This article helps to explain why most 🇺🇸 industrial bases like oil refining, shipbuilding, and shipping have been eviscerated by globalist neoliberals like @tomfriedman while other 🇺🇸 industrial processes like domestic 🌾 production still flourish 🧵 americancompass.org/the-commons/sh…
“To begin with, if the lead nation casts off old industries, without developing newer, better-paying, more advanced industries, then it will simply be deindustrialized.” But who decides if an industry is “old”?
Shipbuilding we are told, is an “old” industry we are best rid of, while writing the software for video games is “new.” The option of modernizing a technologically-laggard industry like textiles to keep it in the lead country is never imagined. Is that because it’s “dirty”?
This arrow points to the Singapore the Wall Street of Asia, the entrance to the South China Sea and the most important maritime “choke point” in the word. In black letters is the Chinese Navy’s #PLAN new base. washingtonpost.com/national-secur…
A choke point is an area where traffic meets and a numerically inferior defending force can use as a force multiplier to thwart or ambush a much larger opponent or cripple the economy of large regions of the world.
This news is also important because Cambodia is chair of the 10-member regional Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) this year, Cambodia is keen to avoid the perception it is “a pawn” of Beijing.
I am so angry at the US Navy over this and disheartened by Navy Twitter too. THIS PERSON IS IN CHARGE OF NATIONAL SHIPBUILDING. Yet she has zero experience. You all are (rightfully!) upset about the Navy shipbuilding plan but CNO said there is no yard availability to beat China🧵
Repeatedly I've been told that I don't understand how the Navy works, that I'm blaming @USNavyCNO for things out of his control. That he can't order ships into the Black Sea, for example.That request, to protect the cargo ships that will prevent famine, has to come from elsewhere
Phillips in the elsewhere. Her department is the liaison with the Joint Chiefs on merchant ship protection. She is the Commandant of the US Merchant Service! But here department, @DOTMARAD, is underfunded and broken.
🤦♂️I love you Navy guys but you are exhausting. Nobody cares about ship numbers , minesweeper locations, CENTCOM or any of the details you keep sending me. But they would care if the @eucopresident asks @USNavyCNO for minesweepers and gets this response: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You don’t win the budget battle for new ships by hitting the voting public over the head with operational concerns, statistics, charts like this, and joint operation control. You win it with BIG MEDIA HEADLINES
US NAVY TELLS EU PRESIDENT IT DOES NOT HAVE ENOUGH SHIPS TO CLEAR MINES IN UKRAINE
Now THAT would get citizens and lawmakers excited. That would get them to notice. That would be a big step towards getting you guys more ships.
I take the opposite stance. In a world aligned under the petrodollar rewards went to linear thinkers. Globalization got too big & too simple. To non-linear thinkers the trenches built by mega-corporations look like the Maginot Line, formidable but fairly easy to circumvent 🧵
Armed with huge about of VC cash non-linear thinkers like @elonmusk are collapsing the systems and swimming in the resulting complexities.
To big companies, big government, big military, big media this all looks confusing - but to web thinkers - it looks obvious. Nathan is right the systems will fragment (and some linear thinkers will dominate those small fragments) but not because it’s too complex but too simple.