The Ten Ships

Richard Fernandez wrote 15 years ago in his essay “The Ten Ships”:

Admiral Nagumo launched his infamous attack on Pearl Harbor from a nameless patch of ocean 200 miles North of Oahu. But Admiral King had the sense to understand that the location itself had little significance. It was the Kido Butai, the ten carriers which made up the Japanese Fast Carrier force which momentarily occupied that ocean waste that he had to destroy. While the Kido Butai existed it could move across the vast spaces and attack at a point of its choosing. While it survived every patch of ocean was dangerous. Once it had been neutralized all the oceans of the world were potentially safe. As John Adams in his book If Mahan Ran the Great Pacific War wrote: “sink ten ships and win the naval war”. Both the Nihon Kaigun and the CINCPAC understood this. The entire purpose of subsequent American naval operations was to find and sink these ten ships; and the Nihon Kaigun’s subsequent efforts revolved around their attempt to preserve them.

Keeping that in mind, we can see that Midway Island itself was merely a plot device that existed to bring about the desired battle.

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About That Royal Navy….

Sometimes, to know where you are, you have to know where you have been.

First, “A Tale of Two Royal Navy’s – Ambitious Expansion Vs Strategic Decline” — which states that in the not-so-distant future, Australia will have a larger navy than the British.

Second, an excellent X-thread on the importance of Diego Garcia to the West’s defense of the Indo-Pacific theater.

Third, the 43rd-anniversary of the re-capture of Goose Green.

Great Britain is no longer a serious country. It is within living memory that the British not only relied on a large and potent navy to keep the Empire intact, but also to prevent their own home islands from being starved-out in the face of enemy blockade.

Nobody expects the return of Jacky Fisher and the Grand Review, but a fleet that only has a total of 14 destroyers and frigates, with only a few of those operational at any one time? The last commissioned more than 11 years ago?

Go ahead, Tommy Friedman and the rest of the DC crowd, and tell me about our special relationship.

It’s not just about hulls.

Take the issue of Diego Garcia, the key US-UK base in the Indian Ocean and the linchpin to Western defense in the region. It’s not just a modern-day Uhliti as an expeditionary base, with its bomber-capable runways and port facilities. It’s that it sits directly across major sea lanes.

Unfortunately, Diego Garcia is part of the Chagos Island Archipelago, a British Indian Ocean Territory that the British are hell-bent on ceding to Mauritius, an island 1,300 miles away. Mauritius’s shaky claim to the Chagos is based on a history of administrative convenience, that they were once part of the same local British colonial apparatus.

Last week, British PM Starmer signed a deal that formally ceded the Chagos to Mauritius, but that provides the fig leaf of the US leasing back the Diego Garcia base. I say fig leaf because the Chagossians who were expelled from Diego Garcia to build the base want the island for themselves.

This will not end well, and the question is how much, not if, Chinese money is involved. After all, buying a bunch of Mauritian politicians to expel the base a few years from now in the name of “Chagossian rights” is a lot cheaper for the Chinese than the missiles it would need to use to destroy it.

Thanks, Britain. If you cannot do your part to keep up your military could you at least do your part not to undermine ours?

Forty-three years ago and on a week’s notice, the British deployed a task force nearly 8,000 miles, to the bottom of the planet, in the face of an approaching Antarctic winter, to fight a war in a hostile power’s backyard. The mission was to retake the Falklands Islands, a fairly desolate and sparsely populated bit of real estate, from the Argentines; a goal that the US Navy assessed to be impossible.

Well, the war lasted all of 10 weeks and the Union Jack still flies there.

That’s just not within living memory, but my living memory.

The British are faced with the fact that, through their own efforts, their not-so-distant past has become as alien to them as the proverbial Stone Age tribe in the Amazon stumbling onto a lost city built by their ancestors.

Reaching for the Alien Shore

So, about those drones. Treating the current social contagion as a subset of the ongoing “UAP” fad, how are we to evaluate the obsession with extraterrestrial aliens? Lest my output appear misleadingly prodigious, I wrote most of what follows in late summer 2023 and have modestly updated it for our situation as of (very) late autumn 2024. The organization of this post is an attempt at a hierarchy from most immediate/local to greatest space/time extent.

NOTICE! In compliance with the Manifoldian Transparency Pledge of 2024, which I just thought up:

  • this thing runs > 8k words, reading time potentially exceeds 30 minutes, and that doesn’t account for
  • lots of math and possible inducement to wander off down various rabbit trails invoked thereby (besides the homework/syllabus assignments), which you may or may not regard as part of the fun; and
  • not to overlook the obvious, I will address the concomitant obsession with foreign infiltration, and OCD contamination phobia in general, in at least one separate post.

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Making Their Mark on the World

I’ve been mulling over the following question: how did each of the modern presidents from Nixon to present impact the world the most?

Richard Nixon: Opening relations with the People’s Republic of China.

Gerald Ford: The Helsinki Accords. The human rights plank encouraged the growing dissident movements in the Eastern Bloc. They took seriously what the Soviets were willing to put on paper in the albeit non-binding resolution.

Jimmy Carter: Enabling the Islamic totalitarian revolution in Iran.

Ronald Reagan: Fomenting the end of the Cold War. “Reagan bolstered the U.S. military might to ruin the Soviet economy, and he achieved his goal” – Gennady Gerasimov

George H. W. Bush: This may be a controversial choice, but I’m going with the “New World Order” speech, or rather what it represents – encouraging the United Nations to take a more active role in foreign relations. One of the legacies of the UN is the enshrinement of the ethic that wars must never be won, only fought to the point of ceasefire.

Bill Clinton: Granting the People’s Republic of China access to supercomputer technology vital to targeting manned, unmanned, and munitions-bearing rocketry. It’s the one great leap forward in China that actually worked.

George W. Bush: The Iraq War. Aside from altering the geopolitical landscape in the region, it convinced Muhammar Qaddafi to cooperate with the US to end Libya’s WMD program.

Barack Obama: Opening Iran to financial markets, thus magnifying its ability to conduct proxy wars.

Donald Trump (first term): It may be a bit early to gauge the legacy of the Abraham Accords, but opening the door to Israeli cooperation with some of its Arab neighbors is bound to have significant impact on Iran’s regional ascendency. It also breaks from the stupid tradition that any negotiations between Israel and any of its neighbors must include the Palestinians, as if Palestinian and non-Palestinian relations can’t be delt with separately.

Joe Biden: Opening Iran to financial markets, thus magnifying its ability to conduct proxy wars – assuming the Ukraine Missile Crisis does not top this. (Our own Trent Telenko is cited in the linked article.)

“Evil Amazon”

Josh Treviño regarding the Mexican cartels:

“It is evil Amazon, really. They’re logistic firms with small armies attached that will profit from whatever they can and increasingly take on the characteristics of insurgency.”

I think the Amazon comparison is apt, but Treviño pulls up a bit short because it’s more than just logistics. Amazon has proven to be a master of leveraging existing capabilities in order to exploit new markets. There is of course its e-commerce transformation from an online bookstore to selling just about everything under the sun. Then there was its leveraging the last-mile delivery and now using its expertise in data centers to develop AWS and enter the AI market.

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