A lot of people have asked when you can safely say that Trump is a dictator. The fact that his party is willing to spend $17 billion to fund a white elephant wunderwaffen that everyone knows is a boondoggle just to humor him and avoid his wrath, even as the country is losing a war, seems like all the proof we needed.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/america-fascism-trump-maga-ice/685751/
Yes, It’s Fascism
Until recently, I thought it a term best avoided. But now, the resemblances are too many and too strong to deny.
Or maybe it was also was before and you just weren’t paying attention, Mr. Atlantic writer.
At this point, trump is just accelerating the military industrial complex eating itself. The whole bullshit with the embarrassingly openly corrupt SIG Sauer deal for a new rifle platform, Lockheed absolutely dragging their ass in deploying the F35, weapons manufacturers in a race to cram as much expensive bullshit as possible in their missles and “smart bombs”, the consolidation of suppliers making fewer points of failure in logistics, etc. Hell, I can only think of one and a half things the us military has done recently that actually make some form of sense: that new Vortex scope is actually kinda cool af, and the F35 program is actually a good idea with decent hardware, just absolute bullshit execution, though. In any case, already not looking great with the wildly unnecessary transition to a new rifle cartridge and compounding supply issues.
Then there’s trump.
All those super expensive missles we already have trouble scaling up production of? All gone. Don’t worry, the contractors are gonna make a killing on resupplying those shits.
Ability to use allied countries for resupply? lol, byeeeeeee
Wasting military resources on bullshit political theater? You better believe it!
Trying to bring back naval warships that have been obsolete since fucking World War 2? Well, here we are.
Pity the vortex only exists in the same way that Armata does; yes, a few people have seen one, but they’re not actually being deployed anywhere in meaningful numbers. Even the units issued the M7 still don’t have them.
And their actual practical benefit is… Questionable. I regularly interact with Canadian combat arms, and it’s notable that the people who actually do frontline stuff think the Vortex sounds like ass. None of them have the slightest interest in a scope that claims to aim for you.
Then again, those same people have been deployed alongside US military, and been OPFOR in training exercises against them, they’ve seen them shoot, and they were not impressed. Consensus in the CAF is that US marksmanship is dogshit. So I guess I can see the appeal of a device that attempts to replace training with technology, provided that the training you’re replacing is really, really bad.
My guess is they tried to distract him from attacking greenland, nuking iran, performing coitus with putin by giving him small play projects. Like designing warships. They can postpone actually building this thing until he’s out.
they can postpone actually building this thing until he’s out.
I cannot even begin to sufficiently emphasize how wrong this is.
First off, to be clear, these are design changes to carriers that are already in production. These aren’t future projects, these are decades in the making projects that are finally coming to fruition. This is literally Trump asking them to stop work on a ship that is half built so that they can redesign it. And we’re talking major redesigns here. The kind that involve basically scrapping everything you’ve built and starting again.
What’s worse is that these are ships that are already seriously delayed, and very seriously needed. Carriers are the primary mode of power projection and the core of every naval battlegroup. A carrier is basically a floating forward operating base. They are vital and essential, and most of the 11 in service today were built before the turn of the century. Some are fifty years old.
The original plan for the Gerald Ford class called for one ship to be built every five years. That began in earnest in 2009. Seventeen years later they have… One.
That’s really bad. A ship that is supposed to take five years to build, on average, is currently sitting at over fifteen. Now, to be fair, production speeds on anything start slow and improve with time as you get the process down, but even allowing that caveat, the Gerald Ford class is very, very badly behind schedule. The original projections were for the Nimitz class to be fully retired by 2058. The US is about a third of the way towards that deadline and 1/11th of the way towards that production goal.
So what Trump wants to do now is take three currently in production carriers, all of them desperately needed, all of them seriously delayed, and throw out all the work that’s been done because he doesn’t like their aesthetics.
This is a disaster for the US Navy, one that compounds upon decades of disasters. The last fifty years of US shipbuilding have been failure upon failure upon failure. The Zumwalt and the Litoral Combat Ship, both intended to revolutionize the Navy, both reduced to production runs of two or three ships, left hanging on to the fleet like useless vestigial appendages. The new frigate, cancelled because the Navy couldn’t stop over-designing the damn thing, leaving the US with an up-gunned coastguard ship as their potential new frigate instead. The new destroyer, a desperately needed replacement for the ancient Arleigh-Burke, left on life support after its budget was pilfered so that Trump can have a battleship.
Other than the Gerald Ford, the US Navy basically hasn’t successfully produced a new design of ship in decades. Meanwhile China is pumping out Type 55 frigates by the dozens. it will not be long before the US is thoroughly outgunned at sea. And worse still, those creaking old Arleigh-Burkes have hit the absolute limits of their hull and power plant. Future upgrades? Forget it. You won’t be mounting lasers or railguns on an Arleigh-Burke. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very good ship, but it’s at the limit of its design. The new Chinese ships are not.
Even Trump’s battleship is a monumental problem, because it’s pulling vital resources away from all of the projects that actually need it. And because of its immense size and the recently added requirement for a nuclear power plant, actually building it will require the same facilities that are currently building the Gerald Fords. So you’ve got the vast majority of all shipbuilding resources now being focused on two ships that literally cannot be built simultaneously. Meanwhile shipyards that could be putting out new destroyers or frigates are doing nothing because there are no new designs to build, and the expertise and money needed to make those new designs has been co-opted.
The clock is ticking, and the US Navy was already running out of time a decade ago. They are in serious danger of no longer being able to pose a credible threat to China at all. The fact that the US currently does not have a carrier in the South China Sea, for the first time in decades, is absolute proof of that. There has never been a time in history when the Navy could less afford to let an idiot child play ship designer.
He starts each day with a Chili’s kids menu and some crayons, and a Diet Coke if he doesn’t eat any of the crayons. That’s where his designs come from.
carrier reflecting pools
Excellent work, Comrade Krasnov!
You know I was going to say the Russian Kleptocracy doesn’t use comrade anymore but it turns out Putin, specifically, does, because he’s a weird old guy.
