Fox Buries the News While Russian Asset Tucker Carlson Trashes Zelenskyy

On Monday of Christmas week, the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection met for the last time to refer to the Justice Department for possible prosecution four charges of crimes committed by Donald Trump.

Also released was a 154-page summary of the leviathan full report that would drop later in the week. It told us that a Trump-team lawyer coached Cassidy Hutchinson to say she couldn’t recall to questions she clearly did but that Trump would rather not be answered.
Cassidy Hutchinson, deemed the most
important witness of the Jan. 6 hearings.

We learned that Trump aide Hope Hicks and White House lawyer Eric Herschmann had called for Trump to urge peacefulness, but that Trump “refused.”

And we learned that a stunning 30 witnesses had pleaded the 5th. The amendment, let’s remember, says that a witness believes that a true answer would imply involvement in a criminal act. There is still that much to hide.

On Tuesday, the House Ways and Means committee voted to release six years of Trump’s personal and business tax returns to the public after a years-long battle. They showed as little as $0 paid in one year and $750 in two others.

On Wednesday came the realization that Trump had repeatedly lied about his tax returns being under audit, that the fix was in at the IRS where stunningly in violation of regulation his returns had never been audited unlike those of all presidents since Nixon.

If you tune in to Fox for your news at night after work, as do most of the channel’s viewers, you would not have learned of any of this. We tracked through all three nights of Tucker Carlson’s and Sean Hannity’s shows and there was not a single mention of what was happening, except for one passing comment by Pete Hegseth, substituting for Hannity, who dismissed all of the House January 6 hearings as “pointless” and immediately moved on first to ridicule Joe Biden’s fabulist personal reminiscences, and then to promote his special “Life of Jesus”.

One or the other or both shows constantly feature the Biden administration doing nothing about the border crisis and the liberal media’s burying the Hunter Biden’s laptop story, and they again did so these three days. The first is a huge story, the second raises serious questions about the press, but the hours are then filled with an often odd choice of avoidist topics such as a former wrestler fighting off an intruder, an arrest at a spa for indecent exposure, Stanford University’s index of forbidden words, UFOs, etc. Yet here we watched a cable channel that has ‘news’ in its corporate name conduct a total blackout of events – criminal referrals of a former president of the United States — that have never happened before.

Over on MSNBC, the difference was striking. Standard programming was shelved and a panel of five, including lawyers, picked their way through the referrals and the 154 pages in realtime for a couple of hours so as to bring this material to light for viewers.

And on Wednesday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy came to Washington to thank America for its support and to make the case for more in a stirring and historical speech before a joint session of Congress. “I was thinking personally how hard this guy works, travelling to the front one day and travelling to Washington the next”, commented Yale Professor of History Timothy Snyder, “and here he comes to us and speaks to us in our own language”, the third language for the Ukraine president.

Putin’s man at Fox

We apparently have a fifth column in this country led by Tucker Carlson, Fox News’s biggest draw. That’s defined as ” any group of people who undermine a larger group or nation from within, usually in favor of an enemy group or another nation.” Carlson is so on the side of Russia that videos of his comments on Fox are replayed regularly on the newscasts of Russia’s largest television and radio company, V.G.T.R.K. On Wednesday night, with Zelenskyy’s speech to Congress on split screen, Carlson showed that what mattered most to him was not the desperate struggle of the Ukrainian people, freezing without heat or light or means to cook food, was Zelenskyy’s attire:

“As far as we know, no one’s ever addressed the United States Congress in a sweatshirt before, but they love him much more than they love you.”

He drew a parallel between alleged swindler Sam Bankman-Fried and Zelenskyy

“when the president of Ukraine arrived at the White House, dressed like the manager of a strip club and started to demand money. Amazingly, no one threw him out.”

Carlson would clearly prefer to cut Ukraine adrift and let Russia take Ukraine and, it can only be assumed, other countries:

“The point of today’s visit to Washington was not to make the world more stable or make wise decisions…The point was to fawn over the Ukrainian strip club manager and hand him billions more dollars from our own crumbling economy. It is hard, in fact, it may be impossible to imagine a more humiliating scenario for the greatest country on earth.”

From his comfy riches in the U.S. where he is incapable of conceiving the hell Zelenskyy and his people have been going through for the last ten months, Carlson, whose idea of masculinity is the homoerotic “bromeopathy” therapy of “testicle tanning”, mocked Zelenskyy in a photo alongside U.S. lawmakers “in a skintight polo shirt, flexing like a weightlifter and trying to look ferocious…What a hunk. So strong and decisive”.

He of course brings up the trope, “Ukraine’s borders matter. Ours don’t matter”, as did several in this week’s interviews with those on the right such as the dim Marsha Blackburn as if the pursuit of the one means the abandonment of the other, as if there’s an easy solution to the southern border if only attention be paid and Ukraine be ignored.

He quotes Mitch McConnell saying defeating Putin is, “the number one priority among Republicans” and Carlson asks him “before our own economy?” and “more important than your nephew dying of fentanyl?” That inadvertently raises the interesting question of whether helping Ukrainians stay alive to fight our now arch-enemy Russia is indeed more important than concern for the idiot drug-using nephew.

“I think we saw greatness”, said Snyder

Zelenskyy’s strident speech drew an emotional response from all but cynics like Carlson and several times brought the entire
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy presents Ukraine battle flag to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Congress to their feet in applause. MSNBC saw the parallel of Winston Churchill’s address to the full Congress on December 26, 1941, just 19 days after the Pearl Harbor attack by Japan, and brought up archival film:

“Here we are, together, facing a group of mighty foes who seek our ruin. Here we are, together, defending all that to free men is dear.”

Zelenskyy drew the parallel between American troops besieged before Christmas of 1944 in the Battle of the Bulge and Ukraine’s Christmas under the hell of bombardment by the Russians. His most significant point was this:

“Thank you for both financial packages you have already provided us with and the ones you may be willing to decide on. Your money is not charity. It’s an investment in the global security and democracy.”

For Carlson,

“He’s the houseguest who would not leave. And every moment we tolerate him, the demands become bigger.”

When the House changes control January 3rd, we can expect a Republican faction will begin lobbying for reducing or ending support for Ukraine. They cannot see past the money to the strategy. Zelenskyy made the point that they seem incapable of finding on their own.

Timothy Snyder understands the Ukrainian president’s message incontrovertibly. His expertise as a historian is Zelenskyy’s corner of the world and the atrocities it experienced in the 20th Century. He wrote “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” and “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin”, the most horrifying book you will ever read in its relentless tallying of the tens of millions starved and slaughtered additional to the millions killed in the war itself in the swath of lands between Germany and Russia, encompassing principally Ukraine and Poland. Snyder has this lesson for Carlson:

“Sometimes Republicans use the phrase ‘blank check’ but the check isn’t blank. There’s a number on the check that we give to Ukraine, and it’s not a big number. It’s about 2 percent of our total defense budget, so really a rounding error. It’s about 5 percent of what we spend on the F-35 fighter program alone. And for that money… what Ukrainians have done is that they’ve put a major war in Europe beyond the horizon because they’re fighting it now. They’ve also improved our security around the world…made it much less likely that China will try something in Taiwan…So we’ve spent relatively little money and we’ve gotten frankly an embarrassing amount of security in return.”

You could say that David Frum, who writes for The Atlantic, is also embarrassed:

“President Zelenskyy came to say thank you and maybe he knows and maybe he doesn’t that one of the talking points of the MAGA-right, the anti-Ukraine faction in American politics, has been to criticize him as ungrateful, maybe even a little uppity, and to seize on details like his clothing to say that he’s not grateful enough so he expressed gratitude over and over again. I don’t know about others, as he did that, I felt a pang of something like shame, that the United States has given generously of money, generously of equipment, but in the end these are only things. Zelenskyy’s people are giving their lives. They are suffering through without heat, without light to defend their country…I think what we need to say is thank you to them. They’re shedding blood. They’re giving their sons, their daughters, they’re giving everything.”

Nicholas Kristof, who had just gone to Ukraine, expressed the realpolitik of why we should support Ukraine in a New York Times opinion piece:

“The fundamental misconception among many congressional Republicans (and some progressives on the left) is that we’re doing Ukraine a favor by sending it weapons. Not so. We are holding Ukraine’s coat as it is sacrificing lives and infrastructure in ways that benefit us, by degrading Russia’s military threat to NATO and Western Europe — and thus to us. ‘They’re doing us a favor; they’re fighting our fight,’ Wesley Clark, the retired American general and former supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe, told me. ‘The fight in Ukraine is a fight about the future of the international community.'”

This should be crystal clear to anyone who grasps our national interests. Put another way, anyone who argues the opposite is either irremedially obtuse or should register as an agent for Vladimir Putin. For example, Mr. Carlson, in closing out his rant, works himself into a frenzy with:

“So the leader of a foreign government dressed in a sweatshirt waltzes into the United States Congress and starts demanding money. And then has the gall to tell the people sitting there, who are giving him tens of billions of dollars more of your money, that it is not charity, it’s an investment. Really, what are the returns on that? And by the way, what’s the point of it? What is the goal here? What’s the justification for it? Do we have a historic debt to Ukraine? Do we have a historic animosity with a non-Soviet Russia? No, no. How do we win here? What’s in it for us? Isn’t this our country? And where do you [Zelenskyy] get off talking to us like that? Do we hate ourselves so much? Do we have so little respect for the United States of America that we put up with that, that we’ll applaud it? Thank you, sir. May I have another? What’s wrong with us? What’s wrong with our leaders? And where is this going?”

On Thursday, the 845-page final report of the January 6 committee was released. MSNBC immediately marshaled three of its crew of legal analysts — former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade, lead Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, and lead majority counsel of the first Trump impeachment Daniel Goldman – to rifle through the document the moment it hit, as well as to go through some of Cassidy Hutchinson’s
riveting testimony about candidate for disbarment Trump lawyer Stefan Passantino telling her, mob style, “We’re gonna get you a really good job in Trump world. You don’t need to apply to other places. We’re gonna get you taken care of” if you “keep your answers short, sweet, and simple, seven words or less.”

We didn’t bother listening to Fox this time. For sure its audience heard none of that. Maybe not even told there is now a monumental report now being printed on its way to the public. Maybe they were once again drumming into their viewers’ heads another favorite meme, that rioters weren’t to blame, that the security lapse that allowed the breach of the Capitol was Nancy Pelosi’s fault.

We’re Stuck in Grand Mal Myopia

Not the subject at first, but we’ll get to it.)

Barton Swaim is a sometime columnist at The Wall Street Journal. He writes longer pieces than the rest of the opinion crew and a week ago came up with a near 2,000 word piece titled, “Why the ‘Smart’ Party Never Learns”. Its premise is that “Democrats are increasingly the party of educated urban elites; the GOP belongs to the white working class” — nothing new to that — and worse, that Democrats and their Progressive cohort live in a bubble, a bubble so vast and prevalent that conservatives are enmeshed in it wherever they go.

They are captives of CNN at airports, they can’t go to “a concert by the local symphony orchestra” without first having “to listen to a four-minute lecture about systemic racism or climate change before the music starts”, and so forth. (Symphonies and travel so frequent that CNN gets on their nerves says Swaim’s working class is doing very well).

He then gets to his point that for fellow conservatives, there is no escape, because for them “There is no bubble, no silo, for such a person”.

Meanwhile…

Two days after Swaim’s essay appeared, Talking Points Memo (TPM) launched a week-long series that promised “the definitive, real-time record of a plot to overturn an American election”. The online publication had “obtained from multiple sources” all text messages from the personal cell phone and email accounts that Trump’s final Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had turned over at the end of last year to the January 6 House select committee. You may recall that in April reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa got hold of 29 email and text exchanges between Meadows and Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in which she fervidly implored Meadows to do everything in his power to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory and hand Donald Trump a second term as president.

But now, in filtering the trove of 2,319 messages, TPM had identified 34 members of Congress, all of them Republican, texting Meadows in the days after the 2020 election up to the assault on the Capitol and beyond with much the same messages as Ginni Thomas’s. “Fight until hell freezes over than [sic] fight them on the ice”, said one. “Mark, When we lose Trump we lose our Republic”, said another. A third wrote, “Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall [sic] Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO.” This last was sent 11 days after the insurrection.

The 34 sent a total of 364 emails to Meadows. Besieged with exhortations to overthrow the government, Meadows very much echoed them in the 95 responses he managed to send out.

Let that sink in: 34 Republican members of the Congress of the United States urged that the Constitution and the vote of the American people be cast aside in a coup d’état to keep Donald Trump in power. When January 6 arrived, the number was far larger: 147 Republican Congress members voted to reject the choice of voters in key states with the intent of substituting fraudulent slates of electors that had their states steal the votes from Biden and switch them to Trump.

blindered

Swaim’s claim that there is no bubble on the right manages to forget the enormous bubble (or “silos” or “echo chambers” or “information cocoons” that he lists) that we have been living in over the past several years in which some two-thirds of Republicans believe Trump’s contention that the 2020 election was stolen from him, compounded by the truly frightening percentage of them who have been beguiled by QAnon conspiracies that began with the belief that Democrats conduct child sex-trafficking rings. The latest: Trump confidant Roger Stone believes that a “demonic portal” opened above the White House when Biden moved in. He was responding to a question about belief in the supernatural posed by conservative radio host Eric Metaxas. Stone said he and others had actually seen it floating above the White House “swirling like a cauldron.”

No right-wing bubble, says Swaim. The question is how many?

Swaim’s bubble is that the left-liberal outlook has saturated the American culture. It is omnipresent “in corporate boardrooms, in government agencies, in sports and entertainment institutions, in K-12 education bureaucracies, in universities and in media organizations”. Swaim is irritated by…

“TV ads that subtly legitimize the latest sexual identity; the lefty sermonettes intoned at public events; the movies and sitcoms that virtually all accept trendy orthodoxies; the race-fixated version of American history promoted in public schools”

This pervasiveness has robbed especially the progressives of “any ability to criticize themselves or doubt their own righteousness”. It’s a valid argument with which we don’t disagree but our critique has been to deny him restricting “bubble” to mean only the cultural zeitgeist when “swirling” about us are the millions on the right who cling to zealous beliefs in alternate realities.

Swaim could claim that the text messages from the 34 Congress members are out of date, but the right-wing bubble, also spoken of as a cult, still exists in force. When Donald Trump just recently complained that articles of the Constitution that have proved vexatious for him should be “terminated”, one after another Republican in government affirmed devotion to the Constitution but could not bring themselves to criticize or even mention Trump. The few exceptions were those leaving office who got up their courage as they went out the door. And to bring up to date the 138 House members who voted for overthrow two years ago, what did Americans just do? Showing not the slightest misgivings about that criminal action, blind inside a Fox News/Newsmax/OAN bubble that next-to-never shows video of the Capitol assault, Republican voters sent just about all of these insurrectionists right back to Congress in the 2022 elections.

One of them, North Carolina representative Ted Budd, an avowed believer in the stolen election, Trump’s backing thus bestowed, was even promoted to senator. He had texted Meadows that there were links between Dominion Voting Systems and billionaire George Soros (false, but right-wing doctrine requires bringing Soros in on every plot).

Then there is the bubble in which Americans in the tens of millions live who came to distrust science and refuse life-saving vaccines, instead trusting fringe websites that tell them that COVID vaccines have killed more than they have saved. Early on, the documentary “Plandemic” spread conspiracies that undermined the use of vaccines and masks. In red states resistance became a belligerent insistence that yielding to vaccine and mask mandates was an infringement of their constitutional rights of individual freedom. Choosing to fight a killer virus with the Constitution is an idiocy that has cost several hundreds of thousands of the more than one million Americans who have died from COVID. A significant percentage of the population still refuse to be vaccinated, with rates along the southernmost belt of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana hovering at about 50% as do rates in other rural states such as Wyoming. And now one learns that paranoia of government and public health mandates is fuelling a movement to abandon all vaccines — decades of their huge suppression of childhood illnesses jettisoned – a movement that promises the return of polio, whooping cough, chicken pox, mumps, and Rubella (measles). How is the rebellion against health science not a bubble, Mr. Swaim?

In a bid to win over the base that holds these suspicions, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is now making a show of investigating vaccines. He personally doesn’t believe this – you can see video montages of him extolling the vaccines and urging everyone to be inoculated in the early days of the pandemic – but now he is making an irresponsible play to the Trump “base”, and at a time when the coronavirus is again gaining a winter foothold. On the right he is celebrated for getting COVID policy right, for defiantly “opening” Florida – the schools, public gatherings – which skirts the fact that nestled among all the Deep South states that have the worst COVID death counts per capita is Florida at #12. Whereas reviled by conservatives is California at #40.

Dinesh d’Souza’s film “2000 Mules” became for a large subset of the stop the steal adherents proof that the 2020 election was won by fraud. The film was based on analysis of cell phone data that identified some 2,000 phones that had passed by drop boxes in battleground states too many times for them to be – in an Olympic jump to conclusion — anything other than “mules” dropping off phony ballots, all of which must of course be for Biden. That belief requires its companion that someone out there had enlisted 2,000 people – a “mule” is a drug deliverer — to stuff those fraudulent ballots, yet to our knowledge not one of them has come forward to reveal the plot. But the conspiracy bubble lives on.

Finally, at week’s end, we were treated to Citizen Trump’s “Major Announcement”, his NFT (non-fungible token) series of “digital” trading cards he introduced in an unimaginably Brobdingnagian display of narcissism. Like a pitchman on the old QVC shopping channel, he offered for $99 each (“which doesn’t sound like very much for what you’re getting”) artist renderings of “hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington”, slimmed down as an astronaut, out-west marshall, jet pilot, Nascar racer, action-film super hero, and of course an addition to Mt. Rushmore. These themes somehow “pertain to my life and my career”, he says, secret lives we never knew about.

It was too much embarrassment even for Steve Bannon (“I can’t watch it again. Make it stop”) and one-time general Mike Flynn (“Whoever advised him on that, I’d fire him immediately”), but for our purpose here it is proof of the ultimate bubble, those who go on idolizing Trump. The entire limited collection of 45,000 cards sold out in a single day, according to OpenSea Data, which tracks the NFT market, which would come to almost $4.5 million. The New York grifter turned carnival barker was once again fleecing his own supporters.

Dec 17 2022 | Posted in Culture War | Read More »

Is the U.S. Military Ready for War? Not by a Long Shot.

It is a world that bristles with hostiles — China, Russia, Iran, North Korea — any of which could trigger war. Yet the consensus is that the U.S. military is, on many counts, vastly unprepared.

Actually, that consensus comes principally from analysts at conservative think tanks, many of them former military, who report their findings in the conservative media, in keeping with the right’s long-standing doctrine that America must maintain a military without peer if we are to retain power in the world.

The subject of deficiencies in our military hardly gets a mention in liberal media, at least over the past year and a half reviewed here. There, attention to the military tends to budgetary politics and the progressive element’s lobbying to divert spending on defense so as to fund domestic social programs.

Now running to over $800 billion a year, the defense budget seems gargantuan, but the prime measure is priorities — what the nation should be able to afford for defense as a percentage of its gross domestic product.


The chart shows the steady decline of defense outlays relative to GDP. Defense spending reached a postwar high of 9.1% in 1968 but never fell below 4.5% even in the 1970s, reaching a high of 6% in 1986 at the height of the Reagan buildup that helped win the
The U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman departs with its strike group toward the Middle East from Naval Station Norfolk, Va., April 11, 2018, with sailors lining the deck.

Cold War. As seen, it is currently about 3.3% of GDP.

That has consequences. The Heritage Foundation recently rated the U.S. military as “weak” in its annual index of military strength, the first such rating in the index’s nine year existence. Its criterion is whether our military would prevail in two conflicts at once.

at sea

The Navy and Air Force are the most-cited as besieged with problems. A war with China would be a naval war, and the United States Navy is not at all ready. We have a navy that has half the number of ships as during the Cold War but is expected to be on station around the world at the same mission pace. The Navy has said for years that to be capable of defeating peer adversaries like China, it must have 350 ships and another 150 unmanned or lightly manned vessels for a total of 500.

But in the 15 years up to the end of the Trump administration, the U.S. fleet grew from 291 war ships to a meager 296. During the same period, China’s navy grew to 360 from 216. Naval old hands are quick to point out that much of China’s navy consists of small patrol boats, no match for the U.S. Navy’s fire power. True, but China is upgrading rapidly.

Former President Trump promised a 355-ship navy when campaigning in 2016, a promise quickly forgotten. Instead, procurement averaged eight ships a year during his term, which is only the replacement rate for the 30-35 year expected life of the Navy’s ships.

Prospects under Biden so far appear to be worse. Biden administration projects that it will only reach the required battle force inventory of 355 ships by 2043. The Navy’s 2023 budget asks to purchase nine ships while retiring 24 under a program they call “divest to invest”. Among the mothballing are five cruisers that each pack more than 120 missile tubes—serious offensive firepower—arguing that the 30-plus-year-old ships are so rundown they’re unsafe.

The estimated $3.6 billion saved over five years from not operating 24 older ships, a fraction of the service’s budget, would pay for only two-three ships of the future. And so, we will gamble with the vulnerability of still fewer ships in the meanwhile.

Some of the 24 due for retirement may be nine littoral ships that the Navy had built. They were designed to operate in shallow waters wherever on the globe they had in mind years ago when that need was perceived. Two ships experienced major propulsion problems with their engines which “rendered both ships inoperable,” said the Government Accountability Office. A Wall Street Journal editorial this past April called the nine…

“[T]he service’s biggest acquisition failure of all time in a crowded field. As usual with these Pentagon disasters, the admirals and civilians responsible have long since left the building.”

The Navy plans to build 15 Constellation-class guided-missile frigates by 2026 to be supported by unmanned ships and perhaps a modified littoral combat ship. The only contract so far for their construction went to the shipyard that built the littoral ships — at a rate of one a year. But the frigates are twice as large. How, then, 15 in four years?

These flotillas are intended for deployment close to the First Island Chain, within the range of China’s arsenal of land-air-sea-based missiles intended to deny U.S. forces access to the region. That strategy seems oblivious to the area-access-denial weapons China has developed to keep adversaries away from its shores.

under water

The U.S. has an unmatched submarine fleet with 49 nuclear-powered boats as well as four guided-missile subs each stuffed with 154 cruise missiles. But maintenance delays add problematically to the 10% of the fleet expected to be offline at a given moment, with the result that the fleet has been running eight boats short of desired strength.

Submarines would be key in any active participation in defense of Taiwan for their ability to sink ships ferrying men and materiel that the Chinese would count on to supply the island’s invasion. A bonus favoring subs is that the Chinese have a perceived lack of aerial anti-submarine capability.

China has an abundance of shipyards for production and maintenance. American shipyards are few and unable to keep up with the maintenance demands of the current ship roster. Our yards can deliver only three subs every two years. In spite of this, the Navy is retiring two of its older worn Los Angeles class boats every year. That combines for a net loss of one submarine every two years, so the fleet — already three-fifths of what is thought advisable — is shrinking.

grounded

It’s worse in the Air Force, which gets a “very weak” rating in the Heritage study. Aging “aircraft and very poor pilot training and retention” have produced an Air Force that “would struggle greatly against a peer competitor”, the report says. The Air Force “is now the smallest, oldest, and least ready it has ever been in its 75-year history”, agrees the Air Force Association. Fighter and bomber forces are 40% what they were in the 1980s. The U.S. is down to approximately 2,000 fighters, half the number of 1990, and their average age is now 29 compared to 11.5 then. Aging leads to low mission-capable rates. Only 50% of the F-22 fleet, for example, is air worthy, largely for need of replacement parts, some taking 24 to 36 months, says Heritage. The Air Force has “abandoned even the illusion” of attaining 80% aircraft readiness.

An engineering marvel without parallel although “notoriously buggy” with 8 million lines of computer code, the F-35 fighter program has been deemed a failure not least for costing $400 billion so far. That overlooks that nine U.S. allies are flying 650 F-35s; that the cost is now down to a more tolerable $80 million a copy; and that the plane is needed to control the skies against a sophisticated opponent such as China. And yet, the Pentagon has cut its buy of F-35s to 33 a year compared to 48 in previous years.

As for bombers, several programs have failed to deliver but the U.S. has just debuted the
B-21 stealth bomber

first copy of the stealth B-21 “Raider”, tail number 0001, after seven years of development. Meantime, in the years it will take to produce a fleet, we will be flying 76 highly vulnerable B-52s until at least 2050 when the eight-engine behemoths will be almost 90 years old.

Flying is costly — $17,000 to $23,000 for an hour in an F-35, e.g. “It’s like your Ferrari. You don’t drive your Ferrari to work every day. You only drive it on Sundays”, quipped Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Brown last year. Budget constraints for years and now the squeeze of inflation have resulted in pilots not getting enough flight time. The goal is 200 hours a year but our pilots are in the air “well below what is required to maintain high levels of proficiency”, the Air Force told Congress. Our fighter pilots flew on average only 10 hours a month in 2021, that’s 120 for the year. Based on what data is available, Chinese fighter pilots appear to be flying 150 hours a year.

unfit

The Army has come up 25% short of its recruitment goal with a 20,000 soldier hole in the ranks. For reasons that include obesity, addiction, and criminal history, the services turn away more than three-quarters of applicants as unfit to serve. And in our volunteer military, that’s from a pool of only 1 in 10 Americans ages 17 to 24 that a poll says are willing to serve. Easier to thank someone else for their service.

Covid-19 vaccine refusal — an insubordination unheard of in the conscription years — has led to several thousand service members separated from the service and a consideration that the requirement might need to be relaxed somewhat. Word making the rounds of sailors stuck on drydocked ships never seeing sea duty and pilots grounded for lack of funds to take their planes aloft have led to only 62% in a Military Family Advisory Network survey saying they’d encourage someone to sign up, down from 74.5% in 2019 just three years ago. A Journal editorial makes the point that, “This is an ominous trend given the importance of family military legacies”.

ammo

At the outbreak of World War II, U.S. industry was able to convert to weapon production at astonishing speed. But weapons were simpler then. At peak production 16 B-17 bombers per day rolled off the assembly line at a single plant in Washington state.

Weapons today are far more complex, and the Ukraine War has raised awareness that our peacetime defense industry would be slow to ramp up. Some missiles such as the Patriot Advanced Capability missile defense system or the Tomahawk V cruise missile take roughly two years to resume production. Other weapons need rare earth materials for which China holds a near monopoly, or rely on only a single source such as the Javelin anti-tank missile’s rocket motor. Others need microelectronics and semiconductor chips assembled half the world away.

Assistance to Ukraine has depleted U.S. stocks of Stinger surface-to-air missile systems, M777 howitzers, 155mm ammunition, and Javelins. Production lines are at their limits.

An unlimited inventory of weapons would not be of use without munitions. To close on a chilling note, if the above is not chilling enough, the Center for Strategic and International Studies war games the hypothetical U.S.-China battle in the Taiwan Strait. In some two dozen iterations, the U.S. expended all its joint air-to-surface standoff missiles and long-range precision-guided anti-ship missiles. How long before they ran out? A week.