This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Defense cuts

  • Navy spending $26.75/gl for biofuels

    Everyone’s favorite Navy Secretary, Ray Mabus, was on the Hill this week getting yelled at by some House Republicans for putting Obama’s political considerations before his Department’s war fighting considerations. But what else is new? Most of the Politico article’s premise, the Navy’s “green energy” program, is old news for TAH readers but a few specific things caught my eye.

    The U.S. must move away from its dependence on foreign oil, and the Navy’s clean-energy projects, including investments in algae-based biofuels, “have made us better warfighters,” Mabus said, explaining that for every $1 increase in oil prices per barrel, the Navy pays and additional $31 million in fuel costs.

    “That means that our sailors and Marines steam less, train less, fly less,” Mabus said. “For these reasons, we have to be relentless in our pursuit of energy goals that will continue to make us a more effective fighting force and our military and our nation more energy independent.”

    And yet the article goes onto explain that not only is the Navy spending about 600% more on bio fuel that’s not economically viable but it’s doing so for non-military related reasons.

    The efforts for a greener Navy don’t come cheap. In December, the service purchased 450,000 gallons of biofuels at $26.75 per gallon, POLITICO Pro reported. The biofuels were then mixed with petroleum-based fuels, typically costing just a few dollars a gallon.
    One of the reasons behind the Navy’s investment in the more-expensive biofuels is to promote domestic alternative-energy production. Navy leaders contend that a vibrant clean-energy industry in the United States could protect the fleet from spikes in fuel prices.

    Last I checked that’s what the Strategic Oil Reserve is for. At least when it isn’t being tapped into to lower needlessly inflated gas prices during an election year.

    It’s truly Orwellian to have the Secretary come out and say that the Navy needs to use these biofuels to save money during budget cuts and improve their ability to fight wars then immediately concede that not only is the program increasing costs, but it’s being pursued in the context of the White House’s heavily politicized (and corrupt) strategic energy policy. I mean the guy was raising a fuss over a fuel type fluctuating by a dollar a gallon and then turning around and spending $20 more a gallon to replace it. They tried to hedge a bit by saying that the Navy needs to “be ready” for when these fuels aren’t heinously inefficient and expensive. But we’ve been hearing for 15 years how biofuels and other alternate energy sources are “just a few years” away from being economically viable. Fast forward to 2012 and the Navy is shelling out $26 bucks for something it could be paying about $4 for.

    In case you’re not sufficiently offended by the intellectual dishonesty, here’s a moral outrage to ice the cake: Mabus finished off his political dance by invoking the memory of past, and the specter of future, Marine casualties.

    Leaders of the Marine Corps also have focused more on energy in recent years — a result of the high cost of moving huge volumes of fuel to U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan. Currently, the corps consumes more than 200,000 gallons a day there.
    “For every 50 convoys we bring in in fuel, a Marine is killed or wounded,” Mabus told lawmakers last month. “That is too high a price to pay.”
    In all, about 3,000 U.S. troops or contractors have been killed or wounded protecting convoys, POLITICO has reported. Roughly 80 percent of convoys carry fuel.
    The Marine Corps has set two major energy goals: to cut its battlefield requirements for energy by half by 2025 and to have half its bases produce as much energy as they consume by 2020.

    Now I’m all for creating renewable sources of power for bases overseas to cut usage if the systems make sense. But if you’re going to start using my dead friends to push your boss’s energy policy on behalf of good vibes for his political base you better make damn sure you’re not doing so while spending an extra $12 million a year on fuels with lower BTUs than traditional petrol and so actually INCREASING the number of convoys required to meet our military’s energy needs.

  • PolitiFact busted, again

    Politifact, the nominally non-partisan “fact checker” which takes a statement by a politician, surveys a group of “experts” of their own choosing and then coughs up a “truth-o-meter” score, has landed in hot water, again. Previously it was when the liberal media establishment got all asshurt over Politifact calling the claim that Republicans were trying to end Medicare the “Lie of the Year”, much to the amusement of columnists like Mark Hemingway over at The Weekly Standard. Hemingway had previously worked to expose so called “fact checking” organizations as being fundamentally misrepresentative highlighting, among other things, the absurdity of using AP reports as the arbiter of proper military analysis after Politifact went after Romney on a Iran statement.

    This time around it again concerns our military.
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  • Shrinking the Corps for its own sake?

    Marine Corps Maj Peter J. Munson, a C-130 driver, Naval Postgraduate School alum and self-proclaimed Middle East expert, put forward a “right sizing” argument in the Marine Corps Gazette today calling for the Corps to shrink down even farther in order to stay relevant. The core of his understanding of the proper role of the Marine Corps is this:

    …the Corps must define the niche that it intends to fill in a competitive market. That niche is primarily defined by its amphibious nature, but it is also defined by highly mobile, lightweight infantry forces, task-organized (MAGTF) and scalable to conduct independent operations (to a defined upper limit), utilizing combined arms and robust command and control capabilities to “punch above its weight”, and capable of expeditionary operations in both littoral and inland areas (through use of strategic maneuver). The Marine Corps is prepared to operate independently to the extent that it is forward deployed and prepared to conduct crisis response (i.e. a MEU and nothing larger). This statement requires some work, but this should be what the Marine Corps does, period. Strip away everything that does not contribute to this niche and either trash it or hand it off to other services.

    With the budget driven cancelling of the EFV the Corps has been left without an amphibious platform viable in a 21st century combat enviroment. Now correct me if I’m wrong but, once you cut out the service specific lingo and the amphibious capability, isn’t he essentially describing SOCOM? What mission falls into that field that can’t be accomplished by a Ranger Batt with specifically tasked aviation assets?

    There’s over 2,500 SEALs running around who are going to be largely unemployed once the war in Afghanistan is over. You think the Navy is going to cough up their amphib raid and VBSS missions? I don’t. Marines are off ship as an operational component of the crew and they’re not coming back. The Navy has barely been able to get the Marines to maintain the Security Forces Regiment which guards, and acts as a QRF for, all the critical installations and assets, i.e. nukes.

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  • Laying the political groundwork for devastating security disinvestment and defense sector job cuts

    They’re coming. They’re real. After the initial rounds of cuts initiated by the Democrats and then the bi-partisan failure to insulate our national defense from indiscriminate slash and burn budgeting we are now on the precipice of the enfeebled 90’s military with 21st century commitments and enemies. The cynical tilling of the field for these cuts by the anti-military Left has been deliberate and systematic.

    Not to say that the adolescent libertarian Right is without blame. Welcome to the hell paved with stupid intentions. Any doubt about the cross-cultural nature of this stupidity can be quickly remedied by simple Google searches. Yep, that’s the perennially useless Barney Frank side by side with Chemtrail hero Ron Paul. Go get ’em guys!

    We should start with the testing ground of all new talking points in politics, the internet. Here we have on the “Real News Network’s” hosting the unbiased Jo Comerford of the “National Priorities Project“, going on about military cuts:

    A significant yet tired piece of propaganda emerges from this video. Comerford begins with, and ultimately relies upon, the idiot’s impression of the federal budget: that federal discretionary spending constitutes the most important, even most substantial, portion of government spending. It’s important to note that after her tired charade, which attempts to impress on the viewer that the portion of federal spending which constitutes military spending is the lion’s share, the circus master chimes in around the 3:00 minute mark with the reinforcing: “…because the military represents such a bigger portion of the overall budget.”

    Oh, really?

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  • Panetta: Our post-cuts military a “spoiler” force

    The front page of my New York Times greeted me this morning with this headline above the fold:

    Panetta to Offer Strategy Cutting Military

    Oh, good. Panetta, who I really don’t think is all that bad a guy, testified in November that forcing the military to take an additional $500 some billion cut, past the already pending $450 billion, would be “devastating” to the military and pose a “substantial risk” to national security. He underscored the point that our defense budget is reflective of the threat we face and reducing military spending by a trillion dollars won’t reduce the threat level, only create an enviroment were we are unable to respond to it. His most prophetic statement was this:

    …we would have to formulate a new security strategy that accepted substantial risk of not meeting our defense needs.

    Fast forward less than two months to today where the unholy alliance of “burn it all down” libertarian Republicans and anti-military liberal Democrats have produced an environment in which the sabotage of our military and its members wasn’t significant enough incentive to reach a deal. According to the NY Times:

    In a shift of doctrine driven by fiscal reality and a deal last summer that kept the United States from defaulting on its debts, Mr. Panetta is expected to outline plans for carefully shrinking the military — and in so doing make it clear that the Pentagon will not maintain the ability to fight two sustained ground wars at once.

    Instead, he will say that the military will be large enough to fight and win one major conflict, while also being able to “spoil” a second adversary’s ambitions in another part of the world while conducting a number of other smaller operations, like providing disaster relief or enforcing a no-flight zone.

    Pentagon officials, in the meantime, are in final deliberations about potential cuts to virtually every important area of military spending: the nuclear arsenal, warships, combat aircraft, salaries, and retirement and health benefits.

    For those who remember history it was our “peace dividend” post World War Two “spoiler” force which was left to defend South Korea as an avalanche of North Korea soldiers flooded the peninsula before finally being stopped at Pusan by an ad-hoc fire brigade of old World War Two Marines brought together from every naval garrison and motor pool in the world. Once you get over the 100,000 wounded and 37,000 dead Americans it was a triumphant spoiler of a conflict. The millions of North Koreans living in a waking nightmare this very moment might have some other thoughts but hey, guns or butter, right?

  • The looming Obama/Paul military massacre (Part 1)

    An unholy alliance has been formed in Washington D.C.

    Libertarian Republicans and liberal Democrats are moving to both destroy the military and cut off at the knees the families who have given the most this past decade. The first person to sound the alram in the mass media was former President George W. Bush’s Ambassador to the UN John Bolton in July of 2011:

    Every indication is that the debt-ceiling negotiations are leaving the defense budget in grave jeopardy. By exposing critical defense programs to disproportionate cuts as part of the “trigger mechanism,” there is a clear risk that key defense programs will be hollowed out.

    While the trigger mechanism comes into play only if the Congressional negotiators fail to reach agreement on the second phase of spending cuts, it verges on catastrophe to take such a national security risk.

    Defense has already taken hugely disproportionate cuts under President Obama, and there is simply no basis for expanding those cuts further. Republican negotiators must hold the line, since the Obama Administration plainly will not.

    He spoke out again making it clear that if (when) the so called Super-Committee failed the DoD and its membership would be left devastated.

    In the deal’s second stage, the yet-to-be-named Congressional Joint Commission will have wide discretion on what to agree on, but if no agreement or only partial agreement is reached, the deal’s sequestration mechanism will be triggered. Broadly speaking, if that happens, defense spending will bear fifty percent of the total cuts, with non-defense spending bearing the remaining fifty percent, up to the amount necessary to raise the debt ceiling by the minimum $2.4 trillion required by the deal. This approach risks grave damage to our national security.
    There is no strategic rationale whatsoever for cuts of this magnitude. There is, in fact, every strategic rationale to the contrary. While the appropriations process may still be able to decide which specific programs will be cut, this is no consolation. Cuts of this size are effectively indiscriminate.

    It’s at this point in which I know I don’t actually need to remind this readership of this blog where the true burden of our tax dollars rest. I’d hope we all know where the rest of this is heading…

    I’ll sound the alarm now for the 6.1 million of you whose jobs are tied into defense. Your time is coming in what is referred to by insiders as the coming train wreck. Entire US companies are looking to get out of the business of defending the United States and taking their people elsewhere.
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