Heroism Revisited

USS Kirk

Chinook Hovering over USS Kirk

A few months ago, I wrote a a post for the Naval History Blog about Operation Frequent Wind the evacuation of thousands of Vietnamese citizens after the Fall of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975. So when
I stumbled  across this series that was been launched today by NPR and published on their website I had to share it . What unfolds is the little know story of the USS Kirk DE 1087 and her participation in rescuing at first over 200 refugees, and later, would go on to help rescue over 20,000 refugees fleeing aboard South Vietnamese Navy vessels.

The NPR story is worth a careful read. Their indepth report relates many stories of heroism and reveals the bravery of one pilot who flew his family and others out to the Kirk in a Chinook helicopter. Too big to land, the pilot hovered while people jumped and mothers tossed their babies to the sailors waiting to catch them. I won't attempt to paraphrase this fine piece and will just say you have to read the whole story, then take the time to click on the Interactive Feature to see and hear accounts of that day told by the people involved. I will say that NPR has done an excellent job of telling this story and the stories of those they saved.

For Americans, the lasting image of the end of the Vietnam War came from the nightly news. On April 29, 1975, television showed the evacuation of Saigon as U.S. Marine helicopters swooped down to the U.S. Embassy and the roof of a nearby CIA safe house to rescue the last 1,000 Americans in the city and some 6,000 Vietnamese and their families who worked for them.

But there was another evacuation that didn't get as much attention. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese found other ways to escape in those frenzied few days. They left in boats and helicopters and headed to the South China Sea. They didn't know if North Vietnamese jets would sink their boats or shoot the helicopters out of the sky.

Read the whole story
Forgotten Ship: A Daring Rescue As Saigon Fell

Sunday Readings

Little League, Circa 1965

Afghanistan, Rockpile

Roy, Iraq 2007

Outpost Restrepo

Musing on Afghanistan on the last weekend in August has led me to post a few thoughts that flow from divergent directions. First is this post courtesy of The U.S. Naval Institute Blog is penned Marine officer and graduate of the Naval Academy Alexander Martin, whom I can identify with as a fellow bench warmer in the great game of little league baseball. What does baseball and Afghanistan have in common? Well you have to read the whole thing to get the point about Afghanistan, but the journey back into the author's foray with little league will spark recognition for many.

Alexander begins:

I remember other things from my baseball years. Allergy attacks. Big League Chew. Uncomfortable carpools in wood-paneled station wagons. Chewing barbeque sunflower seeds, swallowing that sweet-salty pulp and nearly suffocating to death in right field. Pretty girls I didn’t know I wanted yet (but one day would) not-watching from the bleachers in short jean shorts. Chasing butterflies in the on-deck circle. Sitting on the bench not flirting with the pretty girls in short jean shorts. Leaving each game as clean as I arrived; and, most encompassing of all, being legendarily bad at the game of baseball and not being all too interested in getting any better.

So Why Play?

I played baseball because, like most all good red-blooded American kids, I innately understood that I had to. Somewhere deep down in that chunky little body of mine, there was a chunky little heart[2] that knew there was something that moved me about the game[3]. I think I was called to action by the legacy of what it all meant, by the sights and sounds of the game’s elegant arena, and other mystifying nuances of baseball magic that is the command of this great American pastime over a young man’s soul. And who among us can deny the intoxication of a cold fountain soda and an authentic ballpark super dog covered in mustard and ketchup on a hot summer day? No, I didn’t play baseball because I wanted to…I played baseball because I had to…

I will give you the money line. It is up to you to read of the relationship of baseball and war. Perhaps, George Will, nationally known commentator and great baseball affectionado, will rethink his view on Afghanistan after reading this post.

If there’s one thing my experiences as La Jolla’s worst youth ballplayer (arguably of all time) taught me it’s that a lack of dedication and focus can really only get you to first base (and then only sometimes, and rarely gets you noticed by the pretty girls in the stands), and that it’s the commitment that counts.

In the case of war in Afghanistan there is no virtue in pursuing policy that amounts to the blind-luck-swingings of my youth. Here the most essential of little league baseball’s life lessons persists: that we don’t do this because we want to, we do this because we have to…

Read more:
Afghanistan: America's Baseball

This next post comes from the guys at Small Wars Journal who rightfully marque the title. Sunday Morning Must Read. I would say that it deserves your full attention to follow the link and read about Roy

I met Roy in early 2007. I was the leader of a reconnaissance platoon of scouts and snipers in Iraq and was just back from a two-week leave in the United States. Roy was our new interpreter.

That night, my platoon was sent out on a raid. Our target was an al-Qaeda suicide-attack coordinator. Scanning the intelligence report, I learned that previous attempts to capture him had ended with his bodyguards detonating suicide vests and killing 16 Iraqi police officers. An image of my lead scout team entering a house in southern Baghdad and vanishing in a ball of fire flashed through my mind.

Roy's head came up to my chest, and baby fat rounded out his face. He had cheeks so smooth that I could tell he had never shaved. I thought about asking him his age, but I didn't want to offend him during our first meeting. So I asked him why he had become an interpreter. I'll never forget his answer.

"One day the Qaeda came to my school. They say, 'You are not students anymore! Put away your books! Now we show you the path of jihad!' My two best friends say to them, 'We are students trying to learn. We don't want to do the jihad.' "

"And then?"

Roy gave me a wan smile. "Then, they gather the school in one place, they kneel them down, and they cut their heads with the knife."

 
Steel your heart as you read on:
As U.S. troops leave Iraq, an officer honors the memory of a young interpreter

Finally,
A program note that the movie Restrepo is still making it's way around the nation. This is a movie that almost everyone who see's it will agree should be seen by all Americans.

Piper Bill Millin, 51st Highand Division, RIP

Piper Bill Millin at Sword Beach June 6, 1944

Piper Bill Millin, 2008

As even the youngest of World War II veterans are leaving us in numbers approaching the butcher's bill of D-Day itself, we pause to recognize one whom inspired a country and a culture. Piper Bill Millin known as "Piper Bill" went to join his comrades and play Hielan Laddie for eternity, when he passed the bounds of earth last Wednesday August 17, at Devon, England.

For those who don't know, Bill Millin was the personal piper of Brigadier Simon Fraser, 15th Lord Lovat who led the 1st Special Service Brigade ashore at Sword Beach on D-Day. Lovat ordered Millin to pipe the troops as they stormed the beaches in defiance of an order banning the playing of the pipes. Millin continued to play and marched back and forth along the beach piping as his comrades fell around him. His bravery stunned the Germans, who later claimed that they spared him because they thought him mad. It is worth a moment to pause and read about Piper Millin and reflect on his bravery and perhaps momentary madness as his comrades broke the tide of German invincibility on the sea walls of Normandy so long ago.


Read more:
Piper Bill Millin (14 July 1922 – 17 August 2010)

H-Day Reads

After the somewhat depressing post, looking back from 2050 at how our experence in Afghanistan will end. and entering a second decade of crisis after passing the first, trying to plant western style democacy in the ancient cradle of civilization where the region never really advanced beyond the despots that ruled for the past 5,700 years. Two articles attracted my attention and deserve a deeper look.

The first is from an Op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ms. Ali reminds us of what the late historian Samual Huntington once wrote, and how it relates to the recent controversy surrounding the mosque in New York and other small ripples of conflict between the West and Islam.

What do the controversies around the proposed mosque near Ground Zero, the eviction of American missionaries from Morocco earlier this year, the minaret ban in Switzerland last year, and the recent burka ban in France have in common? All four are framed in the Western media as issues of religious tolerance. But that is not their essence. Fundamentally, they are all symptoms of what the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington called the "Clash of Civilizations," particularly the clash between Islam and the West.

Huntington's argument is worth summarizing briefly for those who now only remember his striking title. The essential building block of the post-Cold War world, he wrote, are seven or eight historical civilizations of which the Western, the Muslim and the Confucian are the most important.

Ms Ali ends her comments with this observation.

The greatest advantage of Huntington's civilizational model of international relations is that it reflects the world as it is—not as we wish it to be. It allows us to distinguish friends from enemies. And it helps us to identify the internal conflicts within civilizations, particularly the historic rivalries between Arabs, Turks and Persians for leadership of the Islamic world.

But divide and rule cannot be our only policy. We need to recognize the extent to which the advance of radical Islam is the result of an active propaganda campaign. According to a CIA report written in 2003, the Saudis invested at least $2 billion a year over a 30-year period to spread their brand of fundamentalist Islam. The Western response in promoting our own civilization was negligible.

Read more:
How To Win The Clash of Civilizations

Iraqi Tribal Map

Afghan Tribal Map

This next read will surly stir some response at least mentally, since it challenges most of the narrative that has been taught the past forty years in U.S. History classes from elementary to the university.

Phillip S. Meilinger a retired Air Force colonel with a PhD in military history penned this next article, posted over at Small Wars Journal. Meilinger takes a unvarnished updated look back at the native societies that populated North America during the Pre-Columbian Era. Backed up by the latest archeological data, Meilinger serves up a concise if somewhat narrow view of tribal culture as it relates to war. In this vein I think it is needed to convey the theme without becoming bogged down in the minutia of this tribe was not as war like at that one. Meilinger opens with this intro.

There is an old saw among political scientists that democracies seldom fight other democracies. Although the accuracy of that statement often hinges on definitions—was 1914 Germany an autocracy because of the Kaiser, or a budding democracy because of an elected Reichstag—it is nonetheless largely valid. It has thus been a tenet of US diplomacy to urge the spread of democracy worldwide. Richard L. Armitage, the former Deputy Secretary of State, said recently in an interview: “every President except John Quincy Adams has been involved in the belief that the world is made better by a U.S that is involved in the protection of human freedoms and human rights across the board.” He went on to assert that “every postwar President has believed we have a duty to spread democracy.”

Cutting to the chase Meilinger contrasts what we now know about the Pre-Columbian cultures living in North America and what most have been taught in the past forty years.

Recent books capitalize on a new cycle of research that began a decade or so ago when archeologists and osteologists looked into Indian prehistory—the two thousand or so years before contact with Europeans. The results have been startling. Researchers discovered that prehistoric hunters/gatherers and indigenous peoples were violent and warlike. Most Indian villages, all over the continent, were surrounded by timber stockades, earthen palisades and berms, and other defensive fortifications.6 Indeed, the supposedly most peaceful of all Native Americans, the Anasazi of the southwest, did after all, often live in barely accessible cliff dwellings carved out of mountain sides. Why would they go to the trouble of hiding their homes and making them so indestructible if they had nothing to fear from each other?

What does this have to do with the war in Afghanistan.

It appears that President Obama also believes that peace and democracy can and sometimes should be imposed on lawless areas, but we need to rethink such a strategy and its implementation. Is democracy a realistic goal in Iraq, Afghanistan or other Islamic countries, and if so, how can it be achieved? Will 34,000 more American ground troops in Afghanistan provide the security and institutions needed to nurture democracy? It would appear that the goal should be to change the mindset and culture of ethnic groups—to accept the notions of diversity, tolerance, freedom and peaceful coexistence. These are not unworthy aims, and their achievement could go a long way to removing the hatred and violence than now reigns in too many areas of the world. The challenge is to determine a methodology for achieving these positive goals.

Read the whole piece
Primitive Violence, Culture, and the Path to Peace

Afghanistan, 2050

August 15, 2050 marked the 35th Anniversary of the fall of Kandahar when the fundamentalist Taliban reclaimed the city and began imposing Sharia Law across the southern half of what had been pre-2015 Afghanistan. The fall of Kandahar marked the end of a fourteen year effort by the United States and a coalition made up of NATO countries to prevent the return of the Taliban regime after the September 11, 2001 attack in New York. The war, by far the longest in U.S. history had claimed 3,149 American wars dead, and had cost over $900 billion in an attempt to keep the frayed and fractured country together while it tried to stop incursions by the Taliban, who were supported by militants in Pakistan and the wealth of oil rich Middle East countries.

The separation, led to a buffer zone extending southwesterly from the Hindu Kush to the Iranian border. Pakistan saw their western tribal region begin to seethe in an attempt to break-away to join in a greater Pashtunistan. After fighting a short war to save face, Pakistan eventually saw this as a positive move, as Pashunistan became a buffer state on its western border and a source for allies in the event of war with India.

An Afghanistan confederation sponsored by the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the United States, survives today, in the old territory of the Northern Alliance and in the enclaves of Tajik, Baluchi, and Hazara. This area encompassed most of the oil and gas reserves and where many discoveries of lithium deposits were found. The foundation for this confederation came from the efforts of the United States to provide what some had dubbed, “Diplomacy by cruise missile” where the threat held to the Taliban’s throat was conventionally assured destruction via missiles and bombs if they violated the rules of the armistice, by undermining or attacking the non-Pashtun areas or sponsoring any kind of global terrorist camps.

The only caveat to this arraignment was that it gave an enormous boost to those elements who believed that they had defeated the infidels. Within two years of the brokered armistice other pan-Islamic fundamentalist groups taking heart in the perceived defeat of modernity, began to strike at the more moderate Gulf States and across Africa. The United States had entered into a period of isolationism brought on by extended long term unemployment and falling revenues that caused a drastic cutback in military spending after the collapse of the dollar as the foreign reserve currency.

This came about as a maturing China, began to see the benefit of creating the world’s largest consumer society that within half a decade, replaced the falling market demands of an economically weakened Europe and America. They realized that by backing other currencies and the Yuen, and ending massive purchases of Treasury bonds that they could constrict the United States ability to project its power, leaving Asia and the Western Pacific under their own sphere of influence.

The resurgence of the United States came after a horrific attack occurred on September 11, 2021 on the twentieth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. A cruise missile attack was launched from ocean containers hidden aboard an unsuspecting container ship, and struck the newly constructed Freedom Tower in New York. The attack came during a Saturday memorial service attended by over 250,000 people. At least 12,604 were killed and 98,000 injured, as four cruise missiles rained down on the tower and gathered crowd. At the same time, suicide attacks occurred in Moscow, Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai and Paris, killing over 10,000 and leaving 150,000 injured from the attacks and panic that followed. Outrage was immediate and the United States began to mobilize in an effort not seen since the beginning of World War II, eighty years earlier. President Hillary Clinton, eight months into her second term, had already earned the title of America’s Margaret Thatcher for her strong foreign policy stand, first revealed during a stint as President Obama’s Secretary of State, made a stirring speech to the nation echoing words spoken eighty years earlier by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. President Clinton had spent her first term trying a blend of old “New Deal” projects and tax incentives to spur education and a return to the work ethic that had brought the United States to the pinnacle of world power. Moderate successes had led to her re-election against strong challenge by Senator Bobby Jindel. In her seventies, Mrs. Clinton rose to the occasion by leading a mobilization of America and enlisting the G-20, to confront those who wanted to send the advancing world hurtling back in time. Clinton’s foreign policy adviser Thomas Barnett had lobbied hard for a “Department of everything else” that could lead efforts to integrate developing nations by creating jobs; the true path to draining the swamp of despair. Clinton and Barnett teamed with Secretary of State Petreaus, created a team reminiscent of Nixon and Kissinger, or Truman and Marshall, as they wove a network of core nations into an alliance to confront the root cause of dissatisfaction among the burgeoning populations of the nations caught at the bottom of the economic and social pyramid.

China came to confront the reality that her aging population and dropping demographics was causing her consumer society dreams to rapidly diminish. She was faced with a need for a strong partner to help secure her global markets and who would not threaten her borders. China chose to return to the one source they recognized as a safe investment, the United States. The mobilization of Americas work force and a growing military, had the same effect World War II had had on the Great Depression. The Decade of Despair (2010-2020), as it was known, quickly ended. Americans feeling truly threatened as never before, banded together to confront the crisis. China recognizing this, and moved to shore up her alliance and protect her markets by forging a security alliance with the United States and the former combatants of World War II, Germany and Japan. In the next chapter, we will discuss how America regained her status as the most advanced and free society known to history

....................................................................................................................................................................
When I was invited to participate in this endeavor, the first thing I thought was that given my age 63, that it is unlikely that I will be around in 2050 to see how history will judge Afthanistan and whether America is mortally wounded by sudden course changes that has left today's Americans disgruntled more than any time since the 1960's. But, my children and grandchildren will be there to witness what really happened and whether it was worth it or just a footnote in a dusty unread history book telling of the end of the American Experience or whether we remain a symbol of hope for the rise of the common person borne on the winds of a multinational economic and political union. So in that vein I remain confident that we will re-purpose our society and hence continue to lead the world towards hope and prosperity.

I fell back to use history as a rhyme instead of repeating itself. If one has read William Strauss and Neil Howe’s Generations, Thomas PM Barnett’s Great Powers, David Kennedy's Freedom From Fear, John Robb’s Brave New War or Joel Kotkin’s The Next 100 Million: American in 2050, you will get a prism with which to view and ponder the future.    

Afghanistan in 2050 is an enigma that may in 2050, look like the last lines of this old cowboy poem.



REINCARNATION

What is reincarnation? The Cowpoke asked his friend

His pal replied it happens when your life has reached its end

They comb your hair and wash your neck and clean your fingernails

And lay you in a padded box away from life's travails

And the box then goes in a hole that's been dug in the ground

And reincarnation starts in when your're planted neath the mound

Then clods melt down, just like the box, and you who is inside

And then you're just beginning on your transformation ride

Meanwhile the grass will grow upon your rendered mound

And soon upon your lonely grave a single flower is found

And then a horse will wonder by and graze upon flower

That once was you and now become your vegetated bower

The posie that the horse done eat along with his other feed

Makes bone and fat and muscle essential to the steed

But some is left that he can't use and so it passes thru

And finally lays upon the ground this thing that once was you

And say by chance I wanders by, and sees this on the ground

And I ponders and wonders at this object that I've found

And I thinks of reincarnation and life and death and such

And I come away concluding you ain't changed all that much.

Crossposted at chicagoboyz

Link to the whole series AFGHANISTAN 2050 ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

Navies, are They Worth It?

1 Trillion Dollars X 7= Cost of protecting Oil Supplies 1976-2007?

Dong Feng 21D

South China Sea

U.S. Navy

The lazy days of August has spread to the blogs as several announce taking a break from the daily flurry of posts that challenge the most proflic reader to keep abreast of all that is happening and discussed in our hyper-connected world.

That said, the slower pace allows for a deeper review of some of the more significant posts and allows time to gin up a few comments. I was drawn a post over at information dissemination where the daily absence of founder Galhran's pen is missed. Fortunately, there is a valuable stable of co-posters who have kept the site a daily must read for anyone interested in naval centric topics.

Bryan McGrath who blogs as The Conservative Wahoo, posted this excellent piece of brain food about the real cost of protecting our oil supplies. He outlines his argument with these relevent points.

1. We are dependent on oil and will be for decades to come. Continuing to invest in robust naval power designed at least in part to ensure the free flow of oil to world markets is a critical national security interest.

2. In the pursuit of defending that flow, we are beholden to many countries with views of modern America that are at best, dubious, and at worst, hostile.

3. Our addiction to foreign oil fattens regimes who are with one hand, accepting our cash, and with the other, funding the world-wide Islamic Jihad.

4. (Here's where things take a course change--stay with me) Continuing to beat the American public over the head with the science of climate change is not going to drive people to change their habits. Too many people are aware that the dinosaurs lived in a warmer world than we, and that there have been ice ages. They believe that CLIMATE CHANGES whether humans contribute or not--irrespective of the evidence. As a behavioral change model, CLIMATE CHANGE is a loser and it will not result in the policy aims it is put forward to support.

5. National Security however, is an effective model for behavioral change. Effective leadership in this country would talk about our dependence on oil as a NATIONAL SECURITY CHALLENGE--citing the bad actors on the other end of the transaction, their stated aims, and their ideological bent. Might we have spent $7.3 trillion on defending the flow of oil from 1976-2007? Maybe--who knows? But we all know we're spending SOMETHING to do that, and we all know it must be a considerable sum.

Read the whole post.
On the Cost of Protecting Oil Supplies

Before we all begin to march on Washington, let's take a step back and examine the cost of not defending the life blood of what built our nation and in turn the modern world.

History is complete with examples of the role and importance of having a strong naval presence. Walking backward, we come to Alfred Thayer Mahan and his seminal book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660-1783.  For people versed in American and naval history this is old school and Mahan's theories have been saturated into their sub-concious minds when discussing modern naval strategy. But the lesson is golden to all novices, when held up against the past.

Looking back further in history we find Spain, enriched with the treasures of the New World and faced with the challenge of transporting them back to the seat of power in Madrid. Spain had a great fleet of Galleons, but were soon plagued by an upstart island nation, who sent forth corsairs like Sir Francis Drake to prey on Spanish shipping. Spain countered by building up their navy to the point that they attempted an invasion of England by the Spanish Armada to try and halt the threat to their sea lanes.

As noted, Spain was defeated and rapidly began to lose the ability to defend the sea lanes and the security of the safe transit of the riches of their far flung colonies. She began to shrivel as a super power and shuffled off into economic collapse, never to regain her once held position in the world.


England, as noted in Mahan's book went on to build the strongest navy the world had ever seen and used it to ensure that the sea lanes would for three centuries, remain almost as safe from brigands as a channel crossing.

The War in the Pacific, was launched by Japan, who must have been reading Mahan's book, because as an island nation their life blood of oil must be brought from across the sea. Japan built a vast navy that in time would challenge the navies of the United States, Great Britain and Holland for the control of the Western Pacific and the seas of Asia. They lost, partly because of a generation of men produced by a naval academy that prayed at the alter of Alfred Thayer Mahan's theories and took them to heart in the decades before Pearl Harbor.

Today, the entire world acknowledged or not, relies on the power of the United States to make sure that the flow of resources and goods has only Mother Nature’s wrath to contend with, as vessels laden with all manner of product criss-cross the planet. Only recently, in the age of political correctness, has piracy used the PC shield to prey on shipping in parts of the world. One thing is certain, a shoot on sight rule and the crushing of pirate lairs would put an end to most piracy, just as it did two hundred years ago.

Is our dominance assured now that we continue to posess a navy that has the ability to defeat any navy or combination of navies in the world today? or as this next post asks, are we beginning to see a new challenge to our dominance that may result in our going the way of other great powers?

This post from the Steeljawscribe and posted on the USNI Blog. illustrates a choke point where naval dominance and careful navigation of both the kenitic and diplomatic skills are needed. Steeljaw writes as only one who has sailed these waters can describe.

At its root it is all about resources — protein to supplement meager domestic harvests and oil to drive economies that governments push to unnatural and unsustainable annual growth. It is about an emergent regional power, poised on the brink of asserting itself as something more, flexing new found muscle in new domains and deepening suspicion of others in the region. . . “It” is a body of water, bounded to the west by Indochina, to the south by Indonesia and the east by the Philippine Islands. A marginal sea, it is the largest body of water after the world’s five oceans, measuring some 3.5 million square kilometers. Bordered by nearby home for over 270 million people.

Through its passages at Malacca and Taiwan, pass great streams of commerce — more than half the world’s supertankers and almost half of the world’s tonnage by most counts. Outward-bound to distant lands with finished products, inbound with the raw wealth drilled, mined, scraped and otherwise pulled from the earth, grist for the shore-bound industries. From crowded, stinking cities and wave-swept shore, fishermen set to sea to bring its bounty back to a waiting family, village or hungry nation. They set sail in everything from small boat to vast maritime industrial fleets, so efficient at harvesting but with so little thought of sustainment. At day’s end, visitor and native alike pause to consider the marvels of a watercolor sky, brushed in deep shades of vermilion and azure from above met by molten gold and dark sapphire from below – merging on the horizon.

Marvelous beauty, marvelous bounty – but alas, one that has seen mighty conflict in its time. From the early days of vessels powered by muscles and fear, to sail and later, plied by great grey hulking beasts that sought out like kind for battle or hurl anger ashore, it has seen war in all its stark, naked rage.

The South China Sea. Nán Hǎi. Dagat Timog Tsina. Laut China Selatan. Biển Đông.

Read more:
Competition in the South China Sea

Now for the up-start who is carefully building their own navy to ensure that the resources that will protect their lifelines will be protected and safe from any nation whom would threaten to cut off their life blood. This next post from the Associated Press, reveals something that sent strategist and tacticians scrambling to analize.

Nothing projects U.S. global air and sea power more vividly than supercarriers. Bristling with fighter jets that can reach deep into even landlocked trouble zones, America's virtually invincible carrier fleet has long enforced its dominance of the high seas.

China may soon put an end to that.

U.S. naval planners are scrambling to deal with what analysts say is a game-changing weapon being developed by China — an unprecedented carrier-killing missile called the Dong Feng 21D that could be launched from land with enough accuracy to penetrate the defences of even the most advanced moving aircraft carrier at a distance of more than 1,500 kilometres (900 miles).

Read the whole piece.
Chinese 'carrier-killer' missile raises concerns of Pacific power shift

Now all this should be enough to provoke one grab a few cold ones and think about the weight of the cost of defending oil supplies against the cost of not defending it and perhaps see ourselves held hostage to the decade of the 70's and the oil embargos.

Collapse? or Will Americans Hear the Fire Bell in the Night?

To borrow from Thomas Jeffersons reference to the slavery, "A Fire Bell In The Night" the posts this week look to the crisis in direction and leadership that seem to threaten America's future.

This week, top billing is awarded to two posts that seem to channel the 2012, End of the World phenomenon.

Leading off is this from Mark of zenpundit who linked a provocative post from Dr. Paul Craig Roberts who in Mark's words.

...penned a short but intriguing American ”collapse” scenario set in the near future. Some of what Roberts writes fits neatly with the thesis in Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies:

Mark goes on to expand on his comments.

Several interesting things here. First, the demagogic front men who are currently engaging in op-ed tirades against public pensions in order to loot them to ostensibly plug state budget deficits will, if successful, use that precedent to go after private pensions, IRAs, 401(k), mutual funds, Social Security, Medicare, Home mortgage interest deduction - any remaining big pot of money in the hands of the middle-class has a big target on it. Secondly, food shortages historically were the spark that set off the French and Russian Revolutions.

 
So far, this post has sparked a healthy set of comments that expand on the original thesis.
 
Read the whole post.
An Interesting "Collaspe' Hypothetical
 
Channeling many of the same scenario is this post by the intrepid naval centric blogger Cdr Salamander who posted this review of an article by historian and author Niall Ferguson. Ferguson foresees the possiblilty of a sudden collaspe of America's fortunes if we continue down the path of un-controlled spending.
 
I will invite the readers to visit the good Commander's site and read the main points he highlights. I will tease you with the CDR's final words.

The view from the outside is often needed.

Things are fixable - but time is money, and we are running out of time to stop this run to the cliff's edge.

Read the whole review and then visit the link for more from Ferguson.
Such is the end of Empires

Scary stuff, that invites more pondering of the situation faced by Americans, used to overcoming huge challenges before. In this next post, also from Zenpundit who gets a major hat/tip for introducing a post by Joseph Fouche of the Commitee of Public Safety.

A wise man once told me that a weakness of our Constitutional system was that the Framers implicitly presumed that people of a truly dangerous character, from bullies to bandits to political menaces to the community, would primarily be dealt with in age-old fashion by outraged neighbors whose rights had been trespassed and persons abused one time too many. They did not prepare for a time when communities would be prohibited from doing so by a government that also, as a whole, had slipped the leash. Indeed, having read Locke, Montesquieu, Cicero, Polybius, Aristotle and Plato, they expected that such a state of affairs was “corruption” of the sort that plagued the Old World and might happen here in time. A sign of cultural decadence and political decay. They gave Americans, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, “A republic, if you can keep it”. It remains so only with our vigilance.

It is happening now.

We have forgotten - or rather, deliberately been taught and encouraged to forget - the meaning of citizenship.

We have let things slip.

Joseph Fouche superbly captures this implicit element, the consequences of the loss of fear of informal but very real community sanction, in his most recent post:

Marks superb introduction, is equaled by Joseph's razor sharp observations.

The Mob of Virtue

Finally comes this example of how an informed  mob can effect change. Read this story of the citizens of a small city in California took back their town.

A True Populist Revolt

In contrast to the dire posts above. This last two show that an engaged and informed citizenery can effect change by peacefully voicing their outrage, or at the ballot box. Time will tell if enough care to put their feeling of entitlement aside and vote as if their childrens future mattered.