Military

When I joined the Navy, I was an idealistic young man who joined for patriotism, and not college money. It was a time when so many were joining because they wanted the GI bill. Not me, I declined it. I wanted to serve.

The military and the way that it works taught me more about life, government, and country than I ever bargained for. You get used to hearing things like: “We don’t care about your family. If the Navy wanted you to have a family, they would have issued you one.”

One of the worst things that happened to me while I was in was an indirect result of the Navy’s beneficial suggestion program. This was a program where a sailor who saw waste, fraud, abuse, or a way that the Navy could save money, could make a report to the chain of command. If the Navy adopted your suggestion and saved money, the sailor making the suggestion would get a percentage of the savings.

In 1989, there was an explosion on the USS Iowa. In the case of the Iowa battleships, there was a flaw in the firing system. The silk making up the 50 pound bags that the gunpowder comes in were famous for leaving embers behind in the chamber of the 16 inch guns. Ramming them into the breech too quickly while those embers were still there was a recipe for explosions. They had been known to cause mishaps in those guns for decades.

However, those cannons were a huge PR point for the Navy, providing tons of photo ops and bragging rights for recruiting commercials. So when the Iowa had an explosion, instead of blaming a faulty process in a 50 year old weapons system and hurting their recruiting tool, they blamed a sailor who they alleged was a jilted gay lover.

The Tailhook scandal broke in 1991. It was such a huge deal that they made everyone in the Navy take sexual sensitivity training. Officers were exempt, which was ironic, since every person involved in the Tailhook scandal was an officer.

Back to the beneficial suggestion program. So the Navy had light fixtures that lit up the runways. These light fixtures were low voltage, with a transformer that stepped the power for that fixture from 120 volts down to 12 volts. The light fixtures would often fill with water, and this would short out the transformer, overheating it. The overheated transformer would then catch fire. I submitted a suggestion with a redesign of the circuit.

I was told that the command could authorize an award of up to $500, and my idea would get me more than that. It was so valuable that they were sending it to Atlantic Fleet command. A month later, I asked the Lieutenant what had happened to my idea, and he told me that LantFleet could only authorize an award of $5,000, and this was worth more than that. They were sending it to Navy Sea Systems, where my award could be as much as a million bucks. Wow!

A year later, we went into the shipyards for a 6 month long repair cycle. While we were in there, I helped the yard workers incorporate my changes into the ship’s runway lighting circuits. I asked why we were performing this change, and where my reward was. They said, “what reward? This was the lieutenant’s idea.” The lieutenant that I had brought my idea to wound up getting a sizeable reward from the beneficial suggestion program.

By the time I got out, I was often heard to say, “Oh, you don’t like my attitude? It’s the one I was issued.” I left the Navy wiser, more cynical, and less trusting of government than I was when I entered as the idealistic, patriotic believer that I was when I entered. I was still patriotic, but I had discovered that my government and the people who worked in it were not.

It has long been said that the US has a “nuclear triad” made up of nuclear weapons that could be delivered by three different means- bombers, ground based missiles, and submarine launched missiles. Is that even accurate any longer? The short answer is no, it isn’t.

Our ground based bombers are no longer available as a part of the triad. Sure, we still have deliverable warheads, but there is no alert force, no SIOP, and no organized plan for delivering them. In fact, the US only has 66 nuclear capable strategic bombers remaining in our inventory. The B-1 bomber used to be able to deliver nuclear weapons. Nope. Not anymore. The B-52 can, but those bombers are older than the grandfathers of the pilots who now fly them. The B-2 Spirit can, but there are only a handful of those. At best, we could drop a few weapons, but the truth is that there just isn’t a way to deliver enough warheads by bombers to make that a credible deterrent. Don’t believe me, ask the Air Force, who has said:

You’re going to need more aviators, you’re going to need more Security Forces [personnel],  more maintainers … more bombers … infrastructure improvements at the [alert] facilities, and you’re going to need more tankers.

What about the Air Force’s ground based ICBMs? You mean the LGM-30 that was designed with a 10 year lifespan, but has been in service for over 50 years? The Minuteman III began development in 1964 and entered service in 1970 with a force of 550 missiles. There are 440 of them left, and 400 of them are on alert. The missiles originally carried a total of 1,500 warheads- most had three warheads each. As of June 16, 2014, on Obama’s orders, the U.S. Minuteman III missiles have only a single warhead. Now they carry only 400- a 75% reduction in deliverable warheads by this leg of the triad.

What about from the sea? When I was in the Navy, we had the capability to launch nuclear strikes from aircraft carriers. That capability was completely taken from the Navy by George HW Bush. That capability is gone, and cannot be replaced. The training and knowledge was lost when we eliminated the personnel whose job it was to make that happen.

The Navy also had the ability to use Tomahawk cruise missiles to deliver nuclear warheads. That’s gone as well.

Then there are the much advertised SLBMs. There are 18 of the Ohio class submarines, but 4 of them have been rendered incapable of carrying SLBMs, leaving 14 nuclear capable submarines in the Navy. Scheduling means that only 4 of them are on station at any given time, for a total of 80 SLBMs on alert at any given moment. As for the missiles themselves, they can carry up to 14 warheads each, but in practice they each carry four warheads, on average. So the Navy can deliver 320 warheads at any given time.

In total, adding them up, the US is capable of delivering less than 750 warheads in response to an enemy surprise attack. In October of 2022, US intelligence estimated that the Chinese had 450 land based ICBMs. They also estimate that the Chinese will have more than 1500 warheads by 2035.

US Air Force is removing all identification markings from their aircraft.

Many have suggested that the Air Force should have just shot down the balloon using a laser or bullets to pop the Chinese balloon, instead of a missile. The reason that the fly boys used a missile is because popping a rogue balloon has been tried before, and it doesn’t work.

It was 25 years ago when the Canadians shot a balloon full of 1,000 holes and they found that this didn’t pop it, because the pressure inside of a balloon at that altitude isn’t high enough to burst the balloon.

Now you know…

On a side note, I was surprised that an AIM-9, which is a heat seeking missile, was capable of locking on to something like a helium balloon.

The Pentagon was audited and couldn’t account for 61% of its assets. If a company did this, the executives would be in jail. How can Congress demand to review President Trump’s tax returns, when they can’t even keep track of their own funds?

Even as this happened, there is some PFC somewhere getting smoked because he didn’t tie a dummy cord to his NODs or some sailor is getting accused of gundecking because he used a 4 inch screwdriver when the MRC said it was supposed to be a 6 inch.