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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25446 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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You also ought to give Trump credit for being an obstacle to a much more neocon, interventionist, deep state aligned republican administration.

Neocon and interventionist like assassinating Iran's most important and revered military leader in a foreign capital by drone strike?

I think the neocon interventionist move was "war with Iran." They built the Littoral Combat Ship for a reason, and it wasn't fighting China.

LCS was horrendously bad, was it even suitable for Iran?

In April 2012, Chief of Naval Operations Greenert said, "You won't send it into an anti-access area"; rather, groups of two or three ships are intended to be sent into areas where access is jeopardized to perform missions like minesweeping while under the cover of a destroyer. The LCS's main purpose is to take up operations such as patrolling, port visits, anti-piracy, and partnership-building exercises to free up high-end surface combatants for increased combat availability.

Sounds like it was supposed to be handling Yemen...

By May 2022, the Navy shifted its plans to decommission nine LCS warships in Fiscal Year 2023, citing their ineffective anti-submarine warfare system, their inability to perform any of the Navy's missions, constant breakdowns, and structural failures in high-stress areas of the ships.

Or not.

I think the idea was that it was supposed to help handle the swarms of Iranian speedboats.

My vague sense of Iranian capabilities is that once we fielded the LCS in numbers their capabilities had evolved beyond merely "100 speedboats with warheads" anyway, although we know from Ukraine that the threat from speedboat swarms is real.

The key is the comparison. Would a typical republican be just as interventionist as Trump was, or much more? The reality is that there is in fact a much more gung ho republican faction and there has been backlash against Trump for not going along with the neocon agenda, as much as they wanted.

Both in regards to Ukraine, Syria, and general American involvement and intervention with other countries.

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