Priorities. Three data points.
First, remember this story from last month? Navy to Sideline 17 Vessels Due to Manpower Shortages.
So this an example of why the Navy is standing on the edge of a death spiral. We don’t have enough manpower to crew the ships we have, which means we need to take ships out of service, which means we put more pressure on the existing fleet with extended deployments, which means more problems with retention and recruitment. Rinse and repeat. When you see stories like the USS Eisenhower going on a nine month deployment through July of this year, this is the sort of thing that burns out crews and the fleet in general.
Second, I saw this story today, ”US Navy Replenishment Ship Sustains Damage While Operating in Middle East.” That replenishment ship was the only oiler in the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group which is currently operating near Oman in order to deter Iran. That oiler is now out of action and is being towed back to Dubai. There are no other oilers available in the fleet and the Navy is scrambling to find commercial vessels to service the Lincoln strike group.
A military force is only as good as its logistics and no oilers means the Lincoln strike group becomes a coastal force, tethered to ports for replenishment.
Of those 17 ships the Navy wants to take out of service? Two replenishment vessels and one oiler.
Third, Jill Biden reveals $500 Million Plan That Focuses on Women’s Health at Clinton Global Initiative Oh, really? Tell me more, like what problems are going to be addressed and where’s that money coming from?
First lady Jill Biden is unveiling a new set of actions to address health inequities faced by women in the United States, plans that include spending at least $500 million annually on women’s health research.
Biden was making the announcement Monday while closing out the first day of this year’s Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York.
The additional government spending will mainly come from the Department of Defense…
So when we don’t have enough men and ships for the fleet, the Department of Defense is going to spend nearly $500 million annually on women’s health research? Not HHS or NIH?
Also, why announce this at the Clinton Global Initiative, that well-known personal slush fund for the Clinton crime family?
Did I mention the Clintons gave Joe an award?
Bet you that $500 million could have staffed those 17 ships they are taking off-line, maybe even built a new oiler.
Priorities.
Military Affairs
Quote of the Day
We are not a serious country because, as a democracy, we do not have serious voters. Autocracies like China and Russia have many disadvantages compared to us, but in the present historical moment, they are nowhere near as stupid as we are. One trembles for the future.
Dancing the Minnesota Walz
I think the most purely risible, ‘laugh out loud and roll on the floor’ headline of the current presidential campaign must be this one: Tim Walz’s Masculinity Is Terrifying to Republicans
This unintentionally hilarious take has been committed by one Frances Wilkinson, in an opinion piece for the entity known as Bloomberg.com. I do not know anything about Frances Wilkinson, but will venture a couple of guesses here: one, that she doesn’t really know any Republicans personally; two, that she is as acute a judge of what constitutes masculinity-fearing-Republicans as Rachael Gunn (the notorious Raygun of the Australian Olympic breakdancing team) is of break-dancing technique; and three, who the heck is terrified by the masculinity of a guy who looks like a live-action movie version of Elmer Fudd anyway?
Slow But Exceedingly Fine
I see from various sources that the Israelis have finally done in one of Hezbollah’s senior-ranking terrorists, one Fouad Shakar, who had a multi-million-dollar bounty on his head for involvement in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. The mills of justice may grind very slowly, but they eventually grind very fine. Well, he got to live more than forty years longer than the 241 Marines blown up in 1983, and I hope without much conviction that he spent every one of those years looking nervously over his shoulder. The Hezbollah organization was also behind the kidnapping, gruesome torture and murder of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s, and the protracted hijacking of TWA 847 in the summer of 1985.
“Israel’s strategic game of survival”
(March 15, 2024 / JNS)
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer’s obscene call for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ouster from power on the Senate floor on Thursday was the latest sign that Hamas’s strategy is working. On the “Caroline Glick Show” this week, U.S. Military Academy professor Col. John Spencer, who chairs West Point’s Urban Warfare Studies Program, explained that the terrorist organization’s goal for victory is a concerted political-military strategy.
Hamas, he said, knew that Israeli Defense Forces would respond with force to its Oct. 7 assault in southern Israel. “They wanted Israel’s counterattack, and then they wanted to hold in the tunnels and use the hostages just to buy time for the international community—namely, the United States—to stop the IDF in their operations.”
“Their only goal is to survive. … It’s all about time. They want to survive Israel’s attack against them, which gives them immense political power. If they survive in any way, they have strategically won the war,” said Spencer…