identity politics has another interesting feature: it teaches students to think in a way antithetical to what a liberal arts education should do. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, I was given so many tools for understanding the world. By the time I graduated, I could think about things as a Utilitarian or a Kantian, as a Freudian or a behaviorist, as a computer scientist or a humanist. I was given many lenses to apply to any one situation. But nowadays, students who major in departments that prioritize social justice over the disinterested pursuit of truth are given just one lens — power — and told to apply it to all situations. Everything is about power. Every situation is to be analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education. This is induction into a cult, a fundamentalist religion, a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety, and intellectual impotence.
Jonathan Haidt, “The Age of Outrage: What the current political climate is doing to our country and our universities”, City Journal, 2017-12-17.
December 2, 2023
Shane MacGowan, RIP
I’ve been a long-time fan of the Pogues, and Shane MacGowan was the original lead singer for their first several albums. His lifestyle and undependability brought about a break with the rest of the band who continued on without him. I rather lost track of him soon after his next band, the Popes, had one okay album that showed MacGowan hadn’t shaken his demons. I still post his duet with the late Kirsty MacColl every Christmas. In The Pillar, Ed Condon remembers MacGowan:
Shane MacGowan performing in Japan on an unknown date.
Photo by Masao Nakagami via Wikimedia Commons.
Yesterday Shane MacGowan, lead singer of the Pogues, died at age 65.
He was, in every sense, a living legend of Irish music — so much so that many people, sincerely, expressed shock that he was actually still alive. [NR: Literally the words out of my mouth when Elizabeth told me he’d died.]
Most people, at least in this country, know him best for his fiercely melancholic Christmas ballad “Fairytale of New York”, though the Pogues albums Rum, Sodomy & the Lash and If I Should Fall from Grace with God firmly fixed MacGowan as the living conduit of a musical tradition all too often dismissed as a postcard anachronism, created to appeal to tourists.
There was nothing contrived, though, about MacGowan, who was the living embodiment of the distinctly Irish contradiction of “fierce melancholy.” An incredibly gifted writer and poet, he wrote, performed — and lived — with a kind of burning urgency that seemed at once self-consuming and yet in him, rather than from him.
It would be easy to dismiss the riotous drinker and singer, whose punk-inflected incarnation of Irish ballardry seemed stoked with some terrible ferocity, as just an eloquently wounded product of a now nearly vanished Irish society. But what marked him out, to me, was that he was driven by something from within, not without.
Born on Christmas Day in 1957 to Irish parents in England, he spent his early life back in Ireland, living in a family cottage in rural Tipperary, where the children slept three to a bed, there was no running water, and the family cooked on an open fire.
According to his parents, music and storytelling were the focus of their family life in those days.
“It was basic and beautiful,” he said of his childhood. “It was the end of an era that I just happened to catch. And I’m glad I caught it, you know?”
[…]
“All I ever had were happy times,” is how MacGowan described his childhood in Ireland.
This deep understanding and love for his own history and where he came from, which John Paul II also wrote about in Memory and Identity, suffused MacGowan’s music.
But even as he became a kind of living totem in his home country it was clear he loathed the spotlight, writhed during interviews, and fought, often unsuccessfully, to balance his natural reticence with the convulsive need to make his music.
It drove him to at times terrible self-destruction, but the defiance and desperation of his singing seemed always directed back within himself. And it was a great comfort to read his family’s announcement that he’d died with the last rites imparted.
He was a man for whom the words of Jim Harrison, another great poet, seemed to be written:
Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness and they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy, or they become legend.
Rest in peace, Shane.
Joe Biden solves the inflation problem, fat!
Like any lying dog-faced pony soldier would know, it’s as easy as saying “Trunalimunumaprzure“:
Inflation is kicking just about everyone in the junk here lately, regardless of whether that junk is an innie or an outie. It’s been rough on a lot of us, but I know just how hard it’s been on me and mine.
Prices are up significantly over the last few years and my income isn’t up nearly as much. This creates issues with our finances. The upside is that it’s forced me to be better with money.
But prices are still higher than Willie Nelson on a SpaceX flight.
Luckily, President Joe Biden has figured out the solution to all our problems. He’s going to just tell companies to drop prices.
This week, the White House announced the launch of a Council on Supply Chain Resilience, created with the hope to “strengthen America’s supply chains” and “lower costs for families.”
…
President Joe Biden delivered remarks from the White House on Monday to announce the new council’s creation. He touted the lower inflation rate and falling grocery prices but admonished American companies for, in his view, not going far enough.
“Let me be clear: To any corporation that has not brought their prices back down — even as inflation has come down, even as supply chains have been rebuilt — it’s time to stop the price gouging,” Biden warned, imploring them to “giv[e] the American consumer a break.”
Here’s the issue, at least as I see it.
At Thanksgiving, it was noted here that prices are nearly 20 percent higher than in 2019. This while inflation has supposedly decreased. Prices are still high because it’s not so much that inflation has fallen but that the rate of inflation’s increase has fallen. It doesn’t mean prices should drop, only that they should increase at a slower rate.
NATO’s Ostfront
CDR Salamander doesn’t like the misunderstandings that cause commentators to identify NATO’s primary (but thankfully not militarily active) front as a “flank”:
For those who follow me on twitter/X, you are quite familiar with the meme I’ve been posting since long before the Russo-Ukrainian War, all the way back to at least 2018.
This misuse of the King’s English soon became a bur under my saddle as this error continued to be made. Seeing a trend, the following meme was generated by a friend;
This is not a new problem, and I know exactly where it comes from. In my years as a NATO Staff Officer, it did not take long to notice a twitch in the eye of many, not only Germans, to the mention of an “Eastern Front”. It seems silly, and in the 21st Century is it, but it is a reality.
I refused to play along. Yes, I understand how a very few highly emotional people can’t let go of their grandfather’s nightmares, but it is time for the adults in the room to just go around them. Anyway, this is the English language, and while there were French and Walloon Waffen SS units along with Hungarians, Romanians, Italians, and a few volunteer Spanish and others now on the NATO bench that fought on the Eastern Front in WWII, it doesn’t have the same impact with them as we don’t discuss such things in polite company.
Eastern Front, Front de l’Est, or Ostfront, we should all have moved along. History — and proper military terminology — have been around for centuries. In any event, it doesn’t bother the Russians one way or the other and you are fooling yourself if you think it does.
The use of “Eastern Flank” instead of “Front” where referring to real military threat to NATO, the Russian Federation, is just childish.
Original FG42: A Detailed Comparison of the 1st and 2nd Patterns
Forgotten Weapons
Published 16 Aug 2023Today we are looking at examples of the first (Type E) and second pattern (Type G) FG42, comparing their construction and disassembling both to get a close look at the internal differences. Despite sharing the basic mechanism, these two models share zero parts in common, not even the bayonets or magazines. We will also discuss the developmental path of the FG-42, and why the majority of production was the 2nd pattern but the vast majority of combat use was the 1st pattern …
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QotD: Western media and Putin’s war
Regarding [Vladimir Putin’s] Magical Mystery War, I’m going with the stoyak that the casualty counts peddled by the [western media] is part of a very very old playbook which various Western observers have peddled since 1905-that of Russian stupidity and indifference to casualties. Russia loses a war? They’re stupid gopniks who flung their soldiers into meat grinders until they rebelled (1905 or 1917). Russia wins a war? They’re stupid gopniks who flung their soldiers into meat grinders until they won (1945, 2023). Note that you can effortlessly pivot your propaganda when it becomes obvious in hindsight the outcome of the war. This becomes very important when [Putin] negotiates his 18th century kabiniettskreig ending to the war, since nobody in the West, especially AINO, understands how a cabinet war is fought, much less ends. They will claim that they foiled Putin’s plan for conquering all Ukraine (which he never has wanted) by killing hundreds of thousands of poor, oppressed, stupid, vodka-fueled gopniks used as cannon fodder who simply overwhelmed the valiant forces of good by sheer numbers. Not by superior strategy or tactics, or weapons, but the good ol’ Russian sledgehammer. Just like Hitler’s excuse in 1945, when Ivan was knock knock knockin’ on his bunker door. His generals who survived carried that piece of gospel West when the US Army started studying how to fight the Reds and asked the Germans how they did it. Their answer was happily embraced by the next generation of Very Clever Boys in the 1960s and carried forward to today’s Fistagon — Wunderwaffen.
Pickle Rick, commenting on “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2023-12-01.
Rick agreed to me posting this quote as long as I included this colourized photo of Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov (“because it’s gangsta as FUCK”)
December 1, 2023
“I considered shopping a proposal for an anti-helicopter parenting book called Your Kid Sucks, but for some strange reason my agent dissuaded me”
Freddie deBoer on the modern phenomenon of “helicopter parenting”:
Collapse in childhood freedom – Graphic showing the diminishing “free ranges” of each generation of an English family.
For the New York Times, Jessica Grose details how new online grading systems allow parents to track the progress of their children not from year to year, semester to semester, report card to report card, but week to week or even day by day. The results are depressingly predictable, in today’s parenting environment. There’s stress for students and teachers alike, a collapse in interest in learning in and of itself, an adversarial relationship between parents and teachers, and the rise of “hyperchecking”, where parents complain about each and every single grade that isn’t an A. The piece is about K-12, but Grose notes that parents are increasingly seeking access to college online gradebooks, which seems crazy to me; as someone who’s taught a lot of college classes, the idea of someone constantly monitoring a student’s grade with the mindset of a litigious lawyer sounds awful. But then again, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Here’s a piece about helicopter parenting extending into the college years to the extent that the parents are arranging social calendars. Of their college-age children.
I’ve been thinking about these issues for some time — I considered shopping a proposal for an anti-helicopter parenting book called Your Kid Sucks, but for some strange reason my agent dissuaded me — and what I can’t stop wondering is why parents don’t stop doing this stuff for the good of their kids themselves. There are social and philosophical critiques to be made of helicopter parenting, some very good ones. But we never need to wonder why people choose to pursue selfish interests over social or philosophical ones. What consistently surprises me is that parents keep puttering along in the clouds above their kids, binoculars in hand, when there seem to be really compelling arguments against doing that for reasons that are completely aligned with the selfish interests of the kids. I get ignoring social responsibility for the sake of your kid; it’s hard to understand ignoring what’s best for your kid for the sake of your kid.
There’s the social case to be made against helicopter parenting, of course. If you wanted to define the essential moral project of human beings in the broadest terms possible, you could do worse than “put others before self”. Aggressive parenting allows people to juke this basic logic — parents who act as though their child’s best interest is the only important criterion are, in a literal sense, putting someone else before themselves. “Hey, I may be disadvantaging already-disadvantaged kids with my hyperactive parenting, but I’m doing it for a greater cause than myself.” And the intrinsic (genetic) dedication to the good of one’s child obliterates the broader social concerns once freed from the guilt of traditional for-myself selfishness. But hyper-parenting still reflects selfishness, putting your own kin above the interest of everyone else, especially in cases where the harm done to society is a lot bigger than the benefit to your child. Academic malfeasance like the Varsity Blues scandal has obvious negative social consequences, for example, while those specific kids faced only going to slightly less competitive or desirable schools had there been no fraud in their applications. Less directly illicit behavior, like grade grubbing — which, among other things, inevitably benefits the students with the parents who are the most aggressive and who hold the most social capital — are a greyer area, but ultimately do more to unbalance an already-unbalanced system. If these parents were confronted with the opportunity to do this for themselves, I genuinely think that most of them would decline, out of a sense of social obligation. But once it’s “for my kid”, it’s no holds barred.
I think absolutely all parenting contains a little narcissism, and that’s OK; it’s probably a part of our genetic endowment that helps compel parents to nurture their children, and anyway parenting is a tough job that we shouldn’t expect people to perform with no sense of self-satisfaction. But it is one of those quirks of our social order that the parents who are the most politically progressive, who most ardently advocate for a society that serves all of our people, are often also the most unapologetic about putting their thumb on the scale for their own children. Plus, the sort of second-order selfishness of parenting allows for the sidestepping of more philosophical objections to helicopter parenting. These objections are less about the social good of others and more about the content of our individual characters. These include personal values such as the notion that we just should, as human beings, be able to live with a degree of independence in youth; that we just should experience hardship and the consequences of our actions to better appreciate what it means to be alive; that we just should, as human beings, secure our own interests to whatever degree we’re able, without help from above, including in school; that we just should operate as though we are but one in a broad collection of human beings, all of whom matter as much as we do, for our own spiritual good. The thing about these personal values is that they’re only motivating if they are indeed personal — that is, these might sway an individual, but not even occur to their parents, and in our system parents have remarkable ability to obstruct the agency of their kids. They can do the dirty work the kids might not do for themselves.
“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”
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.
Gregorian – “Stairway To Heaven”
gregorianmusiccom
Published 20 Jun 2015We proudly present the new fan-video “Stairway to Heaven” performed and made by members of the Gregorian-music.com fan club.
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QotD: The OODA loop
OODA theory is worth reading about in more depth for anyone interested in … well, any kind of competitive dynamics, actually – military, commercial, individual, anything. The Wikipedia article is a good start. Stripped to its essentials, the theory is that competing entities have to go through repeated iterations of observing conditions, relating observation to a generative theory, deciding what option to pursue, and acting. Victory tends to go to the competitor who can run this cycle the fastest.
OODA theory was originally generalized from the observation that in fighter design, maneuverability (especially a shorter turning radius) beats straight-line speed. When you get inside your opponent’s OODA loop, either physically or conceptually, you can attack him from unexpected angles. You can be where he isn’t. You have the initiative; he is reduced to reacting, often with too little and too late.
Eric S. Raymond, “The Smartphone Wars: Tightening the OODA Loop”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-02-18.
