I am especially concerned that the Secretary of Defense didn’t know which way the “armada” was sailing. Was Mad Dog Mattis hitting the bottle? Does anyone in this administration have a clue?
When the US sends a carrier to a region in response to a crisis it is a big deal. It will generate headlines through the region and that is the whole point. To claim that you are sending a carrier which is in fact thousands of miles away is a truly astonishing display of incompetence.
The problem seems to have occurred in the Pentagon (from the NYTimes article) :
Here is what Mattis saidlast week:
I don’t know if this is what the Times refers to as the “partially erroneous explanation” but what Mattis said seems to have been flat out wrong. I am not sure how this is even possible. Did Mattis just make an off-the-cuff statement about an incredibly important and sensitive issue without checking with his staff? It is truly astonishing.
Just incredible incompetence, whether in relaying or verifying information. It shows that not even presumably capable people like Mattis are incapable of blunders when within a culture of incompetence.
Usually when something dumb like this happens it’s a matter of people being pressured to say something right now. That’s true whether it’s the Trump administration, some local official, or a CEO or celebrity. They don’t want to look like they don’t have an immediate answer so they wing it. Sometimes that works, often it doesn’t.
The combination of policy-by-random-tweet and the inability of the staff to stay ahead of the braying media make this failure all the more common in the current administration. And that’s before we apply any discount for staff incompetence vs. just staff bandwidth limits.
My point is not to excuse Trump *et al *for this screw-up. But to point out that
A) It’s a common type of spokesman error, not something novel.
AND
B) It’s fundamental mistake in messaging to have so many people directly interfacing with the public & media. Stuff like this should come from the DoD PR office. Everybody else should refer inquiries to them. Silence and “no comment” are golden. In the era of everybody’s-a-social-media-celebrity touting their own brand this is a forlorn hope.
AND
C) We’re going to see a lot of this until / unless the Tweeter-in-Chief and his immediate henchmen lay off the keyboard.
Whoa. What? So your position is that Trump has shown an ability to find good people - but he’s had to already fire his National Security Advisor and slightly demote his chief strategist? And he still has Betsy DeVos, and Jeff Sessions and Ben Carson in his cabinet, right?
I’m glad H.R. McMaster and James Mattis (and your assessment of Mattis is a debatable one, but I’ll just concede that for now) are smart guys, but two guys out of more than a dozen appointments - one of whom, I must again point out, wasn’t Trump’s first pick - actually isn’t a good record. How does his Cabinet compare to other Presidents? Because, frankly, it looks quite bad by comparison from what I can see.
I realize the blithering idiocy of DeVos and Carson aren’t immediately connected to this issue, of course. But the evidence of Trump showing an ability to find good people is in fact dubious at best, when you only have two examples, one being the backup goalie brought in after one Trump wanted gave up goals on the first three shots of the game.
So, as a result of this:
- We either lied to the S. Koreans, making it more difficult for our allies to trust us in the future,
or
- We lost a carrier group during an international crisis, making it more difficult for our allies to trust us in the future.
That about sums this up?
ETA: There’s a third:
- The military has gone rogue and is lying to the White House, making it more difficult for our allies to trust us in the future.
You missed number 4:
- Nobody was lying as such; they just spouted off with no idea what the truth was nor any concern about whether what they said *was *the truth. Thereby making it more difficult for our allies to trust us in the future.
In all this abject failure in PR was a huge own goal. Probably the 4th or 6th so far in this accident-prone administration.
A single misstatement by one spokesperson that is quickly corrected is not a big deal. But this is another case of the administration propagating a false narrative of “alternative facts” for more than a week. The correction only came when the press discovered the military wasn’t where the Trump administration said it was.
It’s baffling how they could be so incompetent to accidentally get this wrong or so stupid to think they could get away with this. You can imagine the confusion if we were actually at war.
Well, if the USA was planning on going to war with Australia, things were in place.
Well, the 2017 America’s Cup races start in a little over a month. Maybe we were positioning ships in case the Kiwis had a faster boat.
Too bad the race is going to be off Bermuda.
Slightly above average is pretty weak praise. For example, I would also say that he would be of below average intelligence among Straight Dope members, and likely has a lower IQ than any of the people he has around him. But the guy did go to an Ivy League school, and did manage to get a degree from Wharton. That puts him slightly above average, but that is not really saying much. George W. Bush probably has a significantly higher IQ than Trump, and Bill Clinton and Obama significantly higher than that.
My reading of Trump isn’t that intelligence is his main problem. His numerous character flaws are what really get him into trouble. Ego, bulling tendencies, thin skin, a lack of curiousity about the world, obvious lack of reading that isn’t just partisan blog crap, etc. He’s not stupid - he’s uneducated, and too arrogant to know what he doesn’t know. Even smart people like Obama suffer from that problem.
At least they can probably get from near Indonesia to near Bermuda if they start soon enough. And if the orders don’t get garbled because there’s ketchup on the form where the lat/long of the destination goes.
Fair enough. I understand your point, but to me a lack of curiosity, lack of knowledge and an ego that keeps your from learning is a factor in your intellect. This simply may be a question of definitions. 
We’re apparently deploying some additional THAAD components to the Korean Peninsula: U.S. says strategy on North Korea centers on sanctions, open to talks | Reuters
And there’s apparently a big meeting tomorrow with the entire Senate?
Yup, and the USS Michigan was just in port in South Korea.
If only there was a major US Naval Air base that was located 500 miles away from the capital of N Korea.
Interesting news. But being in port is probably the *least *tactically effective possible location for an SSGN.
Can you say “PR for the rubes”?
Update: it was apparently nothing special.
D#200,
“US President Donald Trump’s new organization making sense of how to manage North Korea’s pioneer, Kim Jong In”
Nope, just typical Trump - a big show with no content.
Crane