👀 “One way to mitigate the threat to the global economy would be to evacuate Taiwan’s most skilled engineers when war appears imminent.” https://t.co/O9BYCZ11eS
The Biden administration’s 30-year Navy shipbuilding plan is an incoherent, choose-your-own-adventure story with three different bad outcomes, each of which raises more questions than it answers.
7 seasons
6 All-Stars
2 No-Hitters
2 Cy Young Awards
1 World Series Championship
Welcome back, World Series Champion Max Scherzer.
#Scherzday // #NATITUDE
To drive home the ongoing inadequacy of our response to the Chinese naval/maritime challenge, here's an updated ship count/estimate of the PLA Navy vs. USN, using data from this week's FY 23 budget request as well as the most recent CRS Report on Chinese naval modernization. 🤦♂️
Germany overhauling their defense policy/budget. Abe raising the idea of a nuclear sharing agreement w/ Japan and pushing the US to overhaul Taiwan policy. The war in Ukraine has opened new policy doors that weren’t there 4 days ago and Moscow/Beijing should be very concerned.
The quality and quantity of high-end conventional munitions matters and we have been slow to resource this gap in favor of new platforms. We should buy more long range conventional air/sea launched strike weapons (and no I’m not talking about hypersonic).
You can’t overstate this. We’ve been telling ourselves conventional warfare will be hybrid or gray for 15 years. Clausewitzian warfare no longer was politically palatable. This shocks my mental map of what the scope of possibilities are.
A serious DoD global posture review for Asia must continue to realign access in the Compact States and N. Australia, move additional attack submarines to Guam (at least 5 but probably 6), and work to start rotating Army or USMC units to Japan’s southwestern islands.
For folks reading about French shock and surprise at cancellation of the Attack-class diesel submarine program, here's a taste of what those of us who follow this stuff have been reading for quite a while before things came to a head: https://t.co/RV9VRREl1u
We know there will be new airbases in the north added to the list of locations the US will operate from (RAAF Darwin/Tindal were added and built out for tankers/bombers a decade ago). My guess is this is an announcement to deploy ground-based missiles in the near future.