Where is the Accountability?

We have not had the chance to dig up LCS and gibbet it at the entrance of the harbor recently, so let's take a nice overview by Sam about the healthy churn between the Executive and Legislative Branches of government to see how it looks in the light of 2022;

As part of the FY 2023 submission, the Pentagon proposed cutting warships from the Navy’s battleforce – including six cruisers, four Whidbey Island/Harper’s Ferry-class amphibious Dock Landing Ships, nine Littoral Combat Ships as well as Montford Point and John Glenn.

The youngest ship on the list, USS St. Louis (LCS-19), commissioned in 2020.

Years before LCS hull-1 was commissioned, we tried to warn the Navy what they were setting us up for. Long time members of The Front Porch know the story well, new folks can click the LCS-tab to catch up on a couple of decades of discussion.

I'm not sure even in our darkest moments we saw it coming to this much ruin...but perhaps we were optimists.

Imagine being one of the Sailors assigned to the St. Louis. "So, what did you do in the Navy?"

...and yet - where is our accountability for such a potlatchish waste of institutional capital and taxpayer money?

The above is clearly a generational failure by The Potomac Flotilla, and in an article by our friend Jerry Hendrix over at NRO, we have another example where The Potomac Flotilla has intentionally steered our Navy in to shoal water with barely a whistle, 

On Tuesday, the conservative Heritage Foundation released its annual “Index of U.S. Military Strength.” For the first time in the near-decade-long history of the index, it rated the U.S. military as “weak.” Implicitly criticizing multiple administrations, Heritage’s analysts charged that U.S. military forces are under-strength, under-trained, and under-funded, and thus are not ready to meet the current challenges of great-power competition. Heritage highlighted in particular the small size and poor material condition of the U.S. Navy and Air Force, which will be critical in facing a potential conflict in the Asia–Pacific region.

None of these failures are the fault of the Sailors and company and field grade officers in the Fleet - the ones our Navy has no problem holding to very public account for their failures - but of the senior uniformed and civilian leaders spanning multiple administrations ... and yet - who is being held to account?

Combine this with the fact that we tried to tie the loss of a multi-billion dollar large-deck amphib around the neck of an undesignated Seaman only to have him found not guilty after two years ... with still no one of note held to account but scapegoats ... where do the American people have to go in order to have their military leadership held to account?

Where? When? Who?

This should not be how any of this works.