Tag: miscalculation

The American thug bully and its shiny military toys; a scary look at dangerous miscalculations

I have been thinking and musing (a lot) about the absolute arrogance of the United States (out of Washington DC) and the myth of “American exceptionalism”, and that “America has never lost a war”. This has really come into mind with the things that President Trump is doing with multiple assault combat carrier fleets sitting right off the Chinese coast right now.

What he is doing is extraordinarily dangerous.

It reminds me of the bully in school. The one that always gets his way. That always behaves erratically, well because he’s a thug, but also because he never came across another “tough guy” that was bigger than him.

(Time for old guy memories…)

When I was growing up back in the hills of Western Pennsylvania, there was this boy who was two or three years older than me. I cannot say that he was a bully, exactly. It’s just that something wasn’t quite right about him. He was a spoiled brat, that’s for certain, that just was oblivious to the world around him. We was, well, a little “off” in the head, don’t you know.

He was an only child, and he attended the “special education” classes at our High School. They were all pretty much frowned upon as being “weak in the mind”. Which is terrible, I know, as I’m sure that wasn’t the actual case, but we were kids, and that was what we thought.

His father owned a local grocery store as well as a tri-county trash pick up service. They had a house in the nicest part of the town where we lived in, and had an indoor pool that was cool and really unique.

Think of a world where Bruce Wayne wasn't really "Batman". But instead was "The Joker". I guess it was sort of like that.

He would be off doing stuff and getting into all kinds of trouble. Just odd-ball stuff. You know how kids would build a tree-house. Well, he built one too…

…In the back yard of a house that was occupied by two little old ladies that were in their 90’s. The local constable had to have him come and tear it down.

While in High School he lobbed this flat steel disk (Lord only knows where he found it) into a crowd of my classmates. He just somehow got on the roof, yelled at us kids, and threw it. Luckily no one was killed by the flying fifty pound UFO.

He was the one that shocked us fifth graders by telling us how babies were made and how a boy puts his penis into a young lady. He even had magazines to help describe this activity. Not only that, but he was willing to demonstrate to the girls how it worked. (Don’t worry, we all left. Nothing became of it.) Never the less, we were scarred for weeks afterwards. We were just not ready.

Anyways, in hindsight, as an adult you can see that this kid had problems, and it would only be a matter of time before something bad would happen.

When I was 16 I started working in the mines, and perform stock duties in the local grocery store. There we would hear all the local gossip of the community. Of course, we called it “scuttlebutt”. Which was just a guys’ way of gossiping. We found out that he had died.

It turned out, that one Friday evening, around 7PM he was riding his bicycle all over the road. Meaning “all over the road in big lazy arc’s and meandering turns”. He was blocking traffic and forcing the cars to move at abnormally slow speeds. Since the roads were all tight and wove in and out of the hills there, the cars were trapped at the mercy of this crazed Joker-like insane young man. (He was maybe 18 years old at the time.)

Riding a bicycle, not driving a car. You see, he couldn't pass the driving tests at 16.

One of the cars (in the long train of cars beeping and honking behind him) was occupied by three United States marines, who in the early 1970’s probably had done some time in Vietnam (at the American war there). And they were not too pleased with this punk.

So…

So, they got out of the car and grabbed him. And Lordy, they beat the living Dejesus out of him. I mean they really fucked him up bad. They beat the snot out of him, and do you know what?

Do you know what happened?

He died.

That’s right. He was killed.

And the Marines, well they went to Prison. It’s a sad story all the way around. I like to think that everyone learned a lesson in all this. I would see the kid’s father from time to time as he did his business, and lived his life in the town. But, he was a now a small pale sort of man. Not the tall strong man that used to be. I guess that the death of your only child, and the turmoil of life, would do that to you. It’s a sad story for certain.

That’s my story and now for my point.

It’s human nature to believe that we are bigger, smarter, stronger, and more intelligent than everyone else. And if we evolved over time when our notions of who we are and what we are, are not tested, then we continue believing these things long after it becomes obvious that they are no longer true.

The childhood kid ended up getting his “ass whooped” because he had never confronted someone who was bigger, stronger and more aggressive than him. For he was the “big fish in a small pond”. And the Marines that he encountered were some very mean and nasty sharks.

I think of this story often, and it comes to my mind every time I see an article about how “invincible” the United States Navy is.

Now while this might make reading for the American civilian population, the truth is that the leadership of the American military machine are not fools. They know it’s strengths and weaknesses, and are not very keen on testing these expensive military machines with a peer-capable rival.

But, unfortunately, they are not the ones that are making the top-level decisions in Washington DC today. It is Donald Trump, and Mike Pompeo and the rest of the Neocon cabal that are running the country, making the decisions and playing with the military as if it was their very own personal army.

Which brings me to this article…

The following is a reprint of “China Sea Blues: A Thing Not to Do” written by Fred Reed on October 30, 2015. It is reprinted as found on the UNZ site and you can read the Comments to it there. All credit to the author, and note that it was edited to fit this venue, but remains as intact to intent.

China Sea Blues: A Thing Not to Do

It appears that Washington, ever a seething cauldron of bright ideas, is looking for a shooting war with China, or perhaps trying to make the Chinese kowtow and back down, the pretext being some rocks in the Pacific in which the United States cannot possibly have a vital national interest. Or, really, any interest. And if the Chinese do not back down?

The Vincennes. The boxy thing up front is the radar. It is not hardened.

Years back I went aboard the USS Vincennes, CG-49, a Tico class Aegis boat, then the leading edge of naval technology. It was a magnificent ship, fast, powered by a pair of airliner turbines, and carrying the SPY-1 phased-array radar, very high-tech for its time. The CIC was dark and air-conditioned, glowing with huge screens—impressive for then—displaying all manner of information on targets in the air. Below were Standard missiles, then on a sort of chain drive but in later ships using the Vertical Launch System. It was, as they say in Laredo, Muy Star Wars. (The Vincennes was the ship that later shot down the Iranian airliner.)

Being something of a technophile, I took all of this in with admiration, but I thought—what if it gets hit?

As a kid in my preteens I had read about the battleships of WWII, the Carolinas but in particular the Iowa class, fast, brutal ships with sixteen-inch belt armor and turrets that an asteroid would bounce off of. The assumption was that ships were going to get hit. They were built to survive and continue fighting.

American hull armor in a Japanese World War II battleship. Showing not only the thickness, but also the type of damage that it could take.

By contrast, the Vincennes was thin-skinned, hulled with aluminum instead of steel, and the radar, crucial to combat, looked perilously fragile. A single hit with anything serious, or perhaps even a cal .50, but certainly by anything resembling a GAU-8, and she would be hors de combat until refitted.

Damage to the thin hull of the USS Cole by improvised munitions on board a terrorist skiff.

The Iowa, BB-61. I went aboard her at Norfolk at the Navy’s invitation. It altered my appreciation of guns. I came away thinking that if you can’t crawl into it, it isn’t really a gun. And solid: There is a reason why no battleship was sunk after Pearl Harbor.

One hit.

I also knew well that the Navy played Red Team-Blue Team war games in which our own submarines—then chiefly 688s—tried to “sink” the surface fleet. The idea was that if the sub could get into firing position, it would send up a green flare. The subs were then running if memory serves the Mk 48 ADCAP torpedo, a wicked wire-guided thing with a long range. Sailors told me that invariably the subs “sank” the surface force.

When I mentioned this at CHINFO, the Navy’s PR operation in the Pentagon, flacks told me that the potential bad guys only had piddling diesel-electric subs, far inferior to our nukey boats, and couldn’t get near the fleet in open seas. Yes, no, maybe, and then. It sounded like happy talk to me. In WWII, diesel-electrics certainly got in range of surface ships, perhaps the most famous example being when Archer Fish sank Shinano.

DF-21D anti-ship (read: anti-carrier) missile. This is not the place for detail, but China has anti-ship ballistic missiles designed to kill carriers, and is working on others, hypersonic glide vehicles, that are not real interceptible. I do not know how well they work. If I were a carrier, I would make a point of not finding out.

The Chinese DF-21D anti-Carrier missile. This missile is mass-produced and is designed to be fired in clusters of multiple groupings designed to saturate the defensive capabilities of an American Carrier battle group.

I do not know a great deal about the Chinese Navy, having been out of that loop for years. I do know that the Chinese are smart, and that they have optimized their forces specifically to take out carrier battle groups near their territory.

They do not try to match the US ship-for-ship in the kind of war America wants to fight. They would lose fast, and they know it.

The key is to swarm the fleet with cruise missiles arriving all at once, accompanied perhaps by large numbers of aircraft. Would this work? I don’t know, but that is certainly the way I would bet.

The United States Navy has not been in a war for seventy years.

It has sat off various shores and launched aircraft, but the fleet has not been engaged. Over decades of inaction, complacency sets in. Unfortunately, wars regularly turn out to be otherwise than expected. Further, the American military’s standard approach to a war is to underestimate the enemy (there is probably a manual on this).

Yet further, great emotional and financial capital resides in a carrier-battle group, one of the most impressive achievements of the human race. (I mean this: the technology, organization, and competence involved in, say, night flight ops are…”astonishing” is too feeble a word.)

This assures reluctance to question the fleet’s effectiveness in the face of changing conditions. Such as high-Mach, stealthed, maneuvering, sea-skimming cruise missiles. Or terminally guided anti-ship ballistic missiles.

America is accustomed to fighting enemies who can’t fight back.

This may NOT include the Chinese.

The carrier Forrestal, 1967. A single Zuni missile was fired accidentally. A huge fire ensued, bombs cooked off, 134 men were killed, and the ship was devastated, out of service for a very long time. One five-inch missile. Something to think about.

There is also the fact that the American military simply doesn’t matter, which reduces concern with whether it can fight and who it can fight.

It doesn’t defend the US, since there is nothing to defend it against. (What country has the remotest possibility of invading America?)

So the military is used for what are essentially hobbyist wars, keeping Israel happy, providing markets for the arms companies, and for social engineering: we have girl crews who would be a disaster at damage control, but we assume that there will never be any damage to control.

Uh…yeah. The evidence is that these ships are fragile:

What would happen if in a shooting war the Chinese crippled the American fleet?

Washington is rampant with large egos, especially that of John McCain, the senator from PTSD. If it were discovered that China could disable the Navy, many other countries might conclude that they could do it too. They most certainly would think of this.

But…

Washington could not accept the discovery: Fear of the carriers is a large element in Washington’s intimidation of the world. To save face, the US would be tempted to go nuclear, or seriously bomb China proper, with unforeseeable results.

USS Stark, 1987. Hit by two Exocet missiles fired by an Iraqi Mirage.

The Air Force and Navy could hurt China badly by conventional means, yes, for example by cutting off oil from the Mideast, or destroying the Three Gorges dam.

For a variety of reasons this would be playing with fire.

The economic results of any of these bright ideas would be godawful.

  • Just about every commercial product sold in America is made in China.
  • Just about every new construction or building project in America is being funded and manufactured by Chinese companies.
  • China holds a “Lion’s share” of American debt and could collapse the American economy if they wanted to.

Washington seems not to realize that it wields far less military power than it thinks it does, and that the power it does wield is ever less useful than before.

As a land power, it is very weak, being unable to defeat Russia, China, or peasants armed with rifles and RPGs. Air power has regularly proved indecisive.

USS Cole, 2000. Blown up by suicide guys in a small boat.

If Washington somehow won a naval war with China, so what?

It would provide the satisfactions of vanity, but China’s danger to the US imperium lies in increasing economic power and commercial expansion through Asia, where it holds the high cards: it is there, Washington isn’t.

Grrr-bowwow-woofery in the far Pacific, even if successful, is not going to stop China’s commercial expansion, and a defeat would end the credibility of the Navy forever.

As I say, Washington is full of bright ideas.

Conclusion

The purpose of war is to resolve differences when ALL OTHER AVENUES have been exhausted.

However, United States history has clearly illustrated that that doctrine has NOT been followed. Wars have been created for other purposes. Purposes devoted to the obtainment of profits, and to manipulate a compliant and ignorant population.

There is evidence that the last 75 years or so of this behavior cannot end. That those that run and rule over the United States are unable to use the military for any other purpose than what it has been used for.

And like the bully from my High School days, America could see itself on the wrong side of a conflict. One that it started. One that it thinks that it will “win”. And one that will FOREVER change it.

Maybe change it for good, and for infinity.

And, maybe, like the Bully from my High School days, it is long overdue and will be a shock to everyone. From the bully himself who (I am sure) lay there with a look of incredulity on his face, to his toadies who thought he was invincible, to the innocent bystanders (such as myself) who was shocked that such a well-known (if not particularly liked) person could be vanquished so quickly and so easily.

War is NOTHING that the United States should get involved in at this time. It is not healthy. It is a mess, and getting worse. The last thing it should get involved in is a fight with a nation THAT DOES NOT PLAY.

Chinese ships test firing two anti-carrier missiles in the South China Sea in August 2020.

Do you want more?

Do you want to see similar posts?

I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…

SHTF Articles

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.