Of Course They Were Designed as Aircraft Carriers

So, really ... no one here really thought the IZUMO Class was just an ASW carrier, did you?

Come on over to USNIBlog and see the least surprising bit of naval news so far this year.

The Unaffordable Empire or the Sustainable Republic?

The Economist's Lexington brought back to me one of my hobby horses that I have not ridden in awhile; the fact we cannot afford the military we think we need - even if we could, we shouldn't.

The world changes, constantly. We once stood athwart the world because the rest of the world was so relatively poor. That world is gone.

The rest of the world is getting richer, and as a result regional powers will naturally grow. We are not declining - the delta is just shrinking.

We have become accustomed to having overmatch to such a degree that we are setting ourselves up for overreach trying to live in a past that was never that great to begin with.

I can hear intellectual shields going up all over the place - again - so just take a moment to ponder Lexington's last two paragraphs;

A less-noted problem is that America’s unthinking reverence for its fighters is forestalling a badly needed reappraisal of how it organises its forces, and to what end. The fact is, America’s foreign-policy doctrines envisage a degree of global dominance, based on military might, which its volunteer force is now too small to enforce. And to increase the force sufficiently, on current trends, appears unaffordable or impossible. “This force cannot carry out that foreign policy,” concludes Andrew Bacevich, a historian and former army officer, who happens also to be a Gold Star father.

This constitutes a looming crisis, which could logically end in one of two ways. Either America will have to reintroduce conscription. Or it must curtail its military ambitions. Neither outcome is palatable to American policymakers, however, so the problem is seldom discussed. Maintaining the happy delusion that America’s forces are ideal and irreproachable makes that easier. But reality cannot be deferred indefinitely.

We need to finish up the wars we have. Give our friends enough notice to get their defenses in place, as we need to come home.

Let me a repeat again what I have put out for over a decade; remove all land-based maneuver forces from overseas. Maintain a few combined bases with allies for training, logistics, and the occasional surge exercise. No forward deployed TACAIR. Exceptionally limited forward deployed naval forces, if any.

We are a maritime, air, and space power. That is our competitive advantage. We were not designed to sustain, nor do we need, a large standing Army. We need to demobilize and shift to a largely balanced towards National Guard and Reserved land forces. If our rich friends are under threat from ground forces, then they should reflect that in their military investments. We can argument them from the sea, air, and space - and if needed, begin to mobilize land forces.

Our military spending could, and should, be 30% less than it is right now if we really believe that we should be a mercantile republic. If as a nation we decide that we are a global empire in style and action - then keep doing what we are doing.

We aren't. We shouldn't. 

Does anyone really think the path we are on is that desirable or sustainable? Ignore the domestic spending challenge - that isn't "our" wheelhouse. Do you want to be a citizen of a republic blessed with relatively good neighbors and large oceans - or an empire that desires and is expected to bleed blood and gold to protect people who won't protect themselves, or to rule people who have no desire to be ruled? 

Must we always be searching for dragons to slay, both real, imagined, or of our own creation?

Unmanned's Manning Problem

Thanks to Rachel Karas over at InsideDefense, a little bit of an untold aspect of the unmanned aircraft side of the house slipped out.

Lt. Gen. Steven Kwast said at the Air Force Association's winter conference the service doesn't have to settle for a personnel-to-aircraft ratio about seven times greater than manned aircraft require, and needs to find a way to manage those...

Did you catch that? Seven times.

Remember, the greatest utility of UAS is that there is no possibility of human loss to the enemy in case one is shot down. The PAO, PSYOPS and INFO OPS - not to mention all the associated POW issues - unwanted effects of losing a manned aircraft are huge, and quickly move a tactical loss to a strategic handicap.

Those who say they are a great manpower saver? Well ... notsomuch.

We are still in the early days of this chapter in the expansion of unmanned systems decades in the work. To make sure we tailor our platforms and CONOPS - not to mention budgets - we need to be as open as possible to the cost-benefit of the manned unmanned mix.

Personnel costs are not a secondary concern.

Fullbore Friday

You've heard it here before; character isn't built - it just waits for a moment in time to be demonstrated.

You have it or you don't. 

As three young JROTC members demonstrated recently, they had it.

Three cadets killed in the Parkland school shooting are being posthumously honored for their acts of heroism.

The Army is recognizing Peter Wang, 15, and Martin Duque and Alaina Petty, both 14, with the Medal of Heroism for the danger and extraordinary responsibility they took on during last week’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Friends said the three always had a sense of duty and honor as members of the school’s junior ROTC.

Also Tuesday, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point posthumously admitted Peter to the prestigious academy on the day of his funeral. It’s where Peter dreamed of attending. He could have been in the Class of 2025.

Peter died in his JROTC uniform last Wednesday, holding the door open to allow others to escape, as gunman Nikolas Cruz shot and killed 17 at Marjory Stoneman, authorities and witnesses said.

“He saved people’s lives,” said Victoria Downing, one of Peter’s classmates, at the funeral service. “He deserves it.”

West Point conferred the letter of admission, along with honorarium tokens, to his family, local West Point alumnus Chad Maxey said.

Gov. Rick Scott also has directed the Florida National Guard to honor all three cadets. Alaina was honored at her funeral Monday, as Martin will be at his funeral Saturday.

That's about all I will have to say about that.

Fullbore young men and lady. Fullbore.

Diversity Thursday

Our Coast Guard has a lot to answer for.

The only reason this fits in to DivThu is because one of the most caustic efforts of the diversity industry is how it metastasizes in to the legal system. 

The nation’s highest military court has thrown out the 2012 rape conviction of a Coast Guard enlisted man because admirals and prosecutors packed the seven-member jury with five women, four of whom held jobs as advocates for victims of sexual assault.

In a 5-0 ruling that could change how the military conducts sex abuse trials, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces unleashed caustic criticism of all involved.
...
the Coast Guard commandant down to an appellate court to the original trial judge ... contributed to a “stain on the military justice system.”
...
The opinion, delivered by Judge Margaret A. Ryan, said the four admirals who played a role in assembling the officer and enlisted jury pool produced an illegal “gender-based court stacking.” She suggested that the admirals’ role amounted to unlawful command influence

Politics and agendas have always seeped in to our legal system. Only transparency, a free press, and a lot of money for good lawyers to force the truth out keeps that in check.

There is a special kind of evil in humans that will willingly - heck joyfully - move to destroy another person's career, family, friends, and private life for no other reason than to move a narrative forward. To promote an agenda. Or worse, to satisfy an internal need to feed some other craven desire.

This isn't the first case, and it won't be the last - but it does beg a few questions.

- After over a half a decade, how does a man get his reputation back?
- Who will be held accountable for warping the legal system?
- What will happen to them?
- What can we put in place to prevent this from happening again?

Most of us know both victims of sexual assault and those who have been accused of same. I've been around enough to know both more than I like to remember.

While we should all be focused on victims on sexual assault, not every accusation is true. There are legion of false charges, as there all with all crimes. 

If it has not already found its way in to your life, it will. You will have someone in your circle accused of sexual assault of one degree or another. If you are friends with someone who has been charged with any kind of sexual crime, do not automatically assume they are guilty. If you are truly a friend, be a friend. 

They probably will be abandoned my most people they know. Their personal and professional lives will be shattered and will never be the same regardless of what comes out of the legal system. If they are military, even if they are found not guilty in civilian courts, the military can and probably will take them to Court Martial. Double jeopardy is a thing, and is a Kafkaesque experience to watch someone go through.

If guilty, they will have family that will need support - and even they will need support if you are willing to provide it. Remember, the legal system is not totally about guilt and innocence - it is often about winning or losing. Even if guilty, he may not be. Even if they admit their guilt or you are sure of it and you cannot be in the same room as them ever again - remember their family and friends and support them.

If they are found not guilty ... and you wait until then to come back to them - don't expect to pick up where you left them off. They have a life to rebuild. They probably will have little use for such a poor quality material that abandoned them when things were the worse.

Hat tip Ken.

Not quite the Morocco Crisis, but a little ...

There are some interesting things happening in the Indian Ocean.

I'm over at USNIBlog pointing out a spot of bother over in the Maldives.

Come pay a visit and tell me what you think.

Obama's Syria Blink

How did we find ourselves where we are in Syria with the Russians back, the Iranians stronger, and the Turks playing Ottoman?

In a wide ranging interview with the short-lived former SECDEF Chuck Hagel at DefenseNews, he outlines a moment in time that simply has not been explored enough by the press - any of the press.

So much of the problems we have in the Middle East and North Africa can be traced right back to the simply wrong world view held by President Obama.

The cuddling up to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt during his apology tour. The bash-and-shrug in Libya. The premature withdrawal from Iraq. Pretty much everything with Iran. Do I need to go on?

I'll let this pull quote speak for itself.

Ponder.

Was it a mistake not to go into Syria with force and respond to the use of chemical weapons? 

Well, we were ready to do it, as you know. It was a decision made by the National Security Council, a unanimous decision. I strongly favored it. At the last minute the president decided not to do it. I think it was a mistake, I’ve said that. We wouldn’t have had to kill volumes and volumes of people — there was a way to do some things to Assad’s government. And that was the intent. That was the strategy. So it is what it is. Would that event have changed the course of things in Syria? I don’t know.

But also I would say [that] at the time, the Russians were not there. I think it sent a very clear message to the Russians, very clear. When the Russians saw [us not attacking Assad], that action, that was clear to them that we were not going to be players in Syria and we were not going to be involved. And what they did is they took a little naval base, which was nothing, in Latakia province, and used that to build up a huge air asset campaign, troops on the ground, intelligence, navy. And now they’ve got a significant set of sophisticated assets in Syria and now really hold the cards in Syria.