JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: RUSSIA'S ANTI-SHIP MISSILES AND AIRCRAFT CARRIERS - THINGS HAVE INDEED CHANGED BUT SINKING AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER OUTSIDE OF A LARGER WAR WOULD ONLY START A WAR - AMERICA'S PROBLEM IS UNEQUALED CORRUPTION AND ARROGANCE - BUT EVENTS ARE CATCHING-UP - THEN WE'LL SEE AIRCRAFT CARRIERS START TO DISAPPEAR

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY DMITRY ORLOVE IN RUSSIA INSIDER



“Russian Missile Tech has Made America's Trillion Dollar Navy Obsolete

“Times have changed and America can no longer project its military power like it did in Iraq. Those days are over.”



Good piece, and I agree with much of its logic.

But when it comes to the headline, I completely disagree: "Russian Missile Tech has Made America's Trillion Dollar Navy Obsolete"

Yes, that would be true to a great degree in actual conditions of war. The "flattops" would be going down like Manhattan buildings during 9/11.

But we are not at war, and even the US is not keen to start one with Russia, as we saw with the (extremely careful) missile attack in Syria.

Sink a "flattop," however, with its crew of five thousand or so, and you start a war, a war presumably Russia has no interest in starting. Any such war today could quickly escalate to the use of nuclear weapons. After all, the United States has not only actually used such weapons, it has planned or threatened to use them a number of times. Against North Korea. Against North Vietnam. Against Russia and China in the 1950s and again in the 1960s.

A well-known national political figure such as Hillary Clinton thought nothing of frantically shrieking, on camera, about obliterating Iran – a county of maybe 80 million – in recent years. Of course, she was working to pump up more campaign funds from the Israel Lobby, but what a level in politics to have reached, screaming about obliterating whole countries.

The author's analysis of the historical use of navies in the modern era is accurate.

What is going to destroy the flattops, and a whole lot else in contemporary America, is its outrageously out-of-control management of resources. The United States is run today by politicians and the institutional forces of the Deep State in a manner resembling the proverbial drunken sailors on leave.

It spends horrific amounts of money it does not have. It’s new flattops and everything else it commissions are paid with borrowing. The attitude here – “I want it all and I want it now!” has been a feature of American society at least since WWII.

Only today, it moves at “warp speed.” Vast new weapons system, all of them costly to run and maintain, a galaxy of costly-to-maintain overseas bases, and high-tech gear for every soldier. Just each helmet for an F-35 fighter plane costs a year’s wages or more for a middle-class American, and all of the supposedly marvelous stealth planes are unbelievably costly to service and maintain. My God, B-2 bombers must have their own air-conditioned hangers wherever they are located, and they consume many hours and millions of dollars in maintenance for every single hour in the air. Truly, drunken-sailor spending.

Did you know that during some of America’s wars in the Middle East, they supply troops with air-conditioned tents on the dessert? I read one item some years ago that the United States had spent 20 billion dollars on just doing that. Well, you can just imagine supplying all the gear and electricity-generation out in the middle of nowhere, on a desert. The stuff of hallucinations, surely.

And America now has 17 different national security agencies, all staffed with high-price personal who are equipped with the highest-cost equipment. America boasts a security service system which makes the old East German Stasi resemble amateurs. America spends countless billions – again, which it does not have – to know everything about the private lives of its own citizens as well as about people abroad.

America’s new NSA centers, alone, cost billions to build and billions more to keep running well, packed as they are with super hi-tech equipment and with bright minds expecting rewards commensurate with what they could command in Silicon Valley.

Of course, in the mad spending rush, we have immense waste, too. Isn’t that how it always is with profligate, gambling-casino spending? So, we have the costly jokes of many of America’s new ships which do not operate well and planes like the F-35, a plane which operates impressively when all conditions are just right and none of its costly equipment is “on the fritz,” as it so often is.

And just so with many of America’s “advanced” weapons, especially several types of the Navy’s latest fighting ships, which at times when they are running – the Zumwalt 4 billion-dollar destroyer or the new Littoral Combat ships or new super-flattops like the Gerald Ford which cost 13 billion dollars plus 5 billion is development - resemble a Monty Python comedy skit with break-downs and embarrassment.

The attitudes required for such insane spending now permeate deeply into American society. The Congress can no more balance a budget than it can say “no” to money from big lobby groups. The financial rules for Congress are absurd and should have been totally changed years, especially with regard to individual member’s campaign-financing costs and the practices permitted for lobby groups, which in Washington function like a chain of high-cost call girl rings. You cannot expect good laws or oversight from such people, and, of course, you don’t get them, at all.

The State Department equivalent of all this is the unremitting attitude of entitlement and arrogance in everything it touches. You can see it in the smug faces of the very people in recent years acting as its spokespeople. Truly, faces communicating an almost unbelievable sense of entitlement and arrogance.

Again, the State Department is something costly to maintain along with its twisted half-brother, the CIA (who are stationed in every embassy under State Department identity), dishing out millions here and billions there in subsidies, in rewards, in pay-offs, in incentives, and in bribes, year after year. Virtually every international organization has been compromised or suppressed in the process. And, of course, when you effectively lift the controls or oversight, you open things up to an even greater avalanche of corrupt spending with foreign states.

The attitude sinks down into the general society, too, and into the financial system serving them and business. That’s precisely why the United States gave the world its 2008 financial crisis, and that’s why it will give the world another financial crisis before too long.

It is this mountain of excess and waste and terrible management that will sink the flattops and a whole lot more in the Pentagon’s outrageous seven-hundred-billion-dollar budget, more than the rest of the planet spends on military.

A very wise man summed it up perfectly many years ago, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

America today is close to absolute corruption, and I think all of its institutions are far too weak and buried in the same mire to do anything about it.