Raw Intel

There is absolutely nothing wrong with admitting you were wrong and foolish. It’s OK. You can be fooled by people who take advantage of your good nature. Fair-play and high-trust societies can, if they are not wary, be taken advantage of by bad-faith actors. The key is that when your vision becomes clear about what has happened, you take appropriate action. You learn your lesson, and you carry on in a more productive manner. This did not happen by accident, nor was it inspired by capitalist desire alone, though that was the mechanism. Behold the fruit this tree bears. Via Angus Grigg, Alex McDonald, and Will Nicholas at the Australian Broadcasting Corp. Chinese companies …

The Royal Australian Navy (RAN) has made its decision, and it’s a good one. Via Mike Yeo at Breaking Defense; Australia has selected Japan’s improved Mogami-class frigate design for its future fleet of general-purpose frigates, in a deal with further cements ties between the two US Indo-Pacific allies and gives Japan its first major defense export. “Following a rigorous and competitive tender process, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ Mogami-class frigate was assessed as best able to quickly meet the capability requirements and strategic needs of the Australian Defence Force (ADF),” said the Australian Defence Department in a media release. The Royal Australian Navy (RAN) will…

It is one thing to talk about a "Pacific Pivot" or the importance of the Indo-Pacific theater ... but you signal you are serious by your actions. I think Australia has put down a marker ... and they are making the correct move. They see the Long Game. A three-decades-long Australian naval presence in the Middle East will come to an abrupt end this year as the Federal Government grapples with an increasingly uncertain strategic environment closer to home. Defence Minister Linda Reynolds has announced Australia will no longer send a Royal Australian Navy ship to the Middle East every year. ... The shift was flagged in the Government's recent Defence Strategic Update,…

For a whole host of reasons, Australia needs a potent and numerous submarine force. Geography and potential opponents make the case pretty straight forward. It looks like they are not on a smooth path; As this is written, the head of the French naval construction company Naval Group, Pierre Eric Pommellet, is in Australia meeting federal ministers in an attempt to rescue the contract. Tragically for Australia – and for Monsieur Pommellet – not one of those ministers has the experience or competence to wrangle a successful result. Many informed commentators in France, Australia and elsewhere now expect the much-celebrated deal to be abandoned. If that happens, replacing…

Are we giving China an opening in one of the last places we would want them to be? Maybe ... but if not, at least someone just decided to put down a marker on an important bit of forgotten real estate. Details over at USNIBlog. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/blogspot/FAFV?d=yIl2AUoC8zA http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/blogspot/FAFV?d=qj6IDK7rITs http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/blogspot/FAFV?i=zbWS1ByajDQ:sTdiSLvjIIQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/blogspot/FAFV?i=zbWS1ByajDQ:sTdiSLvjIIQ:-BTjWOF_DHI http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/blogspot/FAFV?i=zbWS1ByajDQ:sTdiSLvjIIQ:V_sGLiPBpWU http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/blogspot/FAFV?i=zbWS1ByajDQ:sTdiSLvjIIQ:F7z…

Here’s Subic Bay back in its US Navy heyday. Here she is today. That isn’t the real change. Look at what is happening on the western side of the bay. 19 years ago in 2006, just some undeveloped bayside. Today? Why is it important? Subic Bay, about 90 kilometers (55 miles) northwest of Manila, sits within striking distance of China. It is roughly 1,100 kilometers (684 miles) from Shenzhen and Taipei, 1,800 kilometers (1,120 miles) from Shanghai, and 2,800 kilometers (1,740 miles) from Beijing, putting it well within the range of China’s intermediate-range ballistic missiles. …and the world is a very different place than it was in the Duterte era. Big things are happening…

One little nugget I’ve said too much that last week or so is that to many in the national security nomenklatura – especially in DC – the process is the product. The measure of effectiveness isn’t the ultimate delivery of useful kit to the fleet, but adherence to the process. Billions upon billions of dollars can be made for years and POM-cycles on end getting ready to think about possible things that might be of some use … maybe. We wind up with dead end programs that produce nothing. No one really is held to account. At the end of the day you have to do one of two things: 1. Like with the fail to transition that was ZUMWALT, you have to restart the legacy ARLEIGH B…

It has long been a dirty little secret that we made a decision to “accept risk” in defending our bases from attack. That momentary bet became a habit…and then part of the environment. The Army, especially during GWOT, didn’t just underfund air defense in general and treat it as a secondary career field—it never even considered what was needed to defend bases. The USAF? No better…and they relied on the Army for air defense. It was only 18 months or so ago they started to experiment with base defense. In the halls of the Pentagon, the military historians and Red Teams lost the argument to the accountants and the pet theories of The Smartest People in the Room™. When things …

For me, it is funny but serious that the phrase I started saying in 2019 that we were going to keep building Arleigh Burke DDGs “until the crack of doom” has turned into prophecy. With the anticipated death of DDG(X) and FFG-62, the Burkes are about the only game in town. That fact naturally flows into a point we have raised here and on the Midrats Podcast for the last couple of decades: How are we going to conduct repair and maintenance under combat conditions should we find ourselves in a fight west of the International Date Line? Well, we’ve got the perfect intersection of both issues for the next episode of Midrats. This RAND Report from May caught my eye: The Arle…

For almost two years, the war on the Continent had been raging. The Battle of Verdun has already happened, but the real bloodshed had not even started yet, with the Battle of the Somme only a month away. While the European land armies have been fighting on a scale not seen since Napoleon a century earlier, major conflicts at sea were rare in spite of the major belligerents having great and powerful fleets. Like two heavyweight boxers wary of each other, the surface fleets of the Royal Navy and the Kaiserliche Marine stared at each other across the North Sea, throwing a jab here or there, but not committing for a hard fight. Then, in the early morning hours of May 31st, Vi…

For obvious reasons, the navalists amongst us (guilty) have an ear out for Odessa. Not only is it the last significant port on the Black Sea under the control of Ukraine, it has a history from the dawn of time as the key to any conflict in this area. The Russians must take it during this campaign. As such, this got my attention today; The Ukrainian military is reporting Russian warships in the Black Sea are shelling villages near the coast close to the nearby port city of Odesa. These attacks specifically targeted the settlements of Lebedivka, Sanzheika, Zatoka, and Bilenke, according to a Wednesday Facebook post from Ukraine’s General Staff of the Armed Forces. These vi…

The last year has seen a growing bi-partisan consensus that the United States and the People's Republic of China are in competition to set the global order for the next century. After a year to firmly set in the minds of national security leaders on both sides of the aisle, we find ourselves at a moment when Congress and the Executive branch of government are both in the mood to strengthen our nation and expand job opportunities by opening the door for more spending. Why haven't we seen the logical connection between the two? To explain the importance of this moment in time is returning guest poster, Bryan McGrath. Bryan, over to you. In a speech in Pittsburgh Wed…

Did you catch Biden's speech where he introduced him nomination for Secretary of Defense? In it, if you look at a certain angle, you can see an outline of what you can expect from him - broadly - for national security priorities. I have quotes and details over at USNIBlog. Come by and give it a read and tell me what you think. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/blogspot/FAFV?d=yIl2AUoC8zA http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/blogspot/FAFV?d=qj6IDK7rITs http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/blogspot/FAFV?i=jU_INXPF9fs:1AVju-Le09Y:gIN9vFwOqvQ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/blogspot/FAFV?i=jU_INXPF9fs:1AVju-Le09Y:-BTjWOF_DHI http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/blogspot/FAFV?i=jU_INXPF9f…

We live in an era where in the blink of an eye we've gone from flip-phones to smart phones with the capabilities of both supercomputers a generation ago and entire movie studios in your back pocket. In that same time frame, what happened to the promised integration and operational utilization of aircraft carrier based drones - or Unmanned Aircraft Systems, or whatever we are calling them this week? This Sunday we are going to dive deep in to the topic and problem with our guests Trevor Phillips-Levine, Noah Spataro, and Andrew Tenbusch. We will use as the starting point for our conversation their recent article in War on the Rocks, "Winged Luddites: Aviators are the Bigge…

Our Navy would be such a more powerful force if we had kept with the mindset of the Aegis and Standard Missile evolution. Bit by bit, step by step, increment by increment, baseline by baseline, we got a stronger, more effective Navy. A few hiccups like in any long running program ... but the success is undeniable. The latest example; In a first-of-its-kind test, the United States has successfully used a small ship-fired missile to intercept a target Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), according to the Missile Defense Agency. The successful test shows the U.S. military now has another missile defense system capable of defending against North Korean ICBM’s…

The greatest tragedies from war, both directly and indirectly, are those that were clearly foreseen, knowable, or otherwise clear as day to anyone who wanted to see them. They did not happen in the shadows, they were allowed to happen because people with access to levers of power did not want to expend personal, professional, or real capital to take steps to prevent something that would be too horrible to think of should they come to pass. Little pain now to avoid great pain later is a more difficult concept to accept than it seems. The world in complicated. It is a human failing to not want to expend effort NOW to prevent something that will force harder effort in the fu…

More than once, mostly on the Midrats Podcast, I have said something to the effect, “Bravo Zulu to the Iranian engineering team who developed the Shahed. Everyone is copying them left, right, and sideways. Even the Americans are trying to steal their engineering valor.” Well, belay my last: I was not just wrong, but mind-numbingly wrong. Let’s set the record straight. The Shahed drone is as American as apple pie—OK, perhaps apple strudel! The Dornier Drohne Anti-Radar (DAR) was an unmanned aerial vehicle developed by Dornier GmbH to detect and destroy enemy radar installations, especially those used for air defense, within a defined target area. The development project w…

As a mercantile republic - that is our natural state, don't forget that - our ultimate power is not our military. It is the byproduct of our system of government and the values we like to believe our nation was founded on. It is something that for too long was taken for granted. Yes, there is much ruin in a nation, and the substance of that ruin is the hard work of generations that came before. Work to build a stable society, a vibrant economy where people who work hard are rewarded with the fruits of their labor. As secure society where people can plan their lives and that of their children in the knowledge that threats both foreign and domestic will be kept at bay. Almo…

For those who missed the previous announcements, please read the previous posts for the details, but after 18 2/3 years here, I will no longer be posting on blogspot. Worry not, just click here to go to substack. That is where I'll be. View the full article

As of Monday night, after a bunch of OSIT accounts said that the USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77) had passed through Gibraltar, more and more reports indicate the contrary, she and her escorts are off Namibia, about to head around the Cape of Good Hope instead. It was kind of fun watching the competing reports. There are quite a few reasons to do this. We’ll find out the reason this time at some point, but don’t get lost in the details. It isn’t nothing. As usual, The Other Sal went to the chartroom to make sure everyone understood the state of play. Stop for a second—there is a gift here if we are willing to accept it. Remember one of the fundamentals we like to revisit her…