Unholy Terror

Watching The Terror I’m reminded that period nautical dramas shoot a large percentage of scenes on deck or in the captain’s cabin, which gives 19th century seafaring an unrealistically light and airy vibe.

That, and they haven’t figured out how to broadcast smell.

Something like seventy dudes crammed into a 100’ long ship… It must have smelled unholy belowdecks, especially with those retrofitted steam engines. Like the locker room in a burning slaughterhouse.

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Tab Clearing...

• Unless you're deployed there (or transiting through) this piece from the Beeb is about as close a look as you'll get at Diego Garcia.


• Helene set some storm surge records in Florida.


• More stuff on the sunk minisub.

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So Meta

“Metaphor for hubris sinks during visit to sunken wreck of metaphor for hubris.”

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Meme Dump...

Short Attention Spans, Long Air Campaigns

Every time another round of strikes goes into northwest Yemen, the media acts faintly surprised, as if to say "I thought we blew up the Houthi's missile stuff two news cycles ago?"

While it's not like we're hunting Viet Cong supply columns in triple canopy jungle, or even Serbian tanks and artillery among the forested slopes of the Balkans, we're still trying to knock out a stockpile of mobile cruise missile and drone launch vehicles that are sometimes as small and mobile as a pickup. The Houthis have been stockpiling these over the course of years of shipments, mostly from Iran, and even our most confident estimates were that the initial round of airstrikes only degraded their total missile and drone capability by twenty to thirty percent.

Fortunately that corner of the Arabian peninsula is the armpit of the world and largely devoid of natural overhead cover. At the same time, this isn't like the jump-off of Desert Storm or Iraqi Freedom, where we've been spending a month or more developing targeting data for a mammoth airstrike package. This one is largely happening on the fly.

The Houthis are eager for the shoot 'em up, as you'd expect from a bunch of dudes with "Death to America" right on their flag.

Despite efforts to deter them, the Houthis have refused to back down, vowing to retaliate and welcoming the prospect of war with the United States with open delight.

“Yemen is not an easy military opponent that can be subdued quickly,” Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a senior Houthi official, said in a post on the social media platform X after the American-led strikes.

Thing is, we have no intention (or desire) to fight the Houthis in Yemen. We're all regime-changed-out over here. The Yemenis are just going to have to sort out their problems on their own.

We're just going to hang back and blow up anything the Houthis have that can be used to attack shipping. Of course, this also requires interdicting incoming replacement armaments, and we need to do that, too.

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Rocket the Kasbah

So, last month I wondered...

...whether the west is going to keep shooting down $20k RPVs from Ali's House of Discount Drones with multi-million dollar SM-2 and Sea Viper missiles, or are we going to try a strike using carrier aircraft and cruise missiles to knock out Houthi launch sites and storage facilities.

Well, we have the answer to that question, as yesterday saw airstrikes by Navy Super Hornets and RAF Typhoons, as well as a barrage of sub-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles on Houthi launch and weapons storage facilities in Yemen.

The Houthis, of course, immediately protested and resorted to argumentum ad Israelium.

"A Houthi spokesman, Mohammed Abdul Salam, said on social media that the group would remain by Gaza’s side. He said there was no justification for the strikes on Yemen because its actions do not threaten international shipping, and vowed that the group would continue to target Israeli ships and those heading to Israel."

Which seems like a weird thing to say when you've been launching drones and missiles at random ships which have nothing to do with the Israelis, but the Houthis don't exactly strike me as a very organized bunch.  Also, "I blame the Jooooos!" focus groups well, especially in that corner of the world, so I guess it's worth a try.

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The Who-this?

So the US has put together a task force with some of our NATO allies as well as Bahrain and Seychelles to protect shipping in the Red Sea from Houthi attacks. 

"As of Monday, details on what ships will be involved in the force were not available, a Pentagon spokesperson told USNI News Monday following the announcement.

The U.S. Navy has at least three destroyers in the vicinity of the Bab el Mandeb strait between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden – USS Carney (DDG-64), USS Mason (DDG-87) and USS Thomas Hudner (DDG-116) have all operated in the region. The U.K. Royal Navy guided-missile destroyer HMS Diamond (D34) and the French Navy guided-missile frigate FS Languedoc (653) have operated in the Red Sea as well."

The Houthis, whose slogan is "God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Cursed be the Jews, Victory to Islam" are obviously Big Mad about the whole Gaza thing and are almost certainly being egged on by Tehran and Moscow, who are eager to put a stick in the spokes of as many western wheels as possible.

Meanwhile, BP has announced that it will be suspending oil shipping through the Red Sea, which will do nothing good for petrol prices.

On Monday, oil giant BP became the latest company to announce it would be pausing its shipments through the Red Sea. Several shipping companies, including MSC, Maersk, Euronav and the Evergreen Group, have said they are also avoiding the Suez Canal as militants target cargo vessels.

Roughly 10 percent of all maritime oil trade goes through the Red Sea — which connects to the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal. Without access to the Red Sea route, many ships will have to take the far longer and costlier journey around Africa to reach their destinations.

So the question is whether the west is going to keep shooting down $20k RPVs from Ali's House of Discount Drones with multi-million dollar SM-2 and Sea Viper missiles, or are we going to try a strike using carrier aircraft and cruise missiles to knock out Houthi launch sites and storage facilities. Because in the latter case it would have to be a large enough strike to get them to knock it off for a bit, without being so large as to widen the shooting war(s) going on in the Middle East right now.

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Red (Sea) Alert...

Important line from the latest post at TLP:

"The Biden administration has displayed understandable and otherwise admirable restraint in the face of these continued Houthi provocations. With the war in Gaza still raging, America doesn’t need to see another front opened up in the Middle East. But the Houthis have kept up their attacks on the freedom of the seas—the Navy destroyer USS Carney shot down 14 attack drones just this past weekend, for instance—and transnational container shipping companies Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, and MSC have announced they will keep their ships out of the Red Sea. The problem has slowly snowballed into a significant crisis, one that could find the United States and close allies like Britain and France taking direct military action against the Houthis in the near future."

Note that bit in bold. A tremendous amount of shipping between Europe and Asia transits the Suez Canal. Twelve percent of all global shipping transits the Red Sea. Remember how jammed up things got when the MV Ever Given blocked the canal a few years back?

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Out of the blue and into the black...

Just finished reading The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Oceans, which I'd mentioned a bit ago.

The author, Susan Casey, is fascinated with the deep sea and there's a whole chapter covering William Beebe, whose adventures in his Bathysphere fascinated me when I was in elementary school. I used to draw elaborately layered views of the ocean depths, teeming with all the strange critters he reported.

She also talks about diving off Hawaii in the Pisces-class subs operated by the Hawaii Underwater Research Laboratory and the book climaxes with her accompanying Vescovo* for part of his Five Deeps Expedition.

Although a journalist, Casey writes with a novelist's eye for people and action, and the book steps right along with a very "you are there" vibe. Definitely recommend.

*Vescovo is the only dude to have been to the top of Everest, the bottom of the Marianas Trench, and outer space. (Also the North and South Poles.)

The Next Flashpoint...

The PRC is getting really froggy in the South China Sea and the Spratlys...

As dawn broke, we could see both the fortifications on Mischief Reef and an array of Chinese vessels closing in from different directions: half a dozen maritime militia boats and a recently commissioned navy corvette designed to carry anti-ship missiles. The navy tugboat stayed near, too.

On other occasions, Chinese coast guard and militia vessels have rammed, doused with water cannons and sunk civilian boats in the South China Sea. In 2019, for instance, 22 Filipino fishermen were left to float amid the wreckage of their boat for six hours after a Chinese militia vessel struck them.

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to sea an overeager PLAN officer kicking off a shooting incident with the Philippine or Vietnamese navies.

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Danger Signs

E.B. Misfit linked to a banger of a piece at Vanity Fair on the Titan disaster:

Fortunately, I knew enough to speak to a few people before I got anywhere near the Titan. One phone call was all it took.

Terry Kerby, the veteran chief pilot of the University of Hawaii’s two deep-sea subs, the Pisces IV and the Pisces V, recoiled when I asked him what he thought about OceanGate. “Be careful of that,” he warned. “That guy has the whole submersible community really concerned. He’s just basically ignoring all the major engineering rules.” He paused to make sure this had sunk in, and then added emphatically: “Do not get into that sub. He is going to have a major accident.”

It looks like it's an excerpt from a book, which I just added to my Kindle stack. Her prose really pops*, so the book should be a good read. I've had an interest in subs dating back to early childhood field trips to the U-505 and an old National Geographic with a copiously-illustrated story on the Trieste.

*Bobbi was just commenting that the contraction of the magazine industry has left us with fewer magazines, but generally better ones. (Ignoring zombie husks of former magazines, like Newsweek, that shamble around the internet devouring people's brains.)

The New Cold War Update

Headline at the WaPo this morning announces that U.S. imports from China are down twenty-four percent from this time last year.

U.S. companies are accelerating efforts to reduce their dependence upon Chinese suppliers, even as officials in Washington and Beijing labor to put a floor under their sour relationship.

Which, you know, isn't a bad thing. It's one thing to rely on overseas suppliers for cheap shower shoes and teddy bears, but being reliant on foreign suppliers, especially ones in an increasingly hostile power, for semiconductors and baby formula isn't such a great idea.

Meanwhile, in the Aleutian Islands...

That's a notch up from previous incidents, the most recent of which was last year. This incident involves a larger Sino-Russian flotilla and a more robust response from the USN:

The United States deployed four navy warships after Russian and Chinese naval forces conducted joint patrols near the Alaskan coast, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

At least 11 Russian and Chinese ships went close to the Aleutian Islands in the northern US state of Alaska, the WSJ report said, adding that the ships never entered US territorial waters and left. They were shadowed by four US destroyers and P-8 Poseidon aircraft.

So, just to make sure all of us Americans are on our toes, the government's gonna startle our pants off using our cell phones one fine October morning later this year.

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About that missing sub...

Someone quipped that if these sorts of deep-diving sub expeditions continue as expected and become even more frequent, it won't be long before the sea floor around the wreck of the Titanic turns into a waterlogged version of the upper slopes of Everest, strewn with the corpses of well-heeled adventure seekers.

https://t.co/yEEi9OX8iA pic.twitter.com/nBl4BY0iuS

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 20, 2023

Going back and looking at the CBS reporter's junket on the sub, the whole thing becomes a huge "Oh, hell, no" in my book. Especially reading some of the tweets that David Pogue made recently. Pogue's set himself up for some subpoenas if the sub's passengers are, in fact, croaked.

incredibly funny when the overly-industry-friendly tech journalists don’t realise they’re saying some really damning stuff. https://t.co/vXo9yaZeZ3 pic.twitter.com/TQdkT5ruAH

— Richard (405 Mi16 era) (@halkyardo) June 20, 2023

Meanwhile, in Asia...

Dude just campaigned super well, did amazing in the debates, fundraised like an animal, etc. Gotta hand it to him. https://t.co/1gZtCg7Chw

— Berny Belvedere (@bernybelvedere) March 10, 2023

Xi Jinping got hisself elected to an unprecedented third five-year term as president of China by a vote of 2,952-0 in the CCP's legislature.

Man, that's a bigger margin than Trump pulled in The Villages! (You thought I was gonna say Biden and Detroit, didn't you?)

ANYway, Xi has pretty much solidified his control over the reins of power in China, and that's bad because his whole schtick, foreign policy-wise, is pretty aggro.

This is having some interesting effects in other Asian nations. We've seen the Japanese bolstering their military capabilities and increasing defense spending, and now they're engaging in high-level talks with South Korea, which is pretty wild given the literal centuries of bad blood between Korea and Japan.

Meanwhile, Australia has committed to the purchase of up to five Virginia-class nuclear attack submarines from the US to replace their own trouble-plagued Collins-class diesel-electric subs as they age out of service.

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Color me shocked...

...to find that Seymour Hersh was talking out of his ass again.

"When first reading through Hersh’s account of the events, the level of detail he provides could add credence to his story. Unfortunately for Hersh’s story, the high level of detail is also where the entire story begins to unravel and fall apart. It is often stated that people who lie have a tendency to add too much superfluous detail to their accounts. This attempt to “cover all bases” is in many cases what trips these people up. Extra details add extra points of reference that can be crosschecked and examined. In Hersh’s case, this is exactly what appears to have happened. On the surface level, the level of detail checks out to laymen or people without more niche knowledge of the subject matter mentioned. When you look closer though, the entire story begins to show massive glaring holes and specific details can be debunked."

The ship Hersh named, BTW, hadn't moved under its own power in a decade and was, in fact, apparently scrapped some time ago.

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Skullduggery

The NYT has a pretty good deep dive on the lobbying logrolling that's looking to keep the Littoral Lemons lingering in legislative lucre...

Other industry players joined in, targeting key House lawmakers in Virginia where work on the littoral combat ships is also performed. Letters, emails and other appeals, including opinion pieces in trade magazines, began to pour in.

“Don’t give up the ship,” Tony Parisi, the retired Navy captain, wrote in an opinion piece for Breaking Defense, a trade publication, citing the War of 1812 warning from a Navy captain, James Lawrence, as his ship was sinking.

Mr. Parisi did not mention that he was part of the team at General Dynamics that trains the crews that operate the littoral combat ships at Naval Station Mayport.

One Fincantieri executive, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said he was instructed to be careful not to be too public about the campaign, given that they were also trying to convince the Navy to buy its new class of ships as replacements.

Soon enough, several lawmakers, including Mr. Rutherford and Mr. Wittman, were introducing amendments to block the retirement of all or at least some of the ships, even as other lawmakers, mostly Democrats, pushed to allow the Pentagon to retire all nine ships.

RTWT. The link should vault you over the paywall.

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Sunken Bookends

Stumbled across an interesting story from last April. Younger readers might not remember the Kursk disaster, or how optimistic everyone was that Russia was just going to be a normal country back in the Nineties after the fall of the Soviet Union.

"The Kursk taught Putin as much as it taught Russia, giving the young and inexperienced president a tragically clear view of what he had inherited — and of what it would take to maintain power in a crumbling empire that for 10 years had been careening between freedom and chaos.

“Everything that has long since been typical of Putin was demonstrated after the sinking of the Kursk,” investigative journalist David Satter, who was banned from Russia for his reporting on Putin’s rise to power, told Yahoo News. “The xenophobia, mendacity and casual assumption that the lives of people without power have no value.”"

Desecrating War Graves For Fun & Profit?

The eight propellers (screws to the pedantic) from the HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales have been stolen from their wrecks on the bottom of the South China Sea.

At fifteen tons apiece, these monsters were worth quite a bit just as scrap (bronze is currently over a couple bucks a pound) but there's other value that illicit salvage operators are seeking...

Archeologists believe the criminals might be turning a profit because the hulls are one of the world’s few remaining deposits of “low-background” metals. Having been made before atomic bomb explosions in 1945 and subsequent nuclear tests, the steel is free of radiation. This makes even small quantities that have survived the saltwater extremely useful for finely calibrated instruments such as Geiger counters, space sensors and medical imaging.

Prince of Wales (top) and Repulse during the initial high level bombing attack by IJN Nell bombers. You can see the splashes of near misses around Repulse. These wrecks are the grave of 840 Royal Navy sailors.

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How do you say "Anchors Aweigh" in Mandarin?

China's just launched the Fujian, which is an entirely domestically-designed carrier rather than a rehash of the Russian Kuznetsov-class, like the last Chinese-built carrier was. 

Also unlike the Kuzentsov-derived Shandong, the Fujian is a real grownup CATOBAR ship, with electromagnetic catapults and everything. The only other big CATOBAR bird farm that isn't in the USN is the French Charles de Gaulle, but the Fujian is much larger than the French carrier, and only about fifty feet shy of a Nimitz class in overall length.

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Glub.

At 12,490 tons, the Moskva is now the biggest warship*, by displacement, sunk in combat since World War Two, taking the title from the 12,242-ton Argentine cruiser ARA General Belgrano (née USS Phoenix), which was sent to Davey Jones' locker by HMS Conqueror in the Falklands dustup of '82.

Moskva may be on the bottom of the Black Sea, but she will sail forever in our hearts on a sea of memes.

*"Warship", because Atlantic Conveyor was heavier than either.

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