Episode 704: A Post-Election Midrats Melee

This is a maritime melee show, which means we have our list of things we want to talk about, but we're always interested in what you have as well, So in the chat room is a great place for you to go ahead and put those comments in there. Also want to make the altar call. If you don't already, go over to iTunes, Spotify, spreaker, wherever you get your podcasts aggregated, find mid Rats and go ahead and subscribe that way. If you can't join us live, we'll always

be ready for you when your schedule so allows. And after a couple of weeks break Mark and I were back and I just wanted to kick it off because this is the day before the eleventh day of the eleventh month that we call Veterans Day, so on behalf of the two veterans who do this little podcast and for all of our buddies who are out there as well, a happy Veterans Day. And also I do this on

a not irregular basis. And I don't know why, Maybe it's my anglophilia, but I've always liked the way that the Commonwealth Nations, led by the mother country, Great Britain, how they do Remembrance Day. It's a much more sober, a much more serious, more different theme too. It's more in line with the American Memorial Day, except again it's a much more somber and serious organization and not an excuse to go to the beach and go off this summer.

So for all my all our friends in the anglosphere wearing their red poppies, I hope you have a good Remembrance Day. Besides that, hey, we all survived the election here on the Eastern Seaboard, didn't we mark.

after a long stint of Army people running the show. So, you know, we need to talk about a lot of things. But one of the things I wanted to bring up is the first. The first thing is not to make any serious blood and to not show yourself in the

foot with the decisions you make. And that includes, in my mind right now, things not undoing some damages that we've chosen to do to ourselves, which includes the theoretical closing of the Red Hill Orange Oil Storage Facility fuel storage facility in Hawaii, and I would highly recommend that they not do that because that is vital to our efforts in the Western Pacific to have a source closer than the continent of the United States for arche amounts

of fuel. And I think that it hasn't whatever they're doing to decommission, it has not gone far enough that they can't be undone and at least keep it undone. The closure undone until we get an adequate replacement that

has a similar, if not greater capacity, because it's absolutely vital to our national security.

ability to kick things off in the Pacific War. And also there's a reason why the Ukrainians are attacking the Russian fuel infrastructure here. You can't fight without fuel, and there's nothing out there that can replace what's happening in Red Hills and Red Hills was a failure of leadership, management, inspections, all the usual problems. Anybody that's lived in Hawaii knows what that's like. That that should not be a reason why we should put our nation at strategic risk. We

can clean it up and do it right. Nothing they can replace it right now. We just need to just do what needs to be done. Let the usual suspects in Hawaii. I yell, all they want to but you gotta do what you gotta do.

the way it worked. And they were using contractors, and the contractors screwed up, and you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of blame to go around, but it isn't it isn't necessary to point fingers at this point.

It's necessary to keep the thing alive until we find a way to replace it and if we're going to replace it, and one of the other things, you know, as as long as I'm on the theme of let's not shoot ourselves in the foot, I saw the other day that a discussion about not putting some of the anti ballistic and other defenses on Guam because we seem

to have some kind of budget issues. Well, you know, I think that GWAM is a pretty important place in the scheme of things for the defense of the western of our Western Pacific friends and our own asset am

a GWAM that the trust territory is the Pacific. There are a lot of American citizens out there who who deserve to be protected, and to do it to deny them that protection because we spent a lot of money on and you can you can name your wherever you think miss the current administration has sent money they shouldn't have. You know that that is not a good reason to to not fully fund the effort to protect that that island,

which is vital to our national security. And and as longer on that line, I mean as we need to really take a hard look at to spit at reopening a lot of the facilities we had available to eas

during World War Two. And we'll talk about that a little later, but you know, we need to relook at what we're doing on the on the whole the Alaskan Aleutian Island chain, and we need to look at the you know, places like mid Midway and Wake and Johnson, the toll and and a lot of these other places that we used to used to have as seaplane bases and other things that see see what would be useful in today's modern with today's modern technology in the world.

that I worry about is analysis paralysis. We need to not We don't have the luxury of saying we'll make a decision in physical year twenty thirty and we'll start doing something in fyscal year thirty, you know, twenty thirty two now, where we've wasted too much time doing things like that. We just need to take action, and you've outlined a few that are right there. We have CBS for a reason, and it's time to move forward and to take action. One thing for this election. That's going

to be interesting. We're already starting to see some of the players that may be coming in to the new Trump administration because people are policy. One of the things that I saw there are people who are having their profile raised significantly. Earlier this year, we had Bridge Coleby on here at mid Rats and he's grown up to the big leagues. He just did an over hour long interview with Tucker Carlson, who has the ear of the

senior leaders in this administration. Bridge, I would encourage and I'll put a link on the show page for the mid Rats we had him on and for the Tucker interview he recently did. I caught bits and pieces of it. But you are also seeing other serious people that are going to make some changes in these bold faced areas from what we've seen in the last few years. You know, we're talking Israel, Ukraine, NATO, China, what's happening in the

Red Sea. As as people come on board, you're going to see who's going to be advising the president, and you'll be able to find a paper trail on that. But what I didn't expect to see. I don't know whether you had a chance to look at it. Yet and I'll post posting the chat and on the show page as well. His President Trump had some very interesting ideas about what he wanted to do, which you know is killing hundreds of thousands of American citizens, and that's

the drug cartels in northern Mexico. I got some of the quotes from the video was and this was President Trump, time for America to wage war on the cartels. It will be the policy of the United States to take on the cartels just like we took down isis a full naval blockade of the cartel, special Forces cyber war and defining them as a foreign terrorist organization. And the lawyers in the group, you'all can start pulling us code empty squad that are triggered by those types of words.

That's something close to home that will be very interest team to watch flesh out.

uh and armed forces, you've got some real issues. And there's so much money in the cartels and I don't know, you know where we're going to put a naval blockade on them unless we're going I thought we were doing a pretty good job of catching some of the stuff coming up from from South America. But you know, I know a lot of people. I used to work with a lot of the Customs guys both to the you know, their air their there U S Customs had an air force made up of I guess retired Navy P threes

and some other aircraft. But uh, you know that that's a that's an interesting group of people, and they did a great job trump you know. But it's just as long as a demand, it's not just a matter of going after the cartels. We've got to cut down on the demand. And you know, it's our friends in China who are shipping all this fentanyl for here, so you know that isn't That's another thing is we've got to

stop the flow of stuff from China. And it's you know, you've seen all the zombies on this on the streets of various big cities and small towns for that matter. You know, it's just it's just a problem that really really needs to be attacked. And you know, if it's if it's a we've had the war on drugs before, I think the war on cartels, the war on on this particular Chinese effort perhaps, you know, I think it's

intentional to weaken the United States. So, you know, I'm very hopeful that that somebody is going to run that program that is got the the nerve to pursue it vigorously.

at your research. But there is there's a war going on right now, a civil war inside the Cineela pronouncing that correctly cartel that the Mexican military, which is really the only uncorruptible force they have in Mexico, are are going in and doing what looks like if you've seen video of Fallujah, that's what's happening in city of a million in Mexico right now. It's not getting much play

here north of the border. I know the new president Steinbaum, whatever her name is in Mexico doesn't give the appearance to somebody who's all that pro American, But there might

be a convergence of interests here. If the Mexican government is already doing Flujah type operations in their own cities against the cartels, that it might actually be a good time that we can work together, especially with the intel assets that we have in place, because if you're still in protecting the American people, we already have people being killed by the tens of thousands and the and I think everybody here has either in their family or in

their friend's family somebody that has been affected by what Fitanol has done in the last decade to people. So it's there's a lot of danger there because we've all been part of, you know, the mowing the ocean and the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific. That I wouldn't say it's futile, but it's got limited benefit that there are other ways that you can interdict at the source the

actual production of these incredibly nightmare drugs. This is a long time from Jimmy Buffett's pirate running grass and an old shrimp boat. Are you know? Cocaine cowboys dropping kilos out of the window, driving flying over Texas. This is a whole different ballgame, and it also flows together really well. There's been a really good reporting on this. If you've seen it the last four years, the huge influx of illegal immigrants into the United States. They're not coming there

on their own. The cartels own the northern part of Mexico. They're paying money to the cartels. They've made billions and billions of dollars off of that. So by securing our southern border at last and cutting off that business of smuggling people across the border in the in the millions, that also will constrict one of the income sources from

the cartel. And for those parts of the border that aren't yet secure of what they've been able to do is you overload the border patrol with ten thousand people coming through Eagle Pass, Texas, and then you can run your fittinol forty miles to the west through the desert and nobody's going to catch them. So there's some synergy there of a few policies that can be changed that really could make some address to address the issues. And it really is a national security issue. It's more than

just just drug control. It's it's a cancer on our larger society. And if we can control the supply coming in, then some smarter people will have to work on why there's such a demand for it inside the US.

police are so corrupt that they can't be trusted. People talk about interagency law enforcement, Okay, you're going to have a bunch of FBI and Border Control people talking to civilian police people south of the border. To me, that's just an invitation for intel leakage and all sorts of problems. If we can find a way to have it military to military, there's more of a chance to you having some security on what actions you're going to be taking.

But people know that there's not You're not having a bunch of people who have Age of Aquarius views of human nature that are going to be coming in the Trump administration. I don't think.

And that meeting that was reported where somebody was, you know, what do we do if he I'm not sure what in the content that you know, we never know because not sitting in the meeting, but apparently the context was what do we do if he decides the US US military to help round up the illegal immigrants and ship

them out? And you know that that whole meeting of senior people, I assume pretty disturbing and it bodes not well for a smooth implementation of policies that the President electors said he would like to see in place.

be fine. You know, sixty five something like that would would be okay. But when you look at at the election results in Washington, d C. I'm maybe off a percentage point or two, but it doesn't matter ninety three percent for President Biden, whether you are pro Biden or pro Trump or if those numbers will switched around. That's

not healthy. So when you have that much of a hyperpartisan environment where you have a lot of people who they're not used to being around people who have different policy positions than they do, they can react in unhelpful manners kind of what that report has where they're getting together. I mentioned a few times I live in a metropolitan area of a million people. It voted for President Trump

by a point and a half. In twenty sixteen, it voted for President Biden by I think three points and twenty twenty and the twenty twenty four election they voted for Trump again by about a one point seven points. It's a fifty to fifty metropolitan area. Everybody gets along here. There are no riots, there are no threats. Everything's fine. Everybody gets along here because you're you drive down a street, you see Abiden, a Trump, Abiden, a Trump, abiden a

Trump sign, and that's just how folks live. I think that that makes for a healthy environment. That's not healthy in Washington, DC when you have ninety three percent all for one political party. We see that manifested in some of the trials and the jury selections and things like that. But how they address those people in the bureaucracy that are not willing to do their job still because they're hyper political. There's going to have to be accountability. There's

going to be some person health action. There has to be, and you have to make examples of people. If I don't care what your personal politics are, If you have a legal order, you execute it. You and I both have have served under different political administrations, and I've been given orders by Republicans and Democrats, some of which I didn't.

I live in a state capital, and you know, it's it's like every other large fairly large city with the politicians in it, you know, it was it was probably sixty five thirty five Democrat in this in this particular area, while the rest of the state, except for the other art for all art metropolitan areas, is quite red. So you know, the reds, the Reds prevailed, but you know, you still got the challenge in the state House and the legislature is Republican, but the but the some of

the Council of State is not. So you know, maybe that's the way it should be, that it's a more balanced system where you've got a different groups representing different interests. So they have to they if they're going to achieve anything, they have to kind of compromise a little bit to

move things forward. But you know, and I just there was a lot of there were a lot of discussion at one point on where it went or how you would do it, about not letting I mean making d C much smaller and and putting the residential areas of d c UH into the states surrounding them, rather than having and and then not having anybody be able to live in the district of Columbia itself, so that the people would be wouldn't be quite as one sided as

it seems to be right now. I don't know how you would do that where we go, but it's an interesting thought, one of those things where you go, well, it's you know, if it's that biased, what is how is this going to work exactly?

their hydrocarbons looquified natural gas from Russia. Realizes that now they have a hydrocarb and friendly administration on the way that maybe they can make nice with the US by buying r LNG. I think at least our audience we would just be happy if the rest of the Alliance would spend the bare bare minimum of two percent of their GDP on communal defense as opposed to buying our LNG.

But it's it's interesting when things that you would hope that nations would do on their own, they don't do it unless they feel like Uncle Sam is going to have a slightly different attitude in seventy days.

round people up to send them out. You do need to cut them off from all the benefits and then suggest that if they want, believe will provide some kind of transportation for him out of the country to someplace else.

But you know, I don't I just so many. I think I think the the a lot of the people in the in the media things didn't understand how mad people got about about programs that were obviously incentivizing people to be in the in the country illegally, and and and other programs like the student loan waivers for people you know who who's gonna if if they don't That's another one was thinking of, if if they don't want to pay their own student loans, why should Joe the plumber,

of course, who now probably makes more than they will ever make in their life lives anyway, But or you know, the the the guy who's changing your royal down at Bolina where we get your royal at Tangent, why why should he or she be paying for their paying off their student loans because they were They didn't encoura any of those things. I just you know, I think a lot of that kind of just got overlooked by by people on the on the side that lost this last election.

And I think that's one of the one of those other issues. If if you don't cancel this, if you cancel the student loan grace that mister Biden was supposed to I was trying to invoke. You know, there's a lot of money there is like a you know, not

all of them. Remember it's exactly a tree, But a whole lot of money can be used for for other things that I'm for the American taxpayer, or you know, God, we could pay off the national debt, which has been wrung up pretty pretty highly, which is why we can't have some of the nice things. But you know that all that as is, I mean, that is politics, and that's going to be addressed. I assume the other things you and I talk about are the are the defense issues?

You know, do we are we going to get tenders for the ships that we're going to have to deploy? Are we going to be able to to you know, we're looking at I put up a video the other day of the imar's reloading process and it's really quick, it is, And I'm thinking, why did the Navy not think that they ever had to reload those those vertical launch cells on their on their destroyers and cruisers, And

and I think long before now. I mean, I know that we've got some system that seems to be pretty slow in and of itself, but at least there is a system coming that may help us solve that problem. But I just am baffled by the by the thinking that went into that lack of planning for re arming those those ships, you know, especially for the vertical launcher. So you know, that's why I would say, let's put Hi Mars in as many things as we can, and you know, let the Marines play with them. And we've

already done this. They put them on EPFs, they put them on amphibs. They can shoot. They they have pretty good accuracy, you know, seventy seventy nautical miles or so. I don't remember their new ragne, but you know, there's no reason not to do that. Let's let's the Marines want to go play in the weeds and and be running around the jungle and be very active in uh in in uh In, being mobile and vicious, and they need the weapons to do it. So let's let's load

them up with high mars. And the army is doing the same thing that they've adopted the s M six and the Tomahawk for land based anti ship programs. And that's an old mission for the army. I mean, they were the original coast artillery people. So yeah, let's encourage that too. We don't have to we don't always have to buy new aircraft carriers and and uh and big deck cruisers. If we can if we can spread a

lot of these weapons system around on smaller units. And that's the other thing I would suggest to the new administration is that, you know, you let's not get all hyper with the big people who want to build more more carriers. I mean, I think we need replaced carriers, but you know, let's look at small ships with her with the systems like arm mars and other things that can go fast, can be very mobile, hard to target, and yet are very deadly, and let's you know, just

also drone them all up. Let's get more drones. I mean, that's what the cno cur cynos said. Let's you know, we're going to have this snazzy high drone filled systems out there. Well that's great. You know, now people are finding ways to defeat drones. But let's at least give ourselves a chance to have these these great big mind laying some surface vessels out there and give us this.

Just keep doing that, Let's keep pursuing that. Let's make things hard on the people who want to cause bad things to happen.

a short range ballistic missile. We are spending gobs of money after gobs of money to put conventional prompt strike on three DDG one thousand class ships and all these other items, and those would be great and wonderful, but they're not operational right now, especially the Independence class. LCS has a lot of square footage on the back. Yeah, you want some conventional prop strike. Look at the high mars. What do you need to spray on it to make

it salt water robust enough? But there's a great conventional prompts strike platform that has some reach. You put high mars of a tackles on the back. I don't know how many you can. We'd have to get Hippo on here to have him make an estimate how many you could strap onto the back of an Independence. Even if you have to give up the helo that might be worth it for the mission. There's your mission module, Hi Mars boxes, and you also have you're talking about bringing

lots of drones. The Chinese and the Iranian steal ideas from us all day. Let's steal their ideas. I think most people have seen their launch platform for their Shahid is basically a basic connex box that they elevate at forty five degrees, take the lid off of and they have them stacked in there like so many Pez pellets and a pez dispenser, and I think they have at least a dozen of them in one of those boxes.

And there goes the flying lawnmower. There are ways that you can take what we have right now, customize, change, do a modification, and put them on a ship. Is it? Is it? No? But again, we don't have the luxury of time for development. If you want, if you want to have something that's spoken, start working on it and it can replace those if you're smart. Little architects are going to worry about if you're right now in twenty thirty five, we need something else, and that is highlusion.

If we can think outside the box and have somebody that's willing to give the direction and guidance to do that, which is why I'm really looking forward to see who's going to be the Secretary of Defense, who he gives as the Secretary of the Navy. Look at their background, because I think they're going to have, especially on the Maritimes side of the House, because it's carryover from his

first administration. The Navy has a window and an opportunity here to get some leverage and make some big changes if it has the right people at top that will give those onunderneath them the top cover they need, because I know there's both civilian and military people in the bureaucracy who think just like we do. We've we both talked to them, but they don't have the top cover

and the orders to go do it. So I think that there's there's enough people in place that could really do some impressive things, especially if from an engineering point of view, if they're told to. It's just they've got to have that civilian leadership that points them in that direction and kicks them in the tail.

because that can be minimally manned. I hate to use that term, but can be you know, small enough that they don't require huge crews that you know that we can you know it just it's the kind of thing that Admiral Zumwalt talked about when he had the when he was talking about the kind of the two tier navy,

and he wanted the the small, agile forces. That prompted you know that the turl hydrofoils and the and you know all that stuff that that came around, and then that Admal Sabrowski and other people you know also raised we don't need and of course Captain Hughes, we don't need every ship to be huge, because when you lose a huge destroyer or cruiser, you lose a lot of capacity. But if you lose one PHM, you've lost one PHM

and maybe you know what eight ten missiles. So you know, the the the effectiveness of smaller, heavily armed units and large quantities is significant in the right locations. And I would think of all the locations, the the area around the Philippines, the area of the South China Sea. Those that's you know, that's that seems to me to be prime turf for some high quality but heavily armed and networked systems of small units and men friendly sidekicks going

out with them. And you mentioned the early.

There's there's no magic about it. And you know, people who have a short memory, they just think about submarine tenders like, yeah, we've got to have new submarine tenders, Roger that I'm talking about destroyer tenders that we can do significant depot level maintenance forward because there's we no longer live in a world where you can safely go to Yakuska in Japan and get that done because you're

you're you're under the gun there. We have to have the ability to do like we did in the last Great Pacific War, and destroyer tenders are a great way to do that. But again you get into analysis paralysis with our acquisition system and you'll have you know, a half dozen GS fifteen's come in and tell you why they can't do it as opposed to how it can be done.

they are currently configured. And then if we can continue with the NAVS version of the Consolation, because it's already I guess they're already cut steel and stuff, but the next version ought to be based on what the users find useful in the in the design that the Italians

are using. It makes no sense to me to build something because some GS twelve somewhere in NAVSE decided and we really or somebody else got stuck their finger in the pies of you know, we really need this ship to have X and Y when there's and that changes everything on it. So that I am a big you know, and you have to think short term, you know, we have to let's think we're going to need stuff for the next four or five years, and so let's think what can we do now, what you know, what can

we get going? And then and then work from there. Then then long range planning kicks in, where we you know, what does the navy of ten years from now or fifteen years or twenty years from now look like, Because I don't think it's going to look the same as what we have now, because the world has changed a lot.

to bring back hardball with the Iranians. I don't see anybody in this administration who wants to go to war with Iran, but when it comes to putting sanctions back in, going after them financially, going after those who supply them. If you can make Iran worried about her internal issues because she doesn't have enough money, then that's money that she's not giving to the hu Thies, Hamas, Husbillah and

other organizations. And that's going to be a huge impact on the Middle East if we can pick up where the previous Trump administration left off, where slowly but surely getting the Gulf Arab nations in Israel to realize they have a lot more to gain through business and healthcare exchanges and cooperation than they have on multi generational tribal warfare.

So that's another part of this by product dis election that I'm looking forward to seeing is Iran being put back on the back foot where she needs to be until the Iranian people decide that they want to find a new government.

a good sign. And that just one of those things that you get when you get a voice that they've heard before, come back into the onto the onto the scene, I would think, you know, and we're seeing that all over the place. So I think that's good, and I think that you know, we're as we discussed, we've got

CBS and things. I just I'm going to put up a link to the building of the basis during World War Two in the Pacific because I think it's a germane to the discussion we're having is, you know, we're worried about the missile range of the of the Chinese, and they don't, you know, they don't they don't need to have too great a missile range to hit Guam and and some of the other things we want certainly

want to try and defend. But there are a lot of other islands out there that are either US territories or US I mean actual US property, So you know, we need to look at how we could develop those if we needed to, to help build our own Great American Wall to stop the Chinese from dominating the Pacific and having too much influence on our friends and neighbors like Australia and New Zealand and in the Japanese because there's no there's no you know, we have to have

good assets available from which to do our own work.

I'm yeah, yeah, and that's absolutely critical. And of course Secretary of Defense Austin he should have something, somebody else should have taken his place after the events in Doubles. So again, done lots of service for his country. I'm sure he's won intention but he was the wrong person in the wrong job. I think the record proves it

as such. And I think for those that look back at the first Trump administration, they just didn't get their footage, their footage they're footing early on because for a variety of reasons, it took a while, in some cases almost three years. But yeah, they've been there, they've done that, they've got their people. It's going to move fast. Yeah.

two hundred and forty nine years. But you know, the Marines are naval force, and we need to have a strong navy because we we have oceans that are our barriers or provide barriers from the bad guys, but we need we also have people who live out in those areas that are being threatened by the by the Chinese as they as they do their normal thing of that, they just decided to rename a bunch of islands in the South China Sea. They call them our islands, and

and and you know, you know how that goes. And now that we've declared them to be ours, everybody else has to comply with what we say. I mean, they're they're just they're constantly boiling the frog. They trap you into thinking they're going to be law abiden and then they decided they get to choose which laws they're going to abide to.

State and their permanent class. And with the Republicans having power in both the House and the Senate, I think that gives them a little bit of a window here because the executive branch can do a lot and executive orders whatever, but those can be overturned when the change seats again. But if you really want to make change that has teeth and has legs, got to go through the legislative branch, and the State Department is really overdue

for that. I think there is a I haven't done the whip count, but I think there is a critical mass of people in the House from both parties and the Senate in both parties, who are willing to make some changes about our staff and our bureaucracy, and if they want to get ahead of the game, that's what they'll do, if they want to be smart about it.

Because that's one thing that's been really apparent in the last week is how much attacking the bureaucracy is going to be not in just the national security arena, but a general theme of the next administration. And there's a lot of frustration with how the Pentagon and the Department

in Navy works. So people that have had those ideas in their bottom drawer might be time to take it out, dust it off, find somebody who has access to the lever of power and introduce them to your ideas, because you may have a window to actually affect some positive change here in the next twenty four months before we're looking at the twenty twenty sixth election cycle. Yeah.

out of the air. And you know, they don't recognize that taxpayer toiling away at some job making diesel engine in some places is the one footing the bill for a lot of their randiose ideas that were developed an academia and have no correlation with reality.

last thirty six months, but they are still there. And you know President Trump has our President elect Trump, whatever the correct term is to use it, and this inflection point he's talked about the towards the end of the Rogan podcast, he actually talked about wanting to address government spending in the deficits. We'll see how that works house.

So I would do one little bit of caution as we're coming near the top of the hour, there's a non zero chance that the top line number for defense isn't going to grow above inflation all that much, if that becomes part of the agenda, and that's where things get interesting. If the pie isn't going to grow significantly, then you've got to make decisions about how you're going to change the allocation in that pie. And you know, we talked about compromise. Who's going to be part of

that negotiation, who's going to run that table? And again that will be who is going to be the Secretary of Defense. What's their background, what are their biases and because they're the ones that are probably primarily going to have the ear of the president. And kind of a wild card here and we haven't really touched on it, but I saw a point that I had to appreciate before. I know, our friend Claude Bearbay has done lots of

studies on this, but I think the incoming Vice President JD. Vance, he's the first going to be the first president or vice president that has a Marine Corps background and he retired as an ETH. He not retire you left active duty as an E four. So the mafia is going to be up at the Naval Observatory. So again on the Marine Corps birthday. I guess that's their birthday present this year.

of things we should be talking about. Merchant shipping, you know, the recreation of all that. We've beaten some of those issues flogs and his issues pretty hard. We know we need to do it. We also need things like we've got these auxiliaries that are being laid up because they don't have careers. We need to put us send people on them or USN civilian mixed crews and get them underway so that our fleet doesn't have you know, we're

wearing at all these other ships. It's just got brand new ships sitting wait for cruise that is a ridiculous waste.

that wasn't the right answer. You're burning out your sailors and your ships to make your job convenient now, as opposed to having a stewardship view of things where you're going to pick fights now to make sure that the people who have your job in five, ten, fifteen years don't run into the problem we have right now. That's because of short term focus, lack of a stewardship mindset,

and people not willing to make powerful enemies. It's a lot easier to just piss off your seagoing, enlisted and field grade and company great officers than it is to piss off people on the board of directors of Boeing and write down who may be offering you a job within days after your retirement. Yes, I'm subtweeting, the former chairman of the Joint Chie says staff.

saying those are those are dead? You know, I know in the locals in the state government here, they pretty much defunded all those things for the for colleges, and you know, it's it's a it's a I don't notice that the quality of education of our students in those universities and colleges has gone down one iota either. But we got you know, we've got too many people who have to do things to justify their existence, and the things they do are often counterproductive to getting real things done.

So and if Musk is going to be the the czar of cutting government, I hope he takes lessons from the Argentine President whatever his name is, pretty much ruthlessly went through the Argentine government and I mean to cut out the tax like they're quot to the rs and stuff. So and there their economy has responded and responded well. And yeah, the we've done the same thing with the DEI and in the Free State of Florida as well

in the last two years, and nobody misses them. And they've taken that money and they've repurposed it in the universities to everything from scholarships, traditional instructors. I remember they changed their name this summer from the Office of Diversity Equity Inclusion, but just as a one data point at the US Naval Academy, their DEI office, they're now calling themselves Fuzzy bunny Farts or whatever they're calling themselves this

week they've changed their names. Try to hide, but if you look, if you look at it, it's half dozen plus people. That's a payroll of well over a million dollars. That as just people. That's not their tad, that's not their travel, that's not the seminars they're hosting, none of that. So yeah, there's a lot of money that they actually spoke and that cuts you off.