Monthly Archives: September 2017

No Surprise

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Howard Kurtz was on the right track when he wrote that Republicans shouldn’t be surprised that President Donald Trump cut a deal with Congress’ Progressive-Democratic Party* leadership regarding our debt ceiling and financial aid for Harvey and Irma victims.

However, Kurtz’ laying the blame on House Speaker Paul Ryan (R, WI) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) is misplaced, though.  Ryan did get one Obamacare compromise repeal passed in the House.  McConnell did get 49 out of his 52 Senators to vote for that bill.  It’s the rank and file—the party as a whole—who are failing their duty.

The question of whether the Trump deal is good or bad in its own right also is irrelevant.

Trump has been saying since the Republicans collectively chose the first time to perpetuate Obamacare rather than pass a compromise, however flawed but that would have been an important first step toward remove and replace that he would have to work with the other party.

Since that initial failure, since that initial betrayal of each Congressman’s home district constituents (and yes, that includes Senators, whose home district is statewide) and of their not-too-distant secondary constituents, all of us Americans, those Republicans have continued to choose to inflict Obamacare on us rather than pass successive efforts at compromise toward remove and replace.  They have quibbled with each other over budgets, spending, and on and on, rather than passing Conservative budgets, spending bills, and on and on.  In the Senate, the Republicans won’t even take action on a House-passed bill that would rescind a destructive CFPB regulation.

Republicans still have no plan for removing and replacing Obamacare.  They still have no plan for reforming our mendaciously byzantine tax code.  In fact, here, they’re behaving even more shamefully: instead of acting on their own initiative, they’re meekly pleading for Trump’s tax reform plan details.

Since the Republicans in Congress have chosen not to act for the good of their constituents—either set of them—instead preferring to engage in the personal ego boost of virtue signaling, or preferring to wait to be told what to do, Trump had to act on his threat.

No, his deal with the Progressive-Democrats is no surprise.  Who else is he going to work with, since the Republicans won’t work?

 

*My term, not Kurtz’, which I use because there’s no daylight between today’s “Democrats” and the Progressive beginnings of Herb Croly, TRoosevelt, Woodrow Wilson.  Even today’s party bigwigs brag about being Progressives.

Willful Ignorance

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Senator Diane Feinstein (D, CA) wrote a letter to the editor of USA Today that’s breathtaking in the sweep of its ignorance.

Should the United States adopt a policy of no first use, making clear to the world that our country will never launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike? The answer is yes.

The answer is, of course, No.  She began that question with a false premise.  No first use is not limited to a preemptive nuclear strike.  It simply means no first use.  We engaged in first use when we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki (apart from the narrow tautology that we were the only nation with nuclear weapons), and contra Feinstein’s disparagement of the use and its casualties, that use ended the war, saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of American, Allied, and Japanese soldiers and the lives of millions of Japanese civilians.

That question contains a second false premise: that preemption is necessarily bad.  Not at all.  When the enemy has demonstrated his irrevocable intent to attack, preemption is a moral imperative.  If the only means available to fruitful preemption is nuclear-armed missiles, they must be employed.

Committing to a policy of no first use would help keep us safe by minimizing the very real risk that a foreign power—like North Korea—might misinterpret a benign rocket launch or a non-nuclear military action….

This is just nonsense.  With modern sensing and communications capabilities—even that possessed by northern Korea, misinterpretation is not going to occur.  Action might well be deliberately misinterpreted, but that’s independent of anything we might do.

Beyond that, first use, especially of tactical nuclear weapons, may be the only way to prevent a conventional war defeat, which defeat would be every bit as devastating to our national security, even our independence.

There’s no such thing as a limited nuclear war….

Of course there is, and the Soviet Union actively trained for it.  Today, Russia and the People’s Republic of China are actively training for it.

RTWT—it’s not that long.  Which makes the breadth of ignorance such an accomplishment.

Hypocrisy

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Planned Parenthood has it.  On the matter of DACA and President Donald Trump giving Congress six months to fix the thing—including codifying its current structure in law, but do the law, not Executive Order—Planned Parenthood, through its CEO Cecile Richards had this to say:

Here at Planned Parenthood, we firmly believe that every person has the right to live, work, and raise a family freely and without the threat of deportation or separation[.]

Every person but babies, apparently.  Far too often, they’re just inconveniences to be aborted and either thrown away or their body parts peddled to…researchers.  These inconvenient babies are not to be permitted to live, work, and raise a family freely.

Not Current

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It turns out that most of the 7th Fleet ships were not—are not—current on their training.  In my old USAF parlance, that would render them non-OR—not operationally ready, not capable of doing their wartime mission.

As of late June, eight of the 11 cruisers and destroyers in the Seventh Fleet, and their crew members, weren’t certified by the US Navy to conduct “mobility seamanship,” or basic steering of the ship….

“And their crewmembers.”  That means, to me, that not only were the crewmen individually not positionally qualified, they weren’t qualified as the ship’s unified crew—the ships were not qualified.  Not operationally capable.

The Navy also said that seven of those ships had expired training certification in the areas of cruise missile defense and surface warfare, which test a crew’s ability to defend a ship or to conduct attacks.

That’s a cynically euphemistic way of saying those ships—63% of the cruisers and destroyers—were not capable of carrying out their wartime tasks or missions.  This is appalling.

It is unclear what role the lack of proper certification played in the collisions, and Pentagon investigations are under way both into the collisions and into larger questions of naval operations.

What it means is that the crews were not current in their training in these things.  What it means is that the crews were not capable of performing those tasks.  It’s likely that most of the individual crewmen knew their specific tasks (the old heads, anyway, maybe not the new accessions), but the lack of certification—the lack of being Operationally Ready—meant they had not practiced their tasks recently, more importantly, had not practiced in concert with their fellow crewmen in their respective departments or across departments, and most importantly, had not been evaluated by independent examiners on their ability to perform.

The crews were not capable of coordinated action in the stress of a crisis.

And that’s on each ship’s commander, on his Training and Standard/Evaluation (or the Navy’s equivalent independent testing section) Officers, and it’s on the 7th Fleet’s commander and his Fleet Training and Stan/Eval Officers for not enforcing the requirements down to the individual ship level.

It doesn’t end there.  This is a failure of the entire chain of command and adjacent staff chain—the quintessential REMFs, which folks here earn for the staff the MF part of the acronym.  The commander and training and stan/eval officers of the United States Pacific Fleet, which owns the 7th Fleet, should be required to explain, publicly, why they allowed this to happen, and their jobs, their continuance in the Navy, should be at peril of their own failure to perform.  Nor should it stop there.  The Chief of Naval Operations and his staff are responsible, among other things, for the training of Naval personnel and units, and so they are responsible for not pressuring the chain of command.  These Pentagon wonders also should be called to account at peril of their continuance in the Navy.

These ships are not toys for imitation officers to play with; they’re necessary—and expensive—instruments of national security.  Every Pilot in Command, whether Navy, USAF, Army, or Marine, is fully aware of the importance of his jet or helicopter or prop-driven cargo aircraft every time he straps it on to go fly a mission.  There’s no excuse for a ship commander not constantly carrying the same understanding.

It would be interesting, did the White House, certain Congressional committees, SecDef and SecNav have the political courage to publish, for us to be able to see the correspondence exchanges among CNO/staff, USPACFLT commander and staff, the 7th Fleet commander and staff, and the ship commanders and staff regarding the status of training, why the status was that way, what the respective higher ups were doing about those statuses—and whether the correspondence even exists.

Nor is this the fault of President Barack Obama’s (D) sequester agreement with Congress.  Effective training can be carried out with existing resources, given only two things: a threshold resource level sufficient to sail and remain at sea, and commanders, training officers, and stan/eval officers with the imagination, initiative, and level of interest in their duties needed to develop and carry out training programs and exercises.

I’ll close this with a thought and a couple of questions.

A great man once said, In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice.  In practice, there is.

It’s critical to train like you’ll fight, for you will fight exactly as you’ve trained.  (I have to ask the ship commanders in particular: “Do you expect to throw your human relations training slides at the PLA Navy?”)

Along those lines, a question for the 7th Fleet and USPACFLT commanders: “How do you expect your ships in a flotilla or task force to maneuver under fire without colliding with each other if your ships can’t even maneuver in a peacetime, if busy, strait or harbor approach?”

Another Bit of Foolishness

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And another incentive for businesses to relocate.

San Francisco is looking to tax robots because they are taking rote jobs that humans do.  They’re not the first to consider such a thing, but it’s still foolish.  Never mind, especially with minimum wage laws pricing the unskilled and/or poorly educated out of work, that robots do the jobs more cheaply.  Robots are more reliable, too, as Security guard Eric Leon noted about a security robot:

He doesn’t complain.  He’s quiet.  No lunch break.  He’s starting exactly at 10.

The robot also doesn’t take sick leave or parental leave or any of the other labor froo-froo that San Francisco has mandated, regardless of what an employer and employee might work out between themselves without Know Betters’ dubious help.

If a business is going to be prevented from lowering its cost of doing business, it has little incentive to stay put.  And human consumers, facing artificially elevated prices, aren’t helped a whit.