Pfft. Get with the times. I read WWIII novels exclusively. And I’m starting to explore the canon of WWIV cave paintings.
I have the same problem when talking about the State Department, where I held a TS clearance both on active duty and as a direct hire. That’s been over 30 years ago now, and I’m sure that most everything I ever saw, read or did is now obsolete or declassified, but there is no way to tell.
May I ask why you bailed before retirement?
I was retired. Medically retired.
This thread has been really helpful to me as well. I’ve followed the news about the Lincoln, but the toll of 9 months asea and combat operations wasn’t clear to me until this thread. Thanks for that.
I’m such a nerd. My first thought on reading this was “rush swordman and don’t mess with Ghandi once he has nukes”.
Ah, okay. Didn’t mean to pry; it just seemed like you were six years from calling it a day and suddenly bailed. I can understand that; at ten years, I was ready to call it quits, but the bastards promoted me.
Never Again Volunteer Yourself.
“Gandhi”. You can remember it because he’s friendly, so he says “hi”.
Perfectly fine. I blog about it regularly (or at least I did, until I started the blog post on Iraq) and even under my own name until very recently (what can I say? I don’t know want to test first amendment protections as they apply to retired service members?).
What I see is a lot of people qualifying their statements and trying to piece together the facts from the hints and scraps that are available to them. And when the government is lying to us, and the oligarchs are buying up all the media outlets we used to trust, then that is what responsible citizens do.
If this clusterf*** is what passes for normal on Navy ships for the past ten or more years, then that is not acceptable, and I’m glad we have finally found out. I don’t give a rip who is president while it happens, it shouldn’t be happening. The level of taxation that Americans bear in order to support our bloated military is supposed at least to feed our troops. We deserve competent leadership and the certainty that if our sons and daughter join the DoD, any deaths will be caused by enemy fire, not by some dumb@ss deciding that driving them to suicide is OK if we’ve pretty much always done it.
So whether you like it or not, I’m going to continue to find information anywhere I can get it. I’m going to share and compare, and try to find the average of the propaganda within which the truth likely lies.
And I’m going to continue to bring those guesses and scraps to a place where my friends will fight my ignorance when I’m wrong. Because that is what I count on the people here to do. If I wanted to be right all the time I would go spout down the tubes of a likeminded silo. I. would. not. be. here.
But what is not useful is some dickwad spouting that he knows better, but won’t say anything, but he’s the incredible “no” man who cannot be questioned and decides what is and isn’t cool to try and figure out. But everyone else is wrong and has no right to be so, especially if it embarasses his political God figure.
My bolding
Very well said, but you give these idiots more credit than they deserve. They aren’t even spending five minutes thinking, it’s a few seconds at most.
Yup, it’s all that simple and the only reason it hasn’t been done is no one realized it’s a carrier!! If only someone had thought of that!!!
It’s not limited to military matters, of course. People will read an article on Asia, for example, and tell me how wrong I am or question as to why living here or being involved with Asia for more than 40 years wouldn’t give me a little more insight than someone who has googled one article that sort of supports their preconceived notions.
Fine words, but this right here makes you a fucking dumbass:
The problem with that is that you seem to err on the side of the propaganda when the people with the knowledge and experience to know the difference tell you otherwise. This is demonstrated by the fact that you seem to think it’s politically motivated. Having a security clearance and being cognizant of its ramifications is wise and responsible, not political and certainly not an indicator of deception.
To be clear, I think it would be horribly inefficient to supply a carrier entirely by plane. But militaries do sometimes do horribly inefficient things, if that’s the only option available to them. Like the British flying bombing raids all the way from Britain the the Falklands, by using a dozen tankers refueling other tankers for each bomber that made the full raid. If you have better alternatives, you use those, but if you don’t have the better alternatives, you don’t whine about not being able to do anything, you do the inefficient thing that still gets the job done.
In this case, I think that the US Navy really could have done the efficient thing, of keeping the fleet properly supplied by ship. But they complained that that was impossible, and therefore they were completely absolved of their responsibilities. Bullshit.
One would think that a navy, especially the US navy, could resupply while at sea. Seems a key ability to have a blue water navy. Kinda seems like navy-101 to me.
I am no expert though so will leave it to the others here who are navy veterans tell us if that is unreasonable.
This appears to be what they’re doing via supply ships, at least according to those vets.
The complication is apparently the local bases that supply the supply ships themselves are not fully operational due to attacks (something civil leadership maybe coulda/woulda/shoulda thought about) so they have to come in from a long way away instead of nearby, which limits the types of supplies to essentials first and relative ‘luxuries’ like spoilable foods or personal hygiene products much lower in priority.
Right. And you know this how? And not having enough Spam is the only problem, right?
If only the entire Department of Defense had your expertise, this wouldn’t have been an issue.
If only we had thought about resupplying the ship.
This reminds me of the joke that the good news is that there are people who know how to solve all the world’s problems, but the bad news is that they are too busy driving cabs.
In World War II, we had the capability to ship a chocolate cake, still fresh, across the Atlantic, to troops on the front line. Yes, it’s hard, but we could do it.
If they had my expertise, we’d be screwed, because I don’t know how to handle military logistics. But they don’t have my expertise. They have the best logistics experts in the world. Even though I don’t know how to do it, those guys do. Not having the expertise isn’t the problem. The problem is that the experts weren’t allowed to do their thing.
And your evidence for that is what, exactly?
I know, it a bitch because if they only realized that because of completely irrelevant (stuff) this should be easy.
Tell me again how carriers work! TIL that planes land on them!! I’ve never figured out if ships do better in the water or the freeway. Maybe you could educate me and the Navy.
Or maybe it’s actually a complex situation and a lot of people here don’t have a fucking clue what they are talking about.
Cite