Hugh Hewitt: Navy Should Save Trump in 2020 AKA "Let's formally corrupt the state"

[Skroe]

All is not well in the neofascist trashpile kingdom of Donald J Trump. Objectively speaking, as a matter of policy he hasn't delivered a win to his supporters / movement in close to a year (Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation). In that time he's managed to:

• - decisively lose an midterm election that had the biggest turnout in over a century,
• - sustain his record 93% loss rate in courts when it comes to over turning regulations.
• - completely fold to Democrats on the shut down that he started and got blamed for (and Moscow Mitch didn't want).
• - had the latest (3rd overall) two year bipartisan budget deal put in front of him, thus acceding to Nancy Pelosi and Moscow Mitch's compromise vision of government... that isn't the Trump vision at all (Trump wasn't involved in negotiations).
• - seen his cruel, inhumane and un-American border policy suffer a near unbroken string of legal defeats
• - found himself internationally isolated on almost every global issue, from Iran to ISIS to economic matters. He and his administration is a global pariah.
• - overseen a rise in demand for Gun Control the point even Republicans are talking about some basic measures.
• - Seen the Mueller report land, which fingered his campaign for soft Collusion, and he for engaging in at least 10 acts of obstruction. The impeachment inquiry is ongoing, and Donald Trump will likely go down in history as the third President ever impeached.
• - And most relevant to him, seen a complete collapse of support in crucial rust-belt states he carried in 2016, to the point it is likely unrecoverable.

And to make matters worse, his trade war will likely throw the economy into recession by the Spring or Summer of next year. Expect the holidays to show ~<1% growth.

Objectively, he's in a lot of trouble. Which is causing him and his cult to panic. Hence the latest round in White Supremacist hate speech. Hence trying to weaponize US-Israeli relations against democrats. Hence buying the truly and delectably insane idea Greenland. And unlike most Presidents, who when they leave office can expect a book deal, Donald Trump knows that losing in 2020 means epic personal legal jeopardy in 2021.

Which leads us to his supporters (we'll be getting to Hugh Hewitt), which, because this is a cult, is throwing themselves on top of their cult leader.

In order to understand what I'm about to post with respect to ol' Hugh, and take a deeper look into why shit like he wrote gets written, we must consider the zoology of the Trump Cult. I don't mean voters in 2016. I mean the people who support him now. There are about four major types.

First, is the "True Believers". These are the every day folk you see interviewed or at rallies. Almost uniformly white, disproportionately male, working class, without any college, and rural. These people, against all evidence and reason, legitimately and in good faith support Trump. He says things they like, and they cheer him for it. Without getting too deep into it, yes, a lot of it is driven bey economic, racial, cultural and regional resentment. These are the kind of people who think that working class know-how from fly-over states has more authentic knowledge and expertise than educated "coastal elites" who they see (very wrongly) as uniformly liberal. They have deep biases against minorities. They think America can't be racist anymore because we had a black President. This is the crowd that basks in their ignorance and parochialism. This is the crowd that hates "big government" and "government spending", while disproportionately depending on government services.

Second is the the "Trolls". These people are essentially nihilists. They don't take politics, the problems this country has, or economic / global issues seriously. They exist in an impenetrable bubble world that extends about 10 feet around them in all directions. They are mostly defined by their grievances. "Liberals" (which lets be clear, is their perception of what liberals actually are, which includes many pre-Trump conservatives) piss them off one way or another. It could be because one too many youtube videos by the Ben Crowder / Ben Shapiro alt-reich crowd has caused them to generally the occasional asshole liberal professor at some no name school as "everyone not them". It could be because they're diagnosibly paranoid and really think government is coming for them and their guns. It could be because life experience has just led them to a point where they hate people who basically aren't exactly like them. Regardless how they got their, negative emotions to other things - reaction in a word - defines their political philosophy (such as it is), and they support Trump largely because they like how Trump inflicts pain, hardship and grief on people. They see it all as not a big deal, but simultaneously "hate" it all, and see Trump as some kind of deserved punishment to people they don't like. Regardless of how fucked it is, they support him because he makes people they don't like uncomfortable.

You may recall people taking pleasure in this poor woman, who... you know... took it too a bit too far.


Yeah. The people who did that are fundamentally pretty bad people at heart, and are trolls. I empathize with her. And she should have chilled. But some deeply awful people took delight in her pain, which is pretty sick.

Third is the "Hucksters". This is the level in which we start moving above every day people and more into the the far smaller group of political players (big and smaller) who you can probably google. Trump has been a godsend for a legion of extremely low quality, low talent, largely malignant, pettily corrupt, D-listers. These are the used car salesman who a decade ago would spend $2500 at a dinner to take a 10 second picture with Dick Cheney and try into parlay that into political influence. These are the people create dummy accounts on various sites to offer testimonial to their own alleged-achievement. These are the Twitter-policos, many of whom are women, who appeal to lonely right wing men and try to parlay political agreement into the selling of merch. These are hustlers and swindlers. These are the people who say "proudly retweeted by Sean Hannity". Many of these people only support Trump in a sense in that he's their meal ticket. Business is good for them, because he is President. At the elite level of this, you have the nobodies from nowhereville... the 4th rate talent Donald Trump stacked his White House with. A step down you have the many formerly little known figures who have built a lucrative career entirely defending Donald Trump. When you wonder why there are now so many right wing Talk-Radio Trump supporting people on TV doing talking head bits, not named Rush Limbaugh, this is it. The sincerity of their belief is besides the point. They support - and will continue to support - Trump, first and foremost, because they line their pockets off of him.

Fourth is the "Notice Me Senpais". This is a rather small contingent, but notable because of who is on the list. There is some overlap with the other three groups. These are figures whose support for Donald Trump is largely based around having access to power, and they will do whatever they can to have access to that power and influence. Some of it is ideological. Some of it is money driven (hence the overlap with the hucksters). A large portion of it is corrective. This section is filled by ex-Never Trumpers, Republicans who were neutral in 2016, and Republicans at the relative start of their career trying to make a name for themselves. Their entire shickt is to (largely insincerely) preach the President's "political religion" to all who will hear. For some it is corrective - to atone for transgressing against Lord Trump in the past. For others it is purely career motivated - Trump is now the Republican Party, so you toe the party line. The objective here is to say things in support of Trump loudly in hopes that an adviser will put the headline on Trump's morning briefing (which is all headlines), will Summarize to the President, will be retweetwed by the President or a supporter, or will in some small way career build.

Which brings us, at least, to the specimen that is Hugh Hewitt.

Pre-Trump, Hugh Hewitt is basically an older Ben Shapiro. He is a stupid person's idea of a smart person. But while Ben Shapiro, a Breitbart troll who escaped the internet, barely qualifies as a yellow belt in any sort of debate (see: his amazing and enduringly discrediting BBC performance vs Andrew Neil), Hugh Hewitt is more subtle and careful. this is due in no small part to Hewitt's background in talk radio and actual politics, unoike Ben Shapiro, who frankly, in a more just universe, would just be one of those screaming twitter twits that writes "FAMILY GOD AND COUNTRY. MAGA #2A".

But being more careful doesn't make Hugh Hewitt any less inane, as evidenced by his latest gem in the Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...?noredirect=on

How the Navy could be torpedoing Trump’s chances in 2020

Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were the most surprising states that turned from supporting President Barack Obama in 2012 to voting for Donald Trump in 2016, and they were critical to putting him in the White House. The 2020 election is looking very much like a three-state race again, with the same trio playing the deciding role.

Florida and Ohio are not likely to be in play — the 2018 midterm results confirmed their deepening red hue. And Democratic hopes of flipping Texas or Arizona are in the same category with Republican plans to turn New Hampshire or Colorado: perhaps, but not likely.

When it comes time to defend his red wall along the Great Lakes, President Trump is going to come face to face with the consequences of his Pentagon leadership’s failure to implement his oft-promised 355-ship Navy (up from 290 today).

Pennsylvania workers make many of the essentials that go into ships, including shafts manufactured in Erie and cooling systems in York. Every time the Navy awards a contract for a new ship, the president or vice president should be at one of these facilities talking about the jobs the contracts will provide. But the Navy hasn’t been issuing those contracts, so the president can’t make those announcements.

The Navy could have gone big — still could still go big — in Philadelphia. To extend the life of the existing fleet, a person familiar with the planning tells me, the Navy must perform roughly 100 more ship dockings in the next decade than current dock space can accommodate. Philly Shipyard has the capability to build floating dry docks to make up for this shortfall. Why isn’t Trump announcing a plan to expand the Navy’s dry-dock infrastructure while standing in Philly Shipyard?

Wisconsin benefits from Navy shipbuilding in two ways. First, there is the shipyard in Marinette that creates jobs in both Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The Fincantieri Marine Group is a bidder on the new 20-ship Navy FFG(X) guided-missile frigate program, but politics cannot take precedence over ship design, so the contract is not guaranteed to land lakeside in Wisconsin. The least Trump could do, though, is insist that the Navy pick up the pace of its dreadfully slow design competition.

The Fincantieri Marinette Marine is already under contract to build four Multi-Mission Surface Combatant ships for Saudi Arabia. More work would be sent Wisconsin’s way if the Trump administration could persuade the Saudis to increase their order or bring other countries, such as Israel, on board.


Incredibly, Michigan ranks near the bottom of all the states when defense spending is calculated as a percentage of a state’s GDP — 47th out of 50 in fiscal year 2017 for what was once the arsenal of democracy. Per-resident defense spending in Michigan that year was a paltry $386, compared with $1,554 in Oklahoma.


When the Air Force decided in 2017 not to base F-35A fighter aircraft at Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Michigan, it missed an easy way to achieve some equity in the distribution of defense-industry dollars in the states. Trump could direct the Pentagon to reverse that decision.

The Navy’s plans for a new “large unmanned surface vessel” calls for a ship which could be built at a Great Lakes facility; near Detroit makes sense, if only out of fairness to a state that has been largely ignored in the Trump military rebuild. Given the likely long-term need for many of these ships in the future, a new facility could be planted and grown along with the program. It pains this Buckeye to say so, but somewhere along the Michigan coast next door to Ohio would be equitable.

A focus on Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin need not be limited to the Defense Department. Recently, Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) pushed successfully for the planned relocation of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management to Grand Junction, Colo., in a brilliant move to bring bureaucrats closer to the citizens they regulate and whom they are supposed to serve. Sending large parts of the Environmental Protection Agency to Flint, Mich., or nearby locations would drive home the same message.

Trump has the chance to drain the swamp while making government agencies much more attuned to the people in flyover country. But he must act soon.

Yet, it is really the Navy’s utter failure to deliver even a bare-bones plan to realize the president’s promise of a 355-ship Navy that ought to rankle the commander in chief. A new chief of naval operations will arrive soon. The president ought to have waiting on his desk copies of the speeches in which he promised, and then promised again, a 355-ship Navy, along with the slogan famously used by Winston Churchill scrawled with the black Sharpie that Trump likes to use: “Action this day!”

So let me explain what is going on here.

The US Navy needs to grow from about 285 ships to 355 ships over the next decade and a half. Likely far more than that. Now you may think "the navy just as ships, how hard can that be?". Well no. Every ship is scheduled for a roughly set number of deployments in its life, with a fairly firm retirement date. Like owning your car, which has to be maintained and fueled, there is a cost of ownership to the Navy to a ship too. So when a ship is scheduled to be retired after 25 years, they're gonna stop doing major upgrades after around year 17, major maintenance after around year 21, so it can be retired without wasteful end-of-life spending, and make room in the budget for a new ship that will enter the same time. To offer a simple example, the Navy is retiring 1980s-eras Los Angeles class attack submarines while taking ownership of modern Virgina class attack submarines.

The process of rotating out while bringing some in makes growing the fleet hard. There are basically two ways of doing on. Way one means your build rate has to exceed your retirement rate. This is very difficult now because a lot of those 1970s and 1980s-era ships were built faster and in larger quantities than what is replacing them. This is due in no small part because modern ships are far more sophisticated, expensive and difficult to built. The other way is to selectively delay and stagger retirements so that build rate exceeds the retirement rate. The truth of the matter is many of the Navy's current ships are retired largely for budgetary reasons. The Navy takes immaculate care of its ships (especially compared to competitor Navies) and many ships queued up for 25, 35 and 45 year retirements can easily go another decade at a minimum above that. But in order to do that you have to decide to do that, for example, in year 20 of 25, so you can keep maintaining and upgrading. Year 24 is too late. But it's money that largely drives it. If the navy wants to pay for 110 surface combat ships, it wants the best and most modern ships. If you inflate that to 130 by not retiring the 20 oldest, Congress needs to give them more money to pay for it.

The Navy plans to get to 355 ships by both increasing ship building and slowing retirements. There is a lot of industry stuff that goes into that that I'll avoid elaborating on, but a key takeaway is that scaling up US Navy ship building to both build more and sustain what we have is proving very difficult, because many public shipyards have closed or reconfigured in the past 20 years. The Navy is taking steps to address this The part that Hewitt leaves out - intentionally (we'll get to as to why) - is that the Navy already has a funded, 15 year plan to retrofit existing and older shipyards and perhaps re-open new ones, and simultaneously move major work from public yards to private yards, which are equipped. But why 15 years? Because this is an expensive and non-trivial matter, and that is what is being budgeted. And the Navy isn't even entirely sure if that capacity will be needed in 15 years. The entire concept of a "Destroyer" with 96 missile tubes that could be destroyed with a couple of lucky hits from an anti-ship cruise missile, may be replaced with a distributed (more survivable) maritime drone-based solution. If that's the case, a ship yard that builds 9600 ton ships three a time would be the wrong investment, versus one that builds 300 ton drone ships, 33 at a time (economies of scale!).

Hugh Hewitt knows this. So what the hell is he doing? "Notice Me Senpai".

Hewitt fucked up in 2016. He basically did not support Trump. He often criticized Trump. When the Access Hollywood sexual assault tape came out, he called for Trump to drop out. But he was never part of #NeverTrump. And in the first 6 months of the Trump Administration, he was critical of many Trump policies. All this together, made Hewitt, for a time, basically #NeverTrump.

And with that went limited access, fall in revenue for his show and books. It meant that the President wasn't listening to him, and was listening to other people. Hewitt, a conservative opinion maker in the prime of his career, at the peak of his popularity, made himself persona non grata.

So what's he done the past 18 months? He's gone full on "Notice Me Senpai".

Hewitt's prescription here is entirely ridiculous. Donald Trump cannot win Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania unless something radically changes. So he is making a radical proposal: subvert military needs to political imperatives. The truth of the matter is most of these Navy ships will be built in Mississippi, Alabama, Virginia, Maine, Connecticut and Louisiana. Basically places Donald Trump will easily win, or will not win. But no place that helps him.


Marinette Marine in Wisconsin is building the Freedom class Littoral Combat Ship, aka the Little Crappy Ship. The Navy is stopping building them in 2020 to replace them with a new new Frigate FFG(X) capable of fighting blue water combat. The frigate will be more half-size Destroyer than anything else. And the ironic part? It's almost certain to be an imported design. There are four competitors, but two that have any chance of really winning.

One is the FREMM multipurpose frigate, which is a French-Italian design. FREMM is an excellent ship and the backbone of the French navy. It's internal design is highly praised. The US variant would have significantly more armor. The biggest downside is that the computers and weapons sytems of the FREMM are of European origin. It doesn't use Aegis. It uses the French Herakles. It doesn't have Mark 41 VLS tubes, but rather French SYLVER A43s. If the US were to chose this - a fine choice - it would require a big redesign. This is something the Navy doesn't want to do. It wants a mostly ready-to-go solution that can be built cheaply. Also the FREMM might be too capable. FREMM is made by Marinette Marine and would be built in Wisconsin.


Which brings us to the likely winner, the American-Spanish Álvaro de Bazán-class frigate (AKA F100 class). The F100 is basically a mini-Aegis Destroyer. It was designed as a ship-in-waiting for the US Navy from the outset. It has the full Aegis Combat System and 32 Mk41 VLS cells. It has the same Lockheed Martin radar. It even looks like a Aegis Destroyer. 5 of these are in service with Spain, 4 variants in Norway, and 2 in Australia. It's known as an overpowered design for its size. The class was designed to integrate directly into US Carrier Strike groups. The extent of the work would be more armor, more resistance to below-the-water line damage, and more powerful generators. This class would be built by General Dynamics in Bath, Maine.



So what's Hewitt saying? "Look Senpai, put your finger on the scale and choose the FREMM, so you get re-elected". When the LCS program winds down next year, there are going to be layoffs at Marinette Marine. When FFG(X) gets formally awarded next year, if F100 doesn't win, it'll be a shock. That would mean that, in an election year, thousands of jobs will move from Wisconsin to Maine where the Navy's only small surface combatant will then be built (since the LCS program will be done).

He has good reason to say this. Oracle Corporation through its writers, doing a "Notice Me Senpai", has successfully gotten Trump to intervene in the Pentagon's $10 billion JEDI cloud computer contract. For those who don't know, the Pentagon is the world's largest IT customer. The Amazon + Microsoft team won the JEDI contract this year fair and square. JEDI is a massive project to decentralize the entire Pentagon network into the cloud and streamline services of all types needed by troops and civilians. And there is AI elements and network-centric warfare elements in it all. It's a gargantuan project. Oracle, which largely sucks at everything nowdays lost badly, then had some flying monkeys write some articles they had put on Trump's desk to imply the contract award was corrupt. Oh and of course, Jeff Bezos hate (because Trump). So what did the Pentagon do? It put a temporary hold on JEDI to stage an investigation, which lets be clear, is purely for show so Trump's attention turns elsewhere and they can have some hard data to tell Oracle to shod off.

But the take away in this case is that hacks like Hewitt writing about matters that are within the scope of Donald Trump's small world, can successfully get Presidential attention and effects outcome. Which is exactly what "Notice Me Senpais" want. It's one step on the path to redemption for them. Or one step forward in their careers.

There are other Notice Me Senpais. Erick Erickson lost a huge amount of his income, was basically laid off from Fox News, and lost his coveted talk radio opportunities by going against Trump, notably by uninviting him from the Red State Gathering in 2015. He then spent two years largely against Trump, until last year with Bret Kavanaugh. And now the's all "thank you Mr. President" and "do this Mr. President", and sure enough Trump takes his calls. Trump likes nothing more than a knave and Erickson, a man of low talent outside of of the rather limited things he's done, needs to put food on his table.

There's plenty of folks too like Marc A. Thiessen, also of the Post, who were Bushies aghast at Trump, against him in 2016, and now frozen on the outside write things like:

• "China does not have the upper hand in Hong Kong. Trump does."
• "The rise of anti-Semitism on the left"
• "If Trump is responsible for El Paso, Democrats are responsible for Dayton"
• "How Trump can get the rest of his wall money — without a shutdown or emergency"
• "Trump is being the adult in the room on the shutdown"
• "Democrats are trying to steal an election in Florida".

Do these all sound ridiculous? They're supposed to. They're all Trump would read when put in front of him. Because these are what they used to look like: "Trump’s immigration vision isn’t the Reagan way", "Why is the Trump administration empowering al-Qaeda in Syria?", "The Trump Doctrine is an incoherent philosophical mishmash", "Trump’s left-leaning gamble on foreign policy".


It's too simple to think of these as career-conservatives castrating themselves in front of Trump to be relevant. We after all, have visual evidence of that:





No, this - namely what Hewitt is suggesting here, is far more insidious. It is the corruption of the state for political purposes.

When confronted with evidence a few years back, a local Putin-supporting Russian famously said on this forum that he is fine with corruption so long as it benefits the state and the country. Most westerns would (historically) rightly be aghast at that a citizen of country would say that (tolerating corruption), and more broadly it's quite clear that Putin's corrupt doeesn't actually benefit Russia either.

Here, we have the seeds of that. Hewitt is starts by saying the US Navy needs to grow - something that would, objectively benefit the State. But over the course of his piece, he offers a manifestly corrupt rationale as to why to do that in this way: the US Navy needs to grow, so Trump can save him self in a state he can't be re-elected without. And Trump should order the Navy to do that. "Notice me Senpai, I have an idea to save you".

The joke of it is, Hewitt is being remarkably short sighted. Imagine if this behavior became normalized. I mean, North East Taxpayers contribute far more to the Federal pool than Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama. Why doesn't ship building get moved by the next Democrat back to New York and Massachusetts. Or how about let's go full scale corruption and just move it all to Delaware, Biden's home state. And let me ask another question... why the hell does Alabama, a state mostly associated with rednecks and lynchings, have so much NASA Infrastructure and political power? How about we move that all to California... you know... where the payers and not the moochers are.

Of course those things happen in a world where scales are balanced out like that. Hewitt though is being insincere. Does he really expect Trump to put his finger on the scale from FREMM? Probably not. But he's trying to get back into the room. To be an influencer in an administration dominated by Hucksters, bolstered by trolls, and defended by true believers.

This is what the Trashpile kingdom of Trump looks like. From the Vino Vixen at the Department of State, to Erick Erickson putting his mouth firmly around Trump's mushroom-cock, it's a sad saga of men and women lowering themselves, acting and saying these insincerely, and hucksters making bank... all so that Donald Trump can play President on TV. Not actually be President. Just look President. Like he looked like a Billionaire CEO on the Apprentice.

So why do they all do this? Because nobody takes it seriously. The hucksters don't take governing seriously. The Notice Me Senpais are mostly trying to put food on their table and not have to change careers. The trolls want to burn everything down. The true believers just... exist.

Is there a way out? Not while Trump is President. But this is the inevitable end of money in politics, treating government and politics like a game, and all of it like entertainment. Does Hugh Hewitt the actual person think Trump should corrupt the state to save himself? Corner him and put it like that, and he's probably say no. But the character he is playing in this sick drama, would be all for it.

[Thekri]

I did actually read all of that, took a while, but as usual pretty well researched. However the length of it left it without a real thesis I could identify. What are you trying to get at here?

1) The Conservative establishment has collapsed into a post-apocalyptic wasteland where you either kneel to the ruling cannibal warboss or you become lunch?
2) The US Military acquisition process is inherently deeply corrupted by political agendas under the Trump administration?
3) The Fundamental nature of human idealism tends to always collapse after the personal and financial costs of a moralistic stand becomes clear?
4) French Warships suck?

In which case I agree with 1 and 3 completely, agree with 2, however it is nothing remotely new nor unique to America, and 4 is probably true more often then any Frenchman is comfortable admitting.

Still, too many topics for one thread.

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It's too simple to think of these as career-conservatives castrating themselves in front of Trump to be relevant.

I really hope you mean prostrating by the way.

[Cthulhu 2020]

I really hope you mean prostrating by the way.

They're castrating themselves by prostrating for Trump. Working for Trump will go down as a poisoned resume for most significant employment opportunities.

[Gestopft]

Yeah, but now that he hasn't had his MSNBC show for like a year, he needs to get in someone's financial, er, good graces.

More seriously, and that's great info in the write-up, how much power does the executive have in these matters? Since money needs to be spent on whichever ship is chosen, is this the kind of thing that the DoD will recommend to Congress, or does Congress have its own agency in these matters? Could there be a situation in which the Trump steers the DoD to pick the FREMM, but Congress appropriates funds for the F100? Or does the Navy have more control over it's budget?

[Skroe]

I did actually read all of that, took a while, but as usual pretty well researched. However the length of it left it without a real thesis I could identify. What are you trying to get at here?

1) The Conservative establishment has collapsed into a post-apocalyptic wasteland where you either kneel to the ruling cannibal warboss or you become lunch?
2) The US Military acquisition process is inherently deeply corrupted by political agendas under the Trump administration?
3) The Fundamental nature of human idealism tends to always collapse after the personal and financial costs of a moralistic stand becomes clear?
4) French Warships suck?

In which case I agree with 1 and 3 completely, agree with 2, however it is nothing remotely new nor unique to America, and 4 is probably true more often then any Frenchman is comfortable admitting.

Still, too many topics for one thread.

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I really hope you mean prostrating by the way.

Oh I freely admit this one got away from me a little bit. I tried to pull it together in the end. I suppose I wasn't fully successful. I knew it was going to be a challenge but I wanted to tackle it. I apologize I hid my thesis underneath so many layers. I'm not sure how elese to approach it.

The thesis is, which I think a single paragraph would have made clear, is that is that we're seeing the Putinification of America before our very eyes. Beyond just Trump being a terrible President, that is somehow even worse. Vladimir Putin is supremely powerful in Russia because he, at the head of his inner circle, controls the money and privleges spigot for everyone in Russia. If you're a business man, you have to play ball or suddenly tax issues begin. If you're someone in politics, you have little choice but to cheer on Putin and United Russia if you want to have access and not be maligned or harassed. Putin and his cronies have plundered Russia's vast potential for their personal gain and made political decisions for purely personal reasons. Putin has a legion of his own Hugh Hewitts explaining to the people why that is okay.

The Trump occupation of the GOP has forced the people who preceded him there like Hewitt, like Romney, like Graham and others to kneel. To prostrate themselves so much that to compensate for their earlier resistance, they're going so far as to suggestion Trump abuse what the state can do for his personal ends, even on the level of national security. Now Congressional pork is nothing new. But the President doing that would be exceedingly new.

In a different world with a normal Republican President, this could not happen. The prostration (a word I should have used) required by the Notice Me Senpai contingent, which other Presidents do not require, is a prerequsite... an on-ramp even, for more and more extreme actions by the Trump Administration. The worse things go for Trump, the more people like Hugh Hewitt are encouraging ever moreabnormal executive actions so Trump can save himself.

Hopefully that helps. Perhaps I should have divided it into two parts. This is a grossly shocking thing for Hewitt to suggest, even in this era. And he only is doing it because he desperately wants Trump, a man he suggested drop out of the race in October 2016, to return his phone calls.

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Yeah, but now that he hasn't had his MSNBC show for like a year, he needs to get in someone's financial, er, good graces.

More seriously, and that's great info in the write-up, how much power does the executive have in these matters? Since money needs to be spent on whichever ship is chosen, is this the kind of thing that the DoD will recommend to Congress, or does Congress have its own agency in these matters? Could there be a situation in which the Trump steers the DoD to pick the FREMM, but Congress appropriates funds for the F100? Or does the Navy have more control over it's budget?

This is a good question too, and a complex one. The answer is Congress usually wins, but the Pentagon has a say. The President cannot pick a winner by law, but he can order a review.

I'll explain by offering a little bit of history that will explain how it works.

About 15 years ago the Pentagon decided it needed to replace it's 50 year old KC-135s air refueling jets. The KC-135 is a sister aircraft to the Boeing 707 (it is not a modified 707, they both had their origins in the Boeing Dash 80 / 367-80 prototype). Basically, it's really old. And four old engines, which makes it expensive. It needed a new one. So it started the KC-X program. Airbus entered with a modified Airbus A330. Boeing entered with a modified 767. Short version, the Boeing bid was lazy as fuck. The Airbus bud was cheaper, and significantly. more capable. It was the objectively better choice. The 767 Boeing submitted was basically a "we're not trying, give us money" bid.

The Air Force took it as such, and in a shock, awarded Airbus the KC-X contract for the KC-45. Boeing's Pentagon jetliner monopoly was broken.

Or not. This would have meant that production lines in Ohio and Washington State and California would have shut down, while production lines in South Carolina, Tennessee and elsewhere would have opened. Boeing's congressional protectors portrayed the A330-based KC-45 as a foreign aircraft, even though it was going to be wholly built in America. Beoing cried foul and said the Air Force requirements suggested a design closer to the KC-767 proposal than the Airbus proposal (a bullshit claim). Basically, it became a shitstorm, because Boeing has so many suppliers in so many places, and Airbus had none of that protection. So what happened? Congress basically leaned on the Pentagon and GAO, and forced the Pentagon to rebid the KC-X contract. Airbus won fair and square, and got screwed.

In the rebid contract, Boeing entered a substantially better KC-767 based aircraft than the first round. Airbus, realizing they were basically screwed, entered the same bid. This time the Air Force chose Boeing, and named the aircraft the KC-46. The KC-46 is coming along, but has been fairly troubled. The KC-46 is a fine aircraft (and better than the KC-767 bid by far), but still, Airbus won, and Congress said "fuck that".

THe way the process works is the Pentagon submits a detailed and itemized request for money in various coffers (every sub-segment of the KC-X program for example) and Congress fills it. But under the law, the Pentagon has the right to decide how to allocate funds for contracts. And there is a lot of procedures and regulations on how to do that for all the many types of contracts they get into. But the short version is, Congress cannot pick a contractor by name, but are capable of exerting implict and explicit pressure to do so, as they did with the KC-X.

Another good example, is with NASA's Space Launch System. It is sometimes derisively called the "Senate Launch System". Congress (rightfully at the time) frustrated with the Obama Administration's management of NASA, ordered NASA to build a "super heavy lift rocket" that made use of space shuttle hardware, supply chains and work force wherever possible. This implicitly ruled out alternatives (like a clean sheet design) and implicitly also basically mandated that the same shuttle contractors build the same parts for now (since it must be shuttle derived). They described the SLS concept to such degree in the law that it left very little wiggle room for NASA to decide what to build (which to be fair, was something NASA richly deserved). What it did not do is say "we Congress award the SLS to Boeing, Lockheed and Northrop".

So I guess the take away from this is that there is a veneer of impartiality in contract awards, and usually that is the case, but when Congress wants to intervene, they easily can make independent action by Executive branch agencies difficult.

Presidents though, ironically, cannot do it. Short hand, we've longed like to say "the President can cancel a program", like when "Obama canceled the F-22" or "Clinton canceled Bush '41s Mars vision." That's not actually what happens. The President can not request funding, and can lobby against a program, but Congress decides. In the case of the F-22, the original contract for 187 planes was filled and the President did not request anymore and Congress agreed to that. He didn't cancel the F-22... he just stopped wanting to buy more. Obama tried to kill the SLS repeatedly. He failed because Democrats and Republicans in Congress thought that the President was wrong. So every year, the Obama White House gave an extremely passive aggressive NASA budget request that savagely cut the SLS, and every year Congress ignored him and gave the SLS more money. But that's the extent of the President's power. In a more discret case, when Donald Rumsfeld decided to cancel the Comanche Attack Helicopter in 2003, he had to argue to Congress why further funding would be a bad idea, they agreed, and in the next budget, the program was zero'd. That's how the process works.

So no, Trump can't pick FREMM. The Navy will decide next year based on many factors. Congress has allocated money for the past two years for the FFG(X) program that FREMM and F100 are parts of, but the money is just for early program work. The post-2020 budgets will start to get into the nitty gritty of building the first ships, and at that point who the Navy choses will start to have political implications. A common route is to engage in industrial policy and split the order between two shipyards to keep them both in business. But if the Navy picks F100, like with the KC-45 program and the SLS, changing the verdict, while not impossible, would be an ordeal, and would have to originate from Congress, not the President.

Realistically, the Navy could pick FREMM, but it's unlikely. They want FFG(X) to be dirt cheap (about $800 million a ship after the first ship, which will cost more) and dumbly capable for its price. The FFG(X) and FREMM are ironically almost too good. France and Spain don't operate US-sized Destroyers (9600 ton displacement ships with 96 VLS cells). Those are more the size of their Air defense cruisers if they have them. For most countries, their main multi-purpose surface ship is a 5000-6000 ton displacement "frigate", which is why the F100 in particular looks like a mini-Arliegh Burke Destroyer. Because it is. It's a Burke on a budget in a sense. But arguably the Navy needs something more survivable and more specialized in Anti-Submarine Warfare and Counter-Mine operations, with surface strike and air defense as pure secondary missions. Still, they're great designs (especially with more armor) and the Navy will get a good ship regardless. The thing against the FREMM though, again, is it will need a lot more work than the F100 to "Americanize it".


So it's likely F100 will win. It's likey the Wisconsin delegation will try to stop it. But Trump really couldn't. He could order a review, but an awarded contract is an awarded contract unless there is a serious irregularity that requires it, through procedure, to be re-ran. On the upside, Hugh Hewitt is suggesting this because of the three rust belt states Trump unexectedly won in 2016, Wisconsin is the one he would be most likely to win again, even though he's deep under water there right now. Hugh Hewitt sees the political disaster: layoffs in Wisconsin's defense sector in a re-election year, probably chiefly to the benefit of Maine, which Trump won't win.

On the downside, the end of the LCS program and probable moving of the Light Surface Combatant to Bath does mean more defense consolidation, which runs counter to the Navy's need (and plan) to expand existing public and private shipyards, and build new ones. Hewitt is being political and selective by naming Pennsylvania, but longer term, in this, he's correct, the Navy should re-open shipyards in Pennsylvania. And New York and Boston too. But programs have to exist that actually go there. And as i said, that's kind of the weird thing going on now. Basically the shape of the Navy could fundamentally change. When the current Destroyer Contract is completed, it could very likely be replaced with a highly distributed large martime drone system, which would make the FFG(X) the largest in-production surface combat ship. And that would be paired with an expanded submarine and submarine-drone building program (subs having sunk far, far more ships than any surface ships during and since World War II). The future Navy could be a carrier with a lot of drones on it, surrounded by a number of manned FFG(X)s, drone control ships, and a huge number of unmanned drone ships, with a lot more submarines under it. So where do these shipyards fit in that vision?

Good, big questions. Unanswerable right now too. In the short term though, Hugh Hewitt's crazy, Putinesque idea won't save Trump.

[Paranoid Android]

@Skroe.

You forgot one group: The I want my tax cut and deregulation and don't give an eff about our country's well being.

This group is dangerous. I have seen recently from Stephen Ross of Soul Cycle/Equinox fame holding a Trump fund raiser right after the blatant racial attacks of "go back to your country" and of course the countless more. To paraphrase Stephen Ross he says, "I don't agree with President Trump on some things". This is the problem, isn't it? The people who actually have to power mainly through money and influence who love those tax cuts and deregulation, but are willing to not give a shit about how he is tearing country apart.

Sometimes I give this group too much credit. In a ways I sorta group the suburban professionals in here, who again are mainly focused on their bottom line, which is why they voted Republican heavy before 2018. I gave them credit as people who I assumed were educated, not just college, but the day to day work of working with people and an understanding that reaching as broad as a base as you can is beneficial. Maybe I was wrong and they actually have bias towards the power and a deeper bias in race relations.

Now the suburbs did turn and trend shows mainly the white, educated woman leaving in droves to vote Democrat. White, professional males are moving but not at the rate. To be fair it was in part that they are now WOKE to Trump's racial hatred, but let's again be honest. The tax cut did screw some suburban, especially coastal blue states with the removal of SALT tax. You did see this in 2018 with a massive wave in these districts, look at California and New Jersey.

So now let's get to the super rich assholes. Sure you can say that in the end they are going to look out for their best interest, but at what cost? Trump is still getting massive donations and money to his 2020 run and I believe most is coming from BIG money donors. Sadly these are the people who in the end that a tax rate increase wouldn't kill them. I know, I know, I'm such a socialist. I do understand that taxing our way out of something never works, but we have gotten to the point where their tax cuts are a burden on everyday America.

I don't want to get too much into it but the tax cuts didn't help this economy. Too keep my philosophy simple; "Business don't hire people to hire people. It generally coincides with a demand for their product or service". I posted in another thread were CEO pay past 40 years increased 940% while American worker wage in that same time increased 12%. So this group with the most power and the fewest among us have an influence on the outcome of our elections.

They may not a large group or a vocal group, but they sit back in the shadows and use their money as best as they can to convince these other voters that one day they will be rich and these tax cuts will be waiting for them.

@Skroe. Umm again, Military Industrial Complex.

Sure it may mean the demise of Trump by him effin that up, but I am not a fan of using the MIC as a tool for votes. The simple strategy of putting Military Manufacturing in every state and thus saying "If we cut the military budget, you lose jobs" is horrible. At most if you believe in a government that should spend, spend, spend. Then we should have programs like this that improve infrastructure or combat major problems within the US, such as oncoming Climate Change.

As you see thou what I'm asking is more spending and that could lead to trouble. Sorry Skroe, I'm not a fan of Military spending and the way it is certainly set up.

[Thekri]

The thesis is, which I think a single paragraph would have made clear, is that is that we're seeing the Putinification of America before our very eyes. Beyond just Trump being a terrible President, that is somehow even worse. Vladimir Putin is supremely powerful in Russia because he, at the head of his inner circle, controls the money and privleges spigot for everyone in Russia. If you're a business man, you have to play ball or suddenly tax issues begin. If you're someone in politics, you have little choice but to cheer on Putin and United Russia if you want to have access and not be maligned or harassed. Putin and his cronies have plundered Russia's vast potential for their personal gain and made political decisions for purely personal reasons. Putin has a legion of his own Hugh Hewitts explaining to the people why that is okay.

The Trump occupation of the GOP has forced the people who preceded him there like Hewitt, like Romney, like Graham and others to kneel. To prostrate themselves so much that to compensate for their earlier resistance, they're going so far as to suggestion Trump abuse what the state can do for his personal ends, even on the level of national security. Now Congressional pork is nothing new. But the President doing that would be exceedingly new.

In a different world with a normal Republican President, this could not happen. The prostration (a word I should have used) required by the Notice Me Senpai contingent, which other Presidents do not require, is a prerequsite... an on-ramp even, for more and more extreme actions by the Trump Administration. The worse things go for Trump, the more people like Hugh Hewitt are encouraging ever moreabnormal executive actions so Trump can save himself.

Hopefully that helps. Perhaps I should have divided it into two parts. This is a grossly shocking thing for Hewitt to suggest, even in this era. And he only is doing it because he desperately wants Trump, a man he suggested drop out of the race in October 2016, to return his phone calls.

I am not sure I agree with this thesis. I see it as still being basically the same as every presidential administrations military acquisition policy, just with the usual Trump twist of using their outside voices to announce what other people used some subtlety for. The only thing "New" about this is that the political ramifications of a major defense item where clearly outlined in a public media article, as opposed to being hid in mountains of contract documents. This does speak to a normalizing of the acceptability of the practice, but nothing about it is particularly novel.

You yourself go on to describe something similar happening in the KC-135 replacement program, and I could list dozens of other programs that were either driven through by congress despite being very flawed programs (Most of which eventually produced a decent product, after decades of work and billions of dollars) or canceled them because they didn't fit political requirements. A perfect example of these shenanigans is military helicopters. Essentially there are three major US military helicopter manufacturers left after Lockheed Martin ate Sikorsky a few years ago. Boeing (factories in Arizona and Pennsylvania), Bell Helicopter (Mostly Texas), and the Lockheed Martin/Sikorsky abomination (Florida with a bit of everywhere else). What this means is that any major new US helicopter deal will leave 3-4 major states out in the cold for the enormous amount of revenue produced from such a deal. Which in turns means that every new military rotorcraft deal is immediately attacked and sabotaged by about 2/3s of the House and Senate appropriations committees. Which is why we talk about the RAH-66 Commanche and the ARH-70 Arapaho in past tense, and the US army is forced to keep buying things like the UH1Y Huey instead. Because getting a new design through the political minefield is almost impossible, so we are stuck upgrading old airframes forever.

This is not new to Trump, but as usual he managed to make it somehow more gross and upsetting. The amount of chaos in his disorganized administration, including the gutted defense department is going to lead to these four years as pretty much a wash for meaningful major product developments, despite the massive amount of cash he is wasting on the pentagon.

[Jehct]

I love these long posts. Great info as usual but really. Who on these forums are going to take this and publish an article with it? Who do you think you are presenting this to that is in any means important on any scale?

Mostly nerds that probably already agree with you. Thank you for taking your time to type all of this.

[Zaktar]

I love these long posts. Great info as usual but really. Who on these forums are going to take this and publish an article with it? Who do you think you are presenting this to that is in any means important on any scale?

Mostly nerds that probably already agree with you. Thank you for taking your time to type all of this.

These forums would be a shittier place without Skroe posts.

[Jehct]

These forums would be a shittier place without Skroe posts.

I absolutely agree.

[Voidwielder]

@Skroe Welcome back from your ''vacation''. Your opinion, Trump aside, on Greenland idea?

[arandomuser]

too much read
me like trump
me own libs, own libs important, policy bad, values bad

[Skroe]

@Skroe Welcome back from your ''vacation''. Your opinion, Trump aside, on Greenland idea?

It is one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard. It's so very Trump, and so very Russian too actually.

After World War II, the US made a short lived attempt to buy Greenland. That was a pretty good idea then, given the priorities of the Cold War and the economic needs of post-War Denmark (and Europe as a whole). The US would have gotten a good deal, and it had ahead of it, a minimum of 80 years of potential economic exploitation. We offered $1.3 billion in today's dollars worth in gold in 1946 ($100 million back then).

Today though? In 2019? It's laughably dumb. Hysterically dumb. When I heard it, I had to check two other sources to confirm that Trump wanted it.

There's a lot of reasons why it is a terrible idea. But here's a few.

First, how much is it going to cost us? Probably around $500 billion minimum? More likely a bit over a trillion. Could the US afford it? Probably. We could raise taxes, sell debt or through the federal reserve print money. Consider during the financial crisis, the Obama Stimulus in 2009 (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) cost about $1 trillion. The late 2008-Bush Era TARP bailout cost about $700 billion. The Federal Reserve created about $2 trillion to combat the financial crisis. The US is a fantastically wealthy country and when people say "we can't afford X", what they really mean is they don't want to pay for it and are taking the easy out. If the US needs to find a trillion dollars, it can pretty easily find a trillion dollars. We're not Greece or Russia. We don't have to count coppers.

But what exactly would we be getting for our $500 billion investment? A sparsely populated, isolated island. It wouldn't even be a State. It would be another Guam at best. Would we colonize it? No. Never. We haven't even heavily colonized parts of Alaska that are like Greenland, and we've owned that for 152 years. Would we defend it? I mean we already do that through NATO and Thule Station (which is critical to North American early warning). Our defense posture on the island wouldn't go up. If it needed to, we'd just ask Denmark if we could. They'd probably say yes. So why do we need to own it?

What about economic development? This is where I say "this is so very Russian".

Debating economic matters with Russians on the internet is fundamentally a waste of your life. They're functionally stupid about it. If you can't dig it out of the ground or chop it down and throw it in a fire somewhere, they don't see it as having any value. To them, wealth and potential wealth is purely in the form of natural resources. Oil. Gas. Minerals. Wood. Russia, is evidently, the richest country in the world because it has these things. Because in their economic world, Bitumen is worth more than Bytes.

Of course, if "natural resources = fantastic wealth" were true, the list of rich countries in the world would be very different wouldn't it? It's because the idea is bullshit. Natural resources are worth something, but complex, diversified economies are worth and make so much more. All the oil and gas sales in the world don't approach say, for instance, the American consumer. Or the US financial industry. Consider Saudi Arabia. With a GDP of $683 billion, its economy is less than half the size of Italy. It's about half the size of Mexico, which, while it has oil and gas, has a far more diversified economy than Saudi Arabia.

But the complexities of a modern advanced, post-industrial economy are difficult for, frankly, stupid people like Donald Trump to think about. So they think in terms of oil. In terms of land. In industrial terms, they think in terms of terms of making and (usually) exporting fucking vacuum cleaners, air conditions and tennis rackets. If I'm sounding harsh in my condemnation, it's because economists and policy makers figured all this out back in the 1950s and 1960s. This isn't some new-fangled discovery. Oil wealth helped the US modernize around the turn of the 20th century, but after World War II, natural resources weren't a major factor in the American economy for many decades.

So let's say the US dropped $500 billion on Greenland. It would take decades to develop its economic potential in full to extract what... maybe optimistically a TOTAL of $2 trillion in extricable natural resources wealth over 30 years? Tops? In those decades the US economy will more than double, if the growth over the past few decades holds. Entirely new sectors of the economy will be created that will utterly dwarf the annual and net benefit of economic activity provided by Greenland. On top of that, it being 2019 and not 1946, the developed world is likely to move sharply towards a decarbonized direction over the next 30 years, so the potential wealth of Greenland is worth far less today than it would have been worth in 1946, when there was still at least 80 years of carbon-centric economies ahead of it.

It's such a stupid man's idea of making America great, there are just no words for it. The US will get far, far, far richer, and more globally powerful, by taking that $500 billion, and putting it towards education and scientific research to create new industries that, like our digital economic dominance, didn't exist 80 years ago and today are important and growing part of our economy. Look at it like this. We can spend $500 billion all at once on a home to potential mineral wealth that will yield probably a 300-400% return over 30 years. Or we can spend $500 billion over 30 years (about $17 billion a year) on quantum research, robotics, A.I. or other emerging fields, so in decades hence, when they become $1.5-3 trillion a year industries, our ANNUAL return on investment is far greater.

The Greenland idea is, again, just so Donald Trump it isn't even funny. And it's so his knuckledragging supporters too. It's a stupid idea for stupid people who have zero comprehension on how wealth is created. But then again, I wouldn't expect veritable cavemen who bask in their weapons grade ignorance to move much past the economics of digging shit up, throwing it in a fire and thinking it worth something.

"But Skroe, you've talked before about Mars and the Moon and setting up US territories there. How is this different."

Well in a very fundamental way: a rush for territory and a need to lock it in exists (or will exist) on the Moon and Mars, but not on Earth.

There is no competition for territory on Earth anymore. Most of it is claimed and what isn't is largely in Antarctica. Dozens of nations have claims in Antarctica. None of them actually act on it, or will act on it. For much the same reason as Greenland: the return on investment is terrible, based on a model that there is something in that land that benefits the mother country.

That is different on the Moon and Mars. Space Travel is getting easier. A lot easier. The US can put a lot more into space, a lot cheaper, in 2019, than we ever thought possible in 2009 or 1999. That is likely to continue as we go deeper into the century. It'll be along time before Space Travel is as routine as intercontinental flight, but by the end of the century, yeah, it's very likely it'll be on the level of air travel in the late mid to late 1930s. And it will not be only the US up there. China will be up there too. And probably India.

On the moon and Mars, there will be a rush to claim that territory. Not just for resource extraction to bring back to Earth (pointless), but for for essentially ideological and national competition, much like how the New World saw its claimants. And, judging by the history of the New World, the political, economic and cultural character of the territory seized will long outlast those who seize it. After all, Brazil is not Mexico is not the US is not Quebec, because different parties seized all these lands.

So one day, we're going to have to send a lot of people to those places, to claim them, so competitors don't. The ROI is far greater than a dollar value in this case (because we're talking about, essentially, geopolitical power).

To look at it another way, and to illustrate further why the entire Greenland idea is ridiculous... claiming territory on the Moon and Mars and elsewhere makes sense because it directly benefits an intense geopolitical competition that will be about claiming territory and planting flags. Since that is not happening on Earth (and will not happen, due to all land except Antarctica being claimed), there is no impetus from that angle to do so. Greenland, where Denmark owns it and we just have a little base, is more than enough for our immediate geopolitical agenda. Having them sign the deed over to us wouldn't make it more so.

Oh and for argument's (and maybe clarity's) sake, to offer the converse of the whole Mars/Moon thing, if there is not a US-China-others off-world race to grab land later this century or whenever, then the argument for the US doing so as well is moot, and for the US, the ROI on doing so would be as senseless and as wasteful as buying Greenland. I'm presuming there will be one though because the US is, at its heart, a frontier nation, and China is emphatically an expansionist one.

[Donatello Trumpi]

You may recall people taking pleasure in this poor woman, who... you know... took it too a bit too far.

I don't have time to read your "Lord of the rings: Why orange man is bad" post in which you surely self-fellate your ridiculous muh-russia talking points, but I will adress this "meme" .

First of, props on identifying the person as a woman. I thought it was a typical soyboy.

Second, calling her "poor woman" is ridiculous. She embodies the infantile Trump derangement syndrome to the point, and this is why she has been used in so many videos making fun of liberals.

You couldn't give a shit if trump supporters get attacked with a bikelock, a gay minority journalist is hospitalized, an elderly man is hit behind with a crowbar and bloodied by antifa ( https://www.dailywire.com/sites/defa...?itok=1YSdjTkQ )
but god forbid the right makes fun of an adult throwing an infantile fit because princess clinton, champion of all women (except those her husband fingered with a cigarette) lost.
Your partisan mother theresa-spiel to suit your agenda is easily unmasked as bullshit.

PS: If you are so sure that Trump will lose next election, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and bet a hefty sum on him losing. Easy money, right?


Infracted.

[Gestopft]

I don't have time to read your "Lord of the rings: Why orange man is bad" post in which you surely self-fellate your ridiculous muh-russia talking points, but I will adress this “meme” .

“I can’t be bothered with actual substance, but let me comment on this meme” is a fantastic distillation of the Trump movement’s intellectual capacity. What a tremendous act of self-parody.