Centrifuge

A bunch of things that point in the same direction.

First, the President of the United States left California on Sunday after a week of vacation time near Santa Barbara, and returned to… yes, his beach house in Delaware, where the NOTAMs suggest that he plans to spend nine days. His last trip to the beach house in Delaware? Two weeks ago. Taking bets on how many days Joe Biden sleeps in the White House between now and January 20. “The President of the United States.”

Second, here’s a headline in a British newspaper that makes a disturbingly plausible argument:

Read this well-written opinion piece, which carefully lays out the background for this development. In December of 2023, the US announced the formation of a major international military coalition to stop Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. As September closes in, the attacks continue:

Since January, not only have the attacks steadily increased in number, they have diversified too. Drones and cruise missiles were accompanied by hijackings and ballistic missiles. April saw the first use of a surface drone and there has been a steady increase in this method since…

The Greek flagged tanker Sounion is the latest victim, attacked four times on Wednesday, resulting in a fire on board.

The United States spends $900 billion a year on our military, not counting funding for the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. (Add the $849 billion DOD budget plus the Coast Guard budget, which is allocated to the Department of Transportation, and the funding for nuclear weapons programs in the Department of Energy. And that’s without adding the cost of the intelligence agencies.) And that shockingly expensive military can’t defeat…the Houthis.

The ship attacked last week is in bad shape, and has been abandoned by its crew — with 150,000 tons of crude oil aboard. That’s a potential environmental disaster, but we’ll see.

Last month, the CENTCOM commander warned in a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin that the United States wasn’t defeating the Houthis, and wasn’t on track to destroy their ability to attack ships in the Red Sea. That letter doesn’t appear to have produced a course correction, given more recent events. But the dubiousness of an undeclared and unauthorized war makes escalation implausible, so what can possibly happen next?

Meanwhile, the Houthis — like the Taliban — are showing the world that the United States can be fought. If anyone can find what’s left of Joe Biden, it would be interesting to hear him slur his thoughts about this.

Third, and in a related story about military decline, three of the US Army logistics vessels that participated in the absurd Gaza aid pier operation can’t get home under their own power. The Military Sealift Command is soliciting bids from contractors who can bring the boats back to Norfolk on float-on/float-off vessels. So the JLOTS mission has rendered a portion of the “army’s navy” inoperative, or marginally operative, limiting the army’s logistics fleet for months — at least.

Fourth, the US Navy is considering a “great reset” in the Military Sealift Command, and is evaluating a plan to withdraw 17 civilian-crewed naval support vessels from service due to staffing shortages in the Merchant Marine. See the details at this US Naval Institute news story, or see this Twitter thread from naval historian Sal Mercogliano. The 600-ship US Navy of the 1980s is shriveling into the 200s.

You can watch the navy shrink by scrolling through these historical tables.

Meanwhile:

Hete, let’s just use the same sentence again: If anyone can find what’s left of Joe Biden, it would be interesting to hear him slur his thoughts about this.

Finally, in the face of all this crushingly obvious structural and operational decline, American voters, journalists, scholars, and politicians are focused tightly on the really important stuff:

Harris is also helped by strong support among the slightly less than half of men who reject traditionally masculine identities. Trump’s strongest support is among men who hold traditionally masculine identities, while women and other men strongly favor Harris.

“Trump has built his political career around a very specific performance of whiteness and masculinity,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of Government and Politics at Fairleigh Dickinson, and the Executive Director of the poll. “In the past, that’s been seen as a strength, but it’s no longer clear that it’s working.”

The performance of whiteness and masculinity is powerful stuff. We should use it against the Houthis.

It’s a total mystery why nothing works.