This administration is lost at sea.
FRANCIS P. SEMPA writes in The American Spectator:
Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro just released “Climate Action 2030,” a 32-page report which identifies climate change as an “existential threat” to the U.S. Navy and the nation. In the report’s Foreword, Del Toro writes that climate is “the focal point” for his tenure as Navy Secretary, and notes that both President Biden and Defense Secretary Austin share that view. The Navy Department, Del Toro writes, will be an “environmental leader” that takes “bold climate action.” We have come a long way since Alfred Thayer Mahan, the great sea power strategist and historian, with the full support of Navy Secretary Benjamin Tracy, steered our naval leaders to focus on sea command, strategic chokepoints, and sea lines of communication in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And we have come a long way since Navy Secretaries like James Forrestal contributed to the geopolitical strategy of containment in the late 1940s, and John Lehman and Jim Webb promoted a 600-ship navy and maritime strategy for winning the Cold War.
The Navy Department report establishes two performance goals: to “build climate resilience” and “reduce climate threat.” Del Toro’s stated goal is to have the Navy Department “reduce its greenhouse gas emissions,” “stabilize ecosystems,” and “achieve … net-zero emissions by 2050.” Compare that to the goal of our nation’s most threatening naval adversary — China’s PLA Navy — which is to become the world’s leading naval power by 2049.
The Navy Department report is filled with color photographs of hurricanes, floods, electric vehicles, military families participating in an “oyster castle installation,” naval installations with solar panels, naval officers helping with disaster relief efforts, employees at a naval base planting salt marsh plants, electric-powered amphibious assault ships, and naval officers helping to install “mosquito surveillance and control equipment.” There are no photos of naval warfare, no references to Mahan, no discussion of the challenge posed by the PLA Navy.
https://spectator.org/bidens-navy-secretary-the-existential-threat-is-climate-change/
Check out the full article here.
HT/Climate Depot
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He forgot about transgender rights! The Alphabet People will be up in arms!
Oh, the marines put out that helmet with the rainbow rounds in the the brim. That probably makes up for it.
https://nypost.com/2022/06/01/marine-corps-sparks-outrage-with-pride-month-rainbow-bullets/
Does this mean that defence personnel will be required to paint their finger nails to match a rainbow?
Told you last time it’s alphanumeric people you can’t leave out the plus it is after all LGBTQI+
I like LGBTQWERTY myself.
LGBTQWTF! is more appropriate.
LGUHDTV – ie the TV people is a good one too
We always used to refer to the US intelligence/security agencies collectively as ‘alphabet soup’ – it was far easier to remember! Presumably these are the opposite alphabet soup so should be referred to as ‘anti-intelligence’ groups!
How long before people get sick of a steady diet of bovine excrement? Only dung beetles should be swallowing every scrap of BS they are served.
You have to question why a navy secretary is in the wokerati scene. Military hardware goes through a lot of fuel and the old days of wind and oar powered navies is well and truly defunct.
Thus, it is up to all those that value their Liberty (navies help maintain that Liberty) to question this lunacy. If you don’t mind throwing away hard won Liberty and becoming a slave that owns nothing, go on – be a fool, but don’t expect others to wallow in your own stupidity.
It’s the same approach—repeating lies until everyone believes them—that says men can have babies and there is no such thing as objective truth. The question is always: how long will it take and how much damage will be done before the truth comes through—as it always does.
We are doomed.
and Putin in emboldened.
As well as Xi, Kim and the mulahs in Iran.
Yes, the Chicoms can’t believe their good luck. Their enemy is self-destructing right in front of their eyes.
Let’s just hope the American people see the destructive nature of radical Democrat leadership for what it is. If they don’t see it now, with this Biden disaster ongoing, they never will see it.
We are doomed if radical Democrats are in control.
Lord have mercy.
When the military is “woke” we’re not far from the abyss.
Never thought I would see the day I’d be reading stuff like this from military leaders.
They may be in charge, but they are certainly not leaders, properly addressing the mission.
Well, if they don’t see an actual threat, maybe we cut funding to Navy.
Or that kind of leadership is going to be useless, regardless of the funding levels.
Connecticut, Bonhomme Richard, Gerald R Ford, Zumwalt; the list goes on. Instead of fixing the (somewhat extensive) problems in the US Navy, they’re focussing on non-existent problems – at least they can deal with those, I suppose. The US Navy has become, at best, an expensive liability and, at worst a floating, quite sinkable, target. Get the priorities in order and fix the damage that’s been done.
Not sure who downvoted, but this comment rings true to this retired intelligence analyst. Leaders not focused on mission is one of the first indicators of a failing military.
Though why sink it when you can just send them through the shipping lanes where they will play bumper cars with merchant vessels!
The problem is that they may not be in charge, but they are the ones who decide who gets a promotion. Unless you are sufficiently woke, you can kiss your career good bye.
If the woke admirals, generals, etc, make sure their phone is working, that alone will save a lot of lives when China decides to take over. Instead of sending their military, China can just phone.
Go along to get along, never take an eye off lucrative early retirement. Say anything, do anything.
Love the pic of the “Moskva” The current navy administration is sitting on the bottom right next to the sunken ship if they think CC is a threat. Only in their little minds. But then this bunch the only word they know is “surrender to wokeism”
Actually, my old buddy Vlad Putin has done us a great favor.
He has made it crystal clear why we need our armed forces. To our credit, the western world is responding more-or-less appropriately.
As for the Chinese having the world’s greatest navy any time soon …
The Chinese are in a serious economic pickle that isn’t going to fix itself in the near future. No great navy for them for a while.
China’s population is projected to decrease by half by 2100. link Nigeria will be larger. India will be the largest.
So, who will be our biggest problem at the end of this century? Darned if I know. All I can say is that it would be real prudent for us to maintain an effective military because there will always be someone out there willing to take our freedom if we let them.
Thanks for the reminder Vlad. Condolences for the battle ship and the bridge and stuff. BTW buddy, what do you think of all those Turkish naval vessels that have just entered the Black Sea?
commieBob: “[…] because there will always be someone out there willing to take our freedom if we let them.”
Out there?!? They are already in the Whitehouse, the Legislature, and 1/2 the Judiciary trying to do just that.
Yes, our Domestic enemies are more dangerous to our personal freedoms than are the Chicoms.
Our radical Democrat Domestic Enemies are using the power of the federal government and the power of the Leftwing Media to try to creat a false reality that will allow them to take our freedoms away. The public is lied to on every front by the radical Democrats and their mouthpiece, the Leftwing Media. They use this power to try to obliterate their political opponents as we have all seen over the last few years with their attacks on Trump and on the Right in general.
The radical Democrats will take your freedom away if you give them a chance. Don’t do it..
I think you underestimate Chinese willpower – with most of their population at the level of medieval peasant they have launched satellites, manned space stations and landed a probe on the moon. They certainly do have economic problems and Xi may well be in a lot of trouble but China is easily capable of stifling problems and stubbornly bulling through if they want something. And China certainly does want the world’s greatest navy – to dominate the pacific region and to give the impression of a world superpower, whatever the conditions inside China.
Launching probes to the moon is peanuts compared to the cost of building and running a 500 ship navy.
You mean to say those three-masted naval vessels are already on order?
“there will always be someone out there willing to take our freedom if we let them.”
Can’t say this often enough. It is not the US Constitution that guarantees our rights, it is the US Armed Forces. These are not military leaders at all, and have got to go asap.
Yes, these current military leaders misleading everyone about the dangers of CO2 must be removed from service as soon as the next Republican president is in office. Their own words will be the end of their careers, if we are smart.
It’s scary to see otherwise grown men caught up in this CO2 delusion. Obviously, they don’t go into any detail in examining whether CO2 is actually a danger or not, they are taking another’s word that it is, without actually establishing that this is a fact.
I would describe this as fuzzy thinking that has no place on a battlefield. Any military leader who claims to know something when they don’t actually know that something, has no business in the leadership of the military because their thought process makes them unfit to analyze the real world.
God Save Us from these Climate Change Maniacs!
China is a territorial nation far more than a maritime nation. Their land borders are much harder to protect than their coastline, especially as Xi flexes his dictatorial muscles and pisses off his neighbors. Russia and China are no more natural neighbors than Hitler and Stalin, regardless of who is in charge,
Xi’s navy is expendable. Any land threat will shift naval resources resources to the army.
I see the the “someone” as our own leaders who are more than willing to take our freedom and so far we are letting them do it. The danger is from within and we must fight for what we have if we want to keep it. They are really dumbing us down at an amazing rate.
As for taking our liberties, at present our own leaders are the greatest threat.
Not that Putin et. al. aren’t also threats.
“As for the Chinese having the world’s greatest navy any time soon …”
A lot of those Chinese ships included in their Navy ship count are commercial vessels.
But But But!!! Moskva sunk in a STORM. Honest! Russian Media told me so. Absolutely no surface to surface anti ship missiles were involved, so clearly Climate Change(tm) is to blame.
Probably.
No it’s on a special sea bottom mission to study climate change.
Russia has shown its deep commitment to fighting climate change.
The Moskva is searching for “the missing heat”.
(Unfortunately, under our current leadership, the US Navy may soon be joining in the search.)
Moskva is a clear case in point as to why you should never give ships overly clever or patriotic names. Calling a ship the ‘Unsinkable’, ‘Undefeated’ or after your capital city is always going to invite trouble.
I am just so sick of everything being fake nonsense. I don’t remember if everything was like this when I was a kid and there was this much fake nonsense everywhere but I feel like we live in a time where nothing at all coming from The Establishment is real in any way shape or form.
The Leftwing Media is lying to all of us every day, all day long. They distort reality for political purposes and you can’t believe a word they say. Believe just the opposite of what they say and you will be much closer to the truth.
The Leftwing Media is the most dangerous organization in the nation when it comes to stealing our personal freedoms. Their lies enable really evil/stupid/incompetent people to be elected as our leaders, and these dispicable leaders lead us down the Road to Ruin, like Biden and the other Democrats are doing now.
Americans cannot govern themselves properly if they are constantly lied to, the way they are lied to now. Propaganda is a very effective weapon. It fools a lot of people. It has fooled some American generals and admirals to think and say some really stupid things, which will only embolden our enemies, not strike fear in their hearts.
Leftwing Propaganda will be the death of the United States if we are not careful.
So his focus is climate change and not winning wars. Obviously the qualifications the administration is looking for.
Exactly.
Wow, rainbow warriors fighting climate change. Climate change is going to win, even though it does nothing. I need a drink.
Is this the Babylon Bee?!
It’s better than Nostradamus!
https://babylonbee.com/news/army-nukes-the-sun-after-pentagon-declares-climate-change-a-national-security-threat
Oh dearie me… I hope they postpone the assault until after my beach vacation.
Its the (Biden’s new title) Babble-On B.
And having won his now-famous lawsuit, Captain Jack Sparrow is up for commission in the US Navy.
What has our navy come to. This guy needs a good thrashing.
He needs a new tugboat to play with in his bathtub.
captain’s daughter = cat o’ nine tails
God help us all. I just hope these are just talking points pandering to their far left base, and not sincerely held beliefs. Sadly I suspect it’s the latter.
Even if sincerely held, Del Toro sure as heck shouldn’t be saying stuff like that in public. World peace depends on a wary regard between potential adversaries. Admitting—boasting—that you have no intention of being a potent adversary invites war.
Putin is struggling right now because he underestimated his enemy. If he thought there was a good chance he’d meet a spritied defence he’d have stayed home.
Prior to WWII, the Japanese leadership believed that the US lacked the will to fight.
They believed that if they bloodied us sufficiently at Pearl Harbor, our politicians would race each other to sign a peace treaty with them.
Words have consequences. This seems to be a lesson that each generation has to learn for itself.
MarkW In the WWII era, the Japanese leadership made a serious error in judgement with that belief.
Today, I suspect they would be proven right.
I believe someone said back then, “we have awaken a sleeping tiger”. Now the tiger is “awoke”.
This has been going on to some degree since the Clinton administration. I thought it fairly harmless when it was things like installing solar hot water panels on the base laundry and exchange, but then they seriously started trying to get vegetable oil (from all sorts of plants) to run the airplanes and ships instead of Jet 1A or bunker fuels. The only reason to research those ideas is for a limited proof of concept contingency for disrupted wartime fuel supplies. You can’t reliably run operations on it.
Allow me to order up a prophesy.
China becomes the dominant sea power in the western Pacific ~2025-2028.
They invade and take Taiwan by force of arms shortly after.
With all the geopolitical costs to the US that entails and all the geopolitical advantage that flows to them.
The US navy is unable to engage and can offer no support to Taiwan, China is unopposed internationally.
Status today:
China is building fighting ships, destroyers and cruisers as if on a production line.
The US ship building program is an absolute train wreck.
Consider the new destroyer, DDG 1000 Zumwalt class, late, over budget, weapon systems cancelled. Originally conceived as 32 ships, now cut to 3. A truly useless ship, adding no capabilities to the fleet.
Next up the LCS, the Littoral Combat Ship (Little Crappy Ship). They could not even decide on a basic ship design between traditional monohull and a multiple hull design. So both were built.
The Freedom class and the Independence class. Both have huge problems with the propulsion system, and like the Zumwalt, offer nothing to the fleet.
In 2016 it was announced that the first four LCS would be set aside as training ships and never join the fleet at all. In 2020 it was announced that these ships would be withdrawn from service all together.
This is the navy we have to project power to the western pacific.
Look at the bright side – maybe these Naval lemons can be towed out to deep water and used for target practice.
Plan A:
Deploy them to the western Pacific and allow the Chinese navy to use them for target practice.
Don’t worry, you still have USS Missouri. I watched it on a documentary about it fighting an existential threat.
All to the soundtrack of Thunderstruck by AC-DC.
It was chewed up pretty bad in that conflict. I don’t know if they still make spare parts for it.
The Gerald R Ford also has huge design problems, the Connecticut highlighted glaring problems in training and personnel, the Bonhomme Richard disaster highlighted failures in command and this is on top of several previous cases where US Naval officers have rammed or been rammed due to avoidable errors in seamanship. You’d have thought that these issues would have topped the list of things to get fixed, wouldn’t you?
Which problems management chooses to concentrate tells you what is important to management and what their real goals are.
This morning I attended an all hands meeting with the CEO. After spending the first 3 minutes listening to him go on and on about the tragedy in Uvalde and Tulsa and the desperate need to do something about gun violence, I hung up. I don’t know if he ever got around to talking about the company.
The Tulsa gunman was a disgruntled patient of the doctor he killed. The doctor operated on him a few weeks earlier and the patient thought the operation had been botched and ended up killing the doctor and several others in the immediate vacinity because of it, before killing himself.
It turns out the killer was living with a doctor at the time of the shooting. He lived with a doctor and then he went and killed a doctor. Obviously, he was mentally deranged.
Of course, Biden will focus on trying to ban the AR-15 rifle, but not having a rifle would not have prevented this man from finding something else to shoot with. Along with the rifle, he had a pistol.
Gun Control is avoiding the problem, which is mental illness. Gun Control is a diversion that doesn’t solve the problem. If you have total Gun Control, then only the criminals have guns.
Biden will focus on trying to ban the AR-15 rifle
Because that’s the only rifle he could have possibly used.
Thus far the Biden administration’s standard response to any existential threat is committing suicide.
Would that it were so. From what I’ve seen. I think their standard response is curtailing our liberties.
I’m waiting for them to turn the dial to 11 and move from “existential threat” to “galactic threat”. Because hyperbole and superlatives are supposed to make it sound so much more real to all us little people who haven’t lost our minds and couldn’t care less about the non-existent problem of
climate changeglobal warming.“Intergalactic emergency” would probably be turning the dial up to 11.
ElmerUlmer
Well following the SecNav’s views we need to launch on all shore coal plants and all tankers and NG carriers at sea. Gee, is this the guy you want in charge of the Nacy?
People are tired of the ‘woke/ESG’ agenda. They’ve figured out it’s all hype and no substance. Some corporations have already pulled out of their support for ESG …. quietly, they aren’t sure yet. Investors won’t be fooled by the woke narrative, they’re in it for the money. Long live Capitalism.
Back to sailing ships!
Arrrrrgh! The NavSec is worthy of a plank to walk to Davy Jones Locker. Or, perhaps, a good keelhauling to fix his unworthy not befitting a sailor attitude. Aye, me laddies, we live in interesting times. Which need to be addressed and righted…soon?
Elections are the solution to this farce
Alas, there’s a year and a half before that’s possible. Plenty of time to do just more, perhaps irreversible, damage to this country. I don’t think there’s a rational person anywhere in this administration. Woke radicals all……………Sigh.
The military tried the election idea but found it didn’t work out very well in practice. They much prefer a slightly more defined chain of command!
The regime doesn’t seem to be concerned about losing elections.
Insanity
Yes.
A permanent fog bank has settled in between the Secretary’s ears!
The Biden admin are clowns. All of them. Sadly, they have power and remind me of another clown.
If “climate change” is an existential threat, then I assume the U.S. Navy is currently sailing with all due haste to cruise missile range of China and India. At least one missile should be launched at every single coal-fired power plant in those two countries as soon as the ships are in range.
If heavy bombers from a foreign adversary were carrying nukes to bomb the U.S. into oblivion, that would be an existential threat and everyone in the military would agree to immediately shoot down every bomber.
Why does the term “existential threat” in first scenario not mean the same thing as “existential threat” in the second scenario?
P.S. I am an Idiot, but I am not advocating for violence.
However, I am advocating for logic.
PI, that horse is long out of the barn.
That would be racist.
This seems more like a nightmare, with us being in the Twilight Zone.
Our leaders dwelling on the fake climate crisis in every realm.
Seriously, it’s a religion/cult that’s programmed the minds of millions of people to no longer think critically or use the scientific method.
Instead, they’ve had their minds captured/programmed by climate cult leaders who they trust with unshakeable faith, despite the science being exaggerated to wrong for over 3 decades.
If the US had mortal enemies, this type of leadership and future energy, defense, economic and other strategies are exactly what that enemy would hope for to spell our demise!
Charles Mackay 1812–89
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
During the 80’s a government review of our education system opened up with the statement that if our current education system had been imposed on us by a foreign power, we would consider it an act of war. Education has gotten much, much worse since then.
FOIA requests for the e-mails that led up to the parents are domestic terrorists memo reveal that the “educators” wanted much stronger language.
If the next Republican administration can’t zero-out the Department of Education, I’m done with them.
At least the US Navy is the only government department anywhere close to being capable of going carbon neutral. They have these really cool portable nuclear reactors, and could expand their production massively. But I’m guessing that isn’t part of the Naval Secretary’s plans.
The US Navy is nowhere close to being able to go carbon neutral. The money being wasted on this nonsense should be spent on readiness — spare parts and maintenance for ships and for aircraft, and for upgrading our shipyards to modern standards.
It always pays to read the fine print. It’s even better to read between the lines, and John seems to have done both.
Career bureaucrats seem to have a finely honed ability to find a way of interpreting decisions from on high in such a way as to find additional funds to do something they have on the drawing board.
An earlier article was about the US Army going carbon neutral for bases and non-tactical vehicles, and a while later announced small modular reactors in shipping containers which could be air-lifted to site.
Let’s see what the Navy announces down the track.
Behold the pedal-tank.
Plug in electro boats! they have a long lead time!!!
The fact is that the US Navy’s readiness accounts have been underfunded for more than twenty years to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq; and to pay for shipbuilding programs such as the DDG-1000 and the LCS which are miserable failures for the 60 billion dollars spent on them so far.
The new Ford Class aircraft carrier cannot reliably launch and recover its aircraft; and the nature of the technical problems are such that it is doubtful these can be fixed without a total redesign and replacement of the ship’s aircraft launch and recovery systems at a cost of eight or ten billion dollars, if not more.
The result has been that we now have a USN fleet which is wearing out and which is not sufficiently equipped with enough ships, enough aircraft, and enough ordnance to successfully fight a war at sea with the Chinese.
The money needed to deal with these issues is listed as an unfunded priority in the Navy’s current budget submission. However, Carlos Del Toro states in his Climate Action 2030 plan that his climate action spending priorities will be the primary focus of his tenure as Secretary of the Navy.
We should believe what he says. He was chosen for the job because he will do whatever Biden’s puppet masters tell him to do in supporting their Green New Deal agenda.
I wonder if the Chinese wait to see if our stuff works before they steal the designs.
The Chinese managed to make their copy of the F-35 fly successfully before the US ironed the bugs out of theirs. I think they’ll steal the technology first then see if they can make it work.
Full retard
They’ve been a long time without an enemy to fight with far too much time on their hands and the endemic problems of a peacetime military have become endemic. US Naval officers are no longer concerned with ability or combat effectiveness but simply on political brown-nosing for promotion.
The Air Force seems equally as bad. The Academy is positively drowning in political correctness. It is truly sad to observe these people who have completely lost track of their job assignments and responsibilities.