Rare Armor. Armored personnel carriers Type 1 Ho-Ki via Bmashina Tumblr Page.

Armored personnel carriers Type 1 Ho-Ki, in China, in the summer of 1945.

One day an armor historian will do a better accounting of Japanese, Chinese and Australian armor during WW2.

We have a glut of info on the Russians and Germans.  We have quite a bit on the US.

But the pacific is where everyone has the misconception that armor wasn't used and that it was an all infantry affair.

Part of that lies with the Marine Corps.  Up until a few years ago, Infantry was all (now its aviation) so the valor of tanks/lvtp crews was lost in the sauce.

We need to do better...that includes properly cataloging Japanese efforts during the war.

Yes I know there is an Argentine sub missing...

via CNN

The Argentine navy is stepping up its search in the South Atlantic for a 44-crew submarine that has been out of radio contact for three days.
President Maurico Macri said all national and international resources were being deployed to help find the San Juan as quickly as possible.
A Nasa research plane has joined the search for the vessel.
Britain and countries in the region have offered help after it disappeared 430km (267 miles) off the coast.
"We have not been able to find, or have visual or radar communication with the submarine," navy spokesman Enrique Balbi told a news conference.

Story here. 

Since everyone is filling my inbox with this news I decided to speak on it.

Yes I know there is a missing Argentine sub.

No I haven't commented on it.

Why?

Because we already know the story.  When a sub goes missing and it has to be searched for then 99% of the time the story will end in tragedy.

If the news release was that rescue equipment, ships and planes were rushing to the site of an Argentine sub in distress then we would have something to talk about.

We could watch the rescue effort, determine what we see that's to be cheered and moaned about, lauded the international effort etc...

But we didn't get that.

All we can really do is wait for the investigation to tell us what went wrong and hopefully for them to at least locate it in those deep waters.

Let me add this.  The sub service has come a long way.  That's for all countries.  Subs going down even in peacetime was once a fairly common occurrence.  Subs going missing and investigators being left with only guesses as to the cause was common too.

All we can do is take that 1% chance of hope and wring it for all its worth and wait.  This is big news but there just isn't much for us to talk about.

Army discipline gone wrong in a funny/ironic kind of way!

🗣 @militaryboot

A post shared by military (@badassery) on Nov 17, 2017 at 9:35pm PST

This can't be true can it?

Battle of Tarawa anniversary....Video by Lance Cpl. Gloria Lepko

We don't worship the past.

We study it.  We learn from it.  We honor those that gave so much.  If mistakes were made we strive not to repeat them.  If gallantry was shown we seek to match it.

It's not worship.  It's respect.

Military Industrial Complex Games? Congress Critters push for Israel to choose CH-53K over CH-47?

via Rotor and Wing International.

In April, multiple U.S. senators and representatives targeted Israel to solicit a CH-53K deal. While cost was not explicitly named a motivator for the members of Congress, successful procurement could bring down the price. PMA-261 works with international partners through the Foreign Military Sales program to potentially meet the international partners’ heavy lift helicopter requirements, Navair said. The more helicopters the government sells to international buyers, the more unit cost is decreased for all users. Navair told R&WI in March that the cost per unit is some $87 million at production, not including other costs. The program has come under scrutiny for its high price tag.

Story here. 

Ignore the fictional accounting that has the price of the CH-53K decreasing by almost 50% once it goes into production.  That kind of math defies everything taught in every business or economics course in the country.  How they can get away with that idiocy is beyond me but it proves two things.  People will believe anything and if you play with numbers without accountability you can make a million dollar widget appear to end up costing nothing.

My main focus is on the Congress Critters.

Not only are they forgoing their job to provide proper oversight to military projects (another issue is that the Marine Corps is programing 200 while the GAO says that they can only justify some 156 of them) but they're also acting as salespeople (in addition to what the US military does) for one US manufacturer over another.

That reeks.

The workers at Boeing could certainly use some of that cheese just like the Sikorsky (Lockheed Martin) worker can.

In short.  The Congress is picking winners (CH-53K) and losers (CH-47) and that equals corruption.

Discussion. Is Trump doing a good job?

Saw this on a page I follow and I want to see what the tribe here thinks. The question is simple.  Do you think Trump is doing a good job?  Put your thinking in the comments below, but do me a favor.  Base it on some facts!  Give examples of why you believe he's doing it right/wrong, defend your viewpoint against opposing views and tell us where you think things will go from here.

Keep it clean.  It's a discussion not a fight/flame war/pissing contest.  If we do this right then this should be good.  If we don't then I guess I'll have to take it down.

F-35 propaganda critique..."how they want it to perform, but not how it performs today.”

via The American Conservative.

They call Washington a bubble. A la-la land. Home of the “Deep State.” A long-forgotten 1980’s television series, ‘Tales of the Darkside,’ once described “a place that is just as real, but not as brightly lit” as our own world. Sounds a bit like Capitol Hill.

Nowhere was that more evident than yesterday, as defense industry giant Lockheed Martin hosted an auspiciously-timed reception on the Hill to tout its multi-billion dollar F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, which as anyone reading in this space would know has been more than 16 years in development, and plagued by everything from poor performance reviews and cost overruns, to grounding over a lack of spare parts and tussles over technical data and cybersecurity concerns.

Then there is the expense to the taxpayer, which as of June is projected to be more than $406 billion to complete, and another $1.4 trillion over the life of the program to be maintained. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said at the time there was a 60 percent increase in the cost estimates from 2001 to 2012 due to three major restructurings of the program. But the military kept building more planes—even delivering them to partner countries—throughout the development stage, even though operational testing has yet to begin, and won’t, until late-2018, at the soonest. That’s left the taxpayer with at least $1.7 billion in retrofitting costs as plans change and more technical bells and whistles are put onto the planes. Spare parts are in short supply, and the funds to retrofit all of the older prototypes aren’t readily available. Marine Corps Capt. Dan Grazier at the Project for Government Oversight (POGO) reported in October, that may leave some 108 planes behind as “concurrency orphans,” not fit for service, ever. At more than $100 million per plane (the military has so far built more than 250), that’s a lot of coin to be left idle in a hanger.

..........

 But what “we want” and what exists today are two different things. As Grazier pointed out to TAC, the planned event was an exercise in the former, a carefully designed artifice that emphasized the hoped-for outcomes of the most expensive program in U.S. military history, while downplaying the very real problems as momentary turbulence. Even the simulator, the flashy draw at the corner of the room, boasted capabilities that recent reviews have said the planes don’t have quite yet.

“It was a great sales pitch, it was interesting, it was neat sitting in the cockpit,” he said afterwards. “But it was a display of the brochure promises, not the finished design. It was how they want it to perform, but not how it performs today.”

Story here. 

Open Comment Post. Nov 18, 2017

Assault Amphibian School (Mini Documentary).... video by Sgt. Andrew Kuppers

New China TV - PLA Air Force Promo 2017

Yeah, these boys are starting to feel their oats.  The problem?  We're dealing with leadership of both parties that's more dysfunctional everyday, an economy that doesn't work for the average citizen, a society that is starting to wallow in depravity/no longer has the ability to differentiate between reality/fantasy and have allowed our citizenry to feel that the state owes them instead of them being well rounded productive people that contribute to the nation...not just demanding more and more (whether rights or benefits).

We have time but we must focus on the real threat and decide to immediately harden up in preparation for the big fight that is almost certainly coming.