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John Ʌ Konrad V

@johnkonrad

Jun 3

https://x.com/johnkonrad/status/2062039078531457233

This article has me nodding in full agreement. But there is a deeper problem with Indian and Pakistani immigration this only begins to touch on.

Strap in and let me explain in this long 🧵

When I worked on an oil rig in India, my most trusted bosun was a Sikh named Balbir Singh.

I can’t fully explain how critical he was to the operation. An operation that won us a world record and launched the Ambani family into the stratosphere of wealth.

It was an incredibly difficult assignment. We brought a vintage drillship into southeast India and drilled through monsoons, shipboard fires, and the 2004 Asian tsunami.

When we arrived, most of the crew were good ol’ boys from Mississippi and Louisiana. But the Indian government had set an aggressive schedule to replace us with Indians.

We had more problems than I can recount here. The most pressing involved three things: the caste system, honesty, and safety.

I was chief mate, the first officer, so the crew was my responsibility.

The caste system wasn’t a big deal for me, but it was for my southern crew. Most of these guys grew up in the segregated South. We had a small handful of racists, but the vast majority were fiercely anti-racist. Many had come up in a divided South and had zero tolerance for segregation.

My Indian officers were from the higher priest and warrior castes.

Here is what you have to understand about India: labor is extremely cheap. It is not unusual to hire five men to dig a hole with one shovel, supervised by a sixth man of higher class.
That might work on land. It does not work on an oil rig with a limited number of cots.

In American culture, officers are expected to get their hands dirty and pitch in.

So we would assign an officer to a job on deck, and 15 minutes later he had a gaggle of crew working for him. Crew who had abandoned jobs of their own to do it.

Safety was another problem. Life is cheap, so the crew often prioritized the task over their own survival. You would send a man on deck and he would walk out barefoot, straight under a suspended load.

Last was honesty. The answer to almost everything was yes.
“Did you check to make sure the safety pin is in place?”
“Yes sir.”

It often wasn’t.

We had crew from every Hindu caste and every region of the subcontinent. We also had a token number from other faiths: Christian, Sikh, Muslim, and Jain.

Balbir came in at the lowest level, ordinary seaman, with no experience. He quickly became my right-hand man and the go-to guy for any critical operation on the rig.

Let me say that again. He had zero knowledge or experience when he started. /1

https://x.com/johnkonrad/status/2062039078531457233

Part of it was an eagerness to learn. The Brahmin officers I worked with could devour operating manuals like nobody’s business. The warrior-caste officers struggled with the concepts but did better learning on deck. Balbir did neither.

He didn’t tear through books or spend hours observing. He was the student every professor wants: the one who wastes no time but is always aware, always present, always taking notes. Instead of constantly calling me on the radio, he wrote his questions down and brought them to me after work, the things he was still struggling with.

He wasn’t perfect. Like every Indian I worked with, he wasn’t fully open. He would lie, less than anyone else, and when you pressed him two or three times he would fess up. It is difficult to express how important total transparency is on a complex drilling operation.

But a few traits set him apart.

First, unwavering bravery. When we had a fire or an emergency, almost everyone froze, waiting for orders. The better Americans would start laying out hoses and prepping gear for an entry. Balbir would show up with detailed information and a plan of attack.

How? Once, on his way to emergency stations, he went straight into the fire. Another time a crane operator had a heart attack. While I was still pulling the harness and gear and working out how to get the man down, Balbir was already in the cab, unbuckling the operator’s seatbelt to carry him out himself.

Balbir was deeply respectful of other religions and of the caste system. He refused to budge on his core principles.

At one point riots broke out between Muslims and Hindus. It got so bad the U.S. Embassy called and told us to prepare to evacuate, warning of a risk that Pakistan might launch a nuclear weapon. We had a Muslim radio operator who started getting harassed. The vast majority of the crew were kind to him, but a few bad actors sent death threats.

I assigned the biggest good ol’ boy on the ship to stand guard at the radio station. He was not tactful about it. That caused an incident. There was resentment that we were protecting the man, and the American was taunting and daring both sides. Things got hot fast.

Balbir told us to give him the job. He was not a big man. Maybe 5 feet 2 inches and 120 pounds.

He stood in that doorway like an iron giant. He made it clear with every ounce of his body language that anyone who crossed the threshold would be in a world of pain. I tried to step in to talk to the radio officer. Balbir stopped me. He said he had sworn to protect the man from everyone, including me.

That is when the Hindus pulled me aside, told me about the kirpan that all Sikhs are required to carry, and advised me not to test Balbir’s resolve.

But Balbir’s best trait was this: nobody on that rig stood up to me or the captain. Nobody. And we made mistakes too. Once I was walking around for hours doing dangerous work, exhausted, and I set my hardhat down and lost track of it. I didn’t even notice. The moment Balbir saw me bareheaded, he walked over and handed me his own. The guy would not take no for an answer.

Whenever we tried to take a shortcut, Balbir would pop up like someone had rubbed the bottle and out came the genie.

Sometimes there are no good options and you have to break a rule or two. Balbir would stop me, make me explain why there was no alternative, then shrug and help.
He saved me from massive cultural missteps too. We had a sewage tank that needed cleaning. There is a caste for that work. They were getting exhausted, so I pulled them out and tried to send other crew in. No go. So I called for Balbir to sort it out. He refused.

Frustrated, I started pulling on the coveralls to go in myself. He stood at the porthole and refused to budge. It was the only time I ever saw him yell at me. He yelled at the crew too. Cleared the room.

Once everyone was gone, he barricaded the entrance and started suiting up beside me. We entered the tank together.

/2

It was explained to me later that the entire crew would have lost all respect for me if I had touched sewage, and the company would have had no choice but to fire me.

He kept that secret. He was very good at keeping secrets.

He was always well groomed and professional.
His other outstanding quality is captured in the essay every U.S. Marine reads, “A Message to Garcia.” I won’t spoil it. Go read it. It explains how to get an impossible job done without creating new problems.

But you had to be careful, because Balbir was always listening. Once my captain mentioned that he had visited a dozen silk-rug shops and couldn’t find the colors and size his wife wanted. At the next crew change, Balbir arrived at the heliport with a giant package. Inside was a silk rug, exactly as the captain had described it. He had found it somewhere in Kashmir, negotiated it on credit, and carried it by train across the length of the country to southeast India himself.

Incredible.

But there is a moral to this story.

To understand the men I worked with, I started reading their scriptures. I reread the Bible, then worked through the major Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and Buddhist texts. The Sikh faith fascinated me, so I dug into its history.

I grew up poor in the Bronx. My family moved into an abandoned house in a very wealthy neighborhood when I was in grade school. There was a school production of “Little Orphan Annie,” and I was fascinated by Daddy Warbucks’s fearless bodyguard, Punjab.

Did you know Sikhs were regarded as the finest bodyguards in the world for centuries? For exactly the reasons Balbir Singh was such an extraordinary bosun.

That changed in 1984, when a militant separatist movement, the Khalistanis, occupied the holiest site in the faith, the Golden Temple. Indira Gandhi ordered the Indian military to clear it in Operation Blue Star. Months later she was assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards. After that, the image of the Sikh as the world’s most trusted bodyguard collapsed.

I can’t go deeper without enraging all sides.

The moral is this. In my reading, in my work with Balbir, in many other dealings with Sikhs, they earned an enormous amount of my honor and respect.

To me it is inconceivable that a government would strip a Sikh of his kirpan.

But understand this too. Sikhs are a minority in India that has survived by sticking together, even when militant factions seized their own temple. Having lived among the caste system, among Muslims and Christians, they are acutely aware of race and social dynamics. They have a long history of bringing peace to chaos, and of thriving inside racially charged systems.

And they are not honest about it. /3

Read 6 tweets

John Ʌ Konrad V

@johnkonrad

May 20

I bear partial responsibility for the entire Naval Woke College debate. I’ve been hammering them for years.

Let me tell you why…. 🧵

Strap in, it’s a LONG story.

Go all the way back to the start of the Trump 1.0 administration.

Actually, go back further. Go back to Obama.

The Navy is NOT in charge of shipbuilding. They are in charge of ship buying.

The DOT is in charge of shipyards. Specifically @DOTMARAD. And USCG handles shipyard regulations.

Internationally, the United Nations @IMOHQ is in charge. But MARAD is the only major agency in the United States chartered to promote an American industry. So Obama had to subvert it.

Obama went out of his way to play dumb on all maritime matters. But here’s the thing: he grew up in Hawaii. It is impossible to grow up on an island and not understand shipping.

He wanted to turn the oceans into a collectivist wonderland run by Marxists.
Here is how he did it.

First, he installed the failed governor of Mississippi, Ray Mabus, as Secretary of the Navy.

Then he installed the worst USCG Commandant the nation has ever seen: Admiral Papp, who promoted Senior Executive Service officers aligned with UN globalists.

Papp’s SES pushed the UN to further adopt climate change and DEI. He landed his top USCG JAG a job leading the IMO and made sure the elected Secretary General was little more than a figurehead.

The problem: the UN has zero authority to regulate warships. So Papp had Mabus simply order the Navy to accept USCG shipbuilding rules that were, in fact, UN standards.

Then Mabus pushed hard on projects he knew would fail: LCS, Zumwalt, and a massive initiative to convert every Navy ship to run on used French fry oil.

He also forced thousands of change orders onto new aircraft carriers.

Doubling down on failed designs while welcoming UN-approved inspectors into American shipyards was a one-two punch.

Bad ships, plus crushing red tape, would cripple the most powerful Navy in the world.

But the UN one-world-government scheme requires more than weakening the strongest. You also have to elevate the weakest.

Chinese shipbuilding was growing, but their workmanship was a disgrace. They could only build simple vessels: coal bulkers and the like.

So Obama dispatched an American NGO to Chinese shipyards to teach them everything we know. Not just any NGO. The most profitable nonprofit in America.

(For legal reasons, I can’t name them.)
That NGO pulled the best naval architects, marine engineers, and inspectors out of American yards and sent them to China.

They are still there today.

But what about MARAD? It is mandated, by law, to advance American maritime interests.

He simply didn’t appoint anyone for years. He installed a junior congressional aide with a history of poor performance as acting administrator for most of his first term.

(In his second term, when Navy shipbuilding efforts started crashing and burning, Mabus put a submarine O5 in the job.)

Ships and shipyards are heavily unionized, so the AFL-CIO Marxists made sure no one complained.

And Obama figured out that the GOP hates the Jones Act so every time a based mariner or shipbuilder complained just remind them how the Republicans want to steal their jobs.

Simultaneously you get Democrat friends in the Senate to support the number one JA and Merchant Marine hater: John McCain

If anyone complains about Navy shipbuilding you point them to all the ways Dems are cooperating with McCain

McCain who was undermining the shipyards and commercial maritime base.

Now, how do you keep the Navy itself from screaming bloody murder?

First, you double down on submarines, which cannot police the oceans the way surface ships can. UN rules were kept out of Electric Boat.

Second, you push hard on joint warfare. You send your best and brightest officers not to sea, but to the desert, to serve as support elements for the Army.

You pull in reservists like @PeteButtigieg and @RepGoodlander.

1/5

You do everything you can to land book deals, podcasts, and movie roles for Navy SEALs fighting on dry land.

Dial up every Navy activity ashore. Dial down everything at sea.

The final blow: commercial fishermen were not happy. And they are a loud constituency.

Kneecapping them was easy. All Obama had to do was designate 553 million acres of ocean as National Monuments and watch the industry collapse.

You also had to divide and conquer. Alaska has the most powerful commercial fishing lobby by far, so you don’t “protect” those fisheries, and you get McCain to make their governor his running mate.

This was the easiest part of the whole operation. He styled himself a modern-day Teddy Roosevelt, and the GOP signed off without a fight.
So what does any of this have to do with War Colleges?

I was naive to most of this when Trump was elected. All I knew was that the Naval War College had become incredibly powerful in steering naval policy under Mabus.

War colleges train future admirals and generals. They plant ideas and policies in officers’ heads before those officers ever pin on Rear Admiral.

I knew they were going woke. I knew Tom Nichols was off the rails. I did not know how deep the corruption ran.

All I knew at the time was how powerful they had become.
So Trump gets elected in 2016, and we finally have a chance to reform MARAD. But the Navy admirals won’t let go.

The narrative: the Navy was locked in a zero-sum fight for shipbuilding funding against the US Merchant Marine (run by MARAD at DOT) and the USCG.

The Navy saw the US Merchant Marine as a threat, not an ally. They refused to let us run our own agency. A Navy guy had to be in charge.

But DOT Secretary Elaine Chao wanted to save shipyards. So she cut a compromise: the Navy could pick the Merchant Marine Commandant to run MARAD, but he had to be a Merchant Marine Academy grad.

Elaine was married to Mitch McConnell. The Navy couldn’t say no.

They settled on Rear Admiral Mark Buzby.

Buz came in swinging. He reorganized the Merchant Marine Reserve. He funded a fleet of new training ships. He recruited top talent to run each academy. He saved Philly Shipyard.

I did a lot of work behind the scenes to help Buz.

Buz’s next big project was to restore our maritime highways: the rivers and waterways we need to reindustrialize.

Trucks are great for an import economy. They cannot carry enough weight to rebuild steel mills, shipyards, and the rest of heavy manufacturing. You need rail. You need barges.

I launched a startup at Buzby’s request and poured my personal time and money into the problem.
Then the New York Times ran a hit piece on Elaine Chao’s ties to Chinese maritime interests.

I won’t get into the details. I’m not here to defend or trash the McConnell-Chao family.

They are a complicated bunch, and I could write a book on the great and terrible things they have done.
The point is this: the Dems all follow the New York Times. So the unions and the rest of the maritime coalition had to back away from Chao’s maritime initiative.

The article did even more damage to McConnell, who already had a rocky relationship with Trump. MAGA turned on Mitch, sparking a war still raging today, with Mitch blocking the SAVE Act and Thune retaliating by blocking the SHIPS Act.

At the same time, the so-called West Point Mafia (WPN) was taking over the Trump administration. The Army Corps of Engineers controls the marine highways, and the Army would have to pay for Buz’s plan.
Pompeo, Esper, Milley (Princeton, but loyal to the club), and the rest of the WPA wanted that money flowing to defense contractors and consultants. Not to reindustrialization that would have strengthened the Navy.

2/5

By the midterms, the Trump administration, under the WPM, was tearing itself apart and lost Congress.

Another powerful West Point graduate, Jack Reed, took McCain’s old gavel at the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The WPA didn’t just block Chao and Buz. They sold off most of the Army’s watercraft fleet at auction and turned the Army Corps of Engineers into paperwork pushers who now subcontract almost everything to whichever private firm spends the most on lobbyists.

Certain shipyards complained. They were handed more submarine contracts as a consolation prize and told to build out consulting businesses and digital products instead of ships.

The only person who put up a fight was Trump himself. He tasked his most loyal advisor, along with the NSC and NEC, to find solutions the White House could drive on its own.
O’Brien at the NSC pushed hard. He was cornered at every turn by Milley’s Joint Chiefs and SECDEF Esper.

Esper had already engineered a coup to force the Secretary of the Navy to resign, replacing him with a string of feckless acting secretaries.
The NEC and Navarro both worked hard to save shipbuilding. They had very different ideas.

Navarro was a China hawk. He wanted to unite the core maritime constituents to fight the CCP together. To do that, he had to win over the Jones Act lobby.

Kevin Hassett at NEC wanted to pull internal levers to give heavy industry a boost. In his view, that meant suspending the Jones Act.

There is more to this story, of course. Both men are patriots who tried to do the right thing. Both were aligned on saving shipyards.

But the WPM used the Jones Act to drive a wedge between Hassett and Navarro.

It didn’t ultimately work. Both men are back together in Trump 2.0. At the time, though, it made anything maritime they tried to do agonizing.

Then 2020 happened.

Retired Navy admirals wanted a Navy guy running DOT. The WPM wanted a land war veteran. The Obama crowd wanted a Marxist aligned with the UN.

They settled on a Navy Intelligence reservist: Pete Buttigieg.

Pete is politically savvy. He knew the maritime issues, especially the Jones Act, were political kryptonite.
And everyone was at each other’s throats, demanding action as shipbuilding, the Navy, the USCG, and the Merchant Marine all started collapsing in readiness.

But Obama gave him the playbook: do nothing.

Ignore MARAD.
Ignore the Navy.
Ignore the USCG.

When Congress hands you $1.1 trillion to fix infrastructure, just don’t do any maritime projects.
Let the UN take over and quietly build out a massive UN Carbon Tax that will fund UN DEI, climate programs, and Marxism for decades.

Don’t even help the White House.

When they ask for Merchant Marine ships to support the Gaza Pier, send one that’ll catch fire. When the Baltimore Bridge collapses and Biden puts you in charge, pass it off to the broken Army Corps of Engineers. When the Houthis fire on US Merchant Marine ships, don’t say a word. Not even a tweet.

But this thread isn’t about that criminal neglect by Mayor Pete.

It’s about the Naval Woke College.

3/5

Read 9 tweets

John Ʌ Konrad V

@johnkonrad

May 9

Y’all don’t know the half of it.

I met with the recently fired Secretary of the Navy before his confirmation, and I had repeated contact with his staff. The reforms they planned were revolutionary.

The day before he was fired, he held a press conference. I was deliberately excluded.

The owner of the most-read maritime and Navy website in the world, and his most vocal supporter, frozen out. And not just from his remarks. His staff pushed me out of everything.

People who left naval journalism years ago were invited to host panels at the conference. I’m honestly surprised my press pass wasn’t canceled.

My Pentagon press pass has been rendered nearly worthless. The NYT lawsuit forced SECWAR to kick every reporter out of the press corridor.

When the pass was issued, we were told the whole point was to get reporters out of the building and onto the bases, talking to actual sailors and troops.

How many ship visits have I been able to arrange since? One. And only because I was traveling with the SECWAR himself.

I’m working on another project I can’t discuss publicly. A simple advisory gig.

I was asked in early February. It is now May, and I am still in administrative hold.

In the last few weeks I’ve spoken with Tata, Elbridge Colby, Hegseth, and the SecNav team about it. Nobody can budge “the process.”

The other people I’m supposed to be working with have been sworn to secrecy, so we can’t even compare notes.

A few months ago, I helped an active duty senior officer work through an assignment. The bureaucratic sludge got so bad he gave up. Last week, that same officer was asked to serve as assistant secretary under a different cabinet member. That was handled in days.

He has the straight up approval from the White House but, of course, his chain of command won’t approve a TDY, so he needs personal signatures from both SECWAR & SECNAV.

I am nobody. But this officer is absolutely vital to our shipbuilding effort: active duty, in good standing, top eval reports.

Times were dark for me under Biden. NCIS opened a full investigation on me. I was literally pushed off the stage at the big Navy conference.

They watched me closely. But I could still get things done. I could still help Democratic friends land appointments & push bipartisan agendas across the line.

Every corner I turn now is blocked.
I have traveled with @PeteHegseth. I have friends in very senior positions throughout the Navy & the Pentagon. Everyone takes my calls. Everyone wants to help.

There’s no shortage of admirals willing to help either, which genuinely surprised me.

But there is always “a process.” And everything I have worked on has stalled inside it.

Just entering the building or scheduling a meeting has become its own ordeal.
Meanwhile, the literal worst reporter at CNN just filed from an active exercise.

And the worst part? I can’t even complain, because the transformation is real. Hegseth, Tata, Colby, Michaels, Doge & Hung Cao are doing excellent work.

They are working their asses off to get the warfighters what they need.
The operational & procurement reforms are real. But the more I praise them for it, the more “partisan” I get labeled & the bigger the pushback from the blob.

I have been reporting on the Navy for almost twenty years. I have never seen anything like it.

It is simultaneously the most ambitious operational reform I have ever witnessed & the worst bureaucratic obstruction I have ever encountered on structural change.

And Hegseth’s team should prioritize the people on the front line. My concerns are secondary.

All I’m saying is Dort is right. The blob has been suppressing everything.

That’s their trick. They don’t say no. They don’t block you. They just take days to respond to simple requests. Someone loses your paperwork. The process eats you.

I’m dying to share more details but anything negative I say will be used against Hegseth and Cao even though they are fighting tooth & nail to solve these problems.

The problem is the blob is smart.

They know what @PeteHegseth cares about. They know he puts the warfighter first and demands operational excellence.

So they let him have that, unencumbered, while quietly strangling his secondary and tertiary priorities.

What goes unspoken is the threat underneath: push those secondary and tertiary priorities too hard, and they will start throwing wrenches into the primary ones and the warfighters will suffer.

And anyone who thinks the blob won’t screw over the warfighters to get what they want hasn’t studied the Afghanistan withdrawal or Gaza pier.

The other BIG problem is this administration follows the rules

The last one didn’t.

All these MSM reports of war crimes is total bullshit. Hegseth has JAGs review everything. Senior Trump appointees don’t leak secrets to pressure the blob. They honor NDAs and legal process.

These guys are Boy Scouts fighting a rear action war against Marxists who don’t mind shooting their own and are outright happy to destroy us.

Which is why the majority of the MSM phsyop campaign is to paint them as criminals.

The Marxists always accuse the opposition of their own most deadly sins.

Read 4 tweets

John Ʌ Konrad V

@johnkonrad

Mar 18

https://x.com/johnkonrad/status/2034251231334457819

Let's unpack this..

What if the White House has no intention of reopening the Strait of Hormuz?

What if this war is really about ships & tariffs?

I had a long discussion with senior DOE official yesterday on background. I can’t share any details but it’s clear everyone’s Strait of Hormuz calculus is wrong.

We need to go back to the drawing boards.

That's it. That's the tweet. Now a hypothetical 🧵 with my personal thoughts.

https://x.com/johnkonrad/status/2034251231334457819

Background on the Hormuz Crisis

You can skip this long section but know this: THIS IS ALL ABOUT SHIPS, SHIPS, SHIPS... and the US Navy giving them permission to pass.

The Strait of Hormuz is twenty-one miles wide. Two shipping channels, each two miles across, separated by a two-mile buffer. The normal traffic separation scheme runs through Iranian territorial waters, past the islands of Qeshm and Larak, where the IRGC has radar stations, missile batteries, and fast-attack craft bases overlooking every transit.

Twenty million barrels of oil and petroleum products flow through this gap every day. One-fifth of global consumption. There is no alternative. Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline to Yanbu and the UAE’s pipeline to Fujairah can handle maybe 5 million barrels combined. The math doesn’t work. The bottleneck is not political. It’s geological and hydrographic.

When those seven P&I clubs belonging to the International Group issued 72-hour cancellation notices for war risk coverage in the Persian Gulf, they didn’t just raise costs. They made transit impossible.

Here’s why.

P&I clubs insure roughly 90% of the world’s ocean-going tonnage. Without their coverage, ships can’t sail. Port authorities won’t let them dock. Banks won’t finance the cargo. Charterers won’t book the vessel. The entire system, from loading berth to discharge terminal, is underwritten by a chain of contracts that begins with a club in London, Oslo, or Tokyo.

When the clubs pulled war risk extensions on March 5, that chain broke. Not for a few ships. For the global fleet.

War risk premiums jumped from 0.25% to 1% of hull value, renewable every seven days. VLCC charter rates quadrupled to nearly $800,000 per day. Over 1,000 vessels are now trapped in the Persian Gulf, burning charter costs with nowhere to go. By March 3, only four ships crossed the Strait, down from a seven-day average of seventy-seven.

This is the part almost nobody in the media understands. Every TV analyst is talking about minesweepers and carrier strike groups. The binding constraint on Hormuz in the first week was not a minefield. It was spreadsheet in London.

Then Trump did something remarkable.

He ordered the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation to create a $20 billion maritime reinsurance facility, with Chubb as lead underwriter, making the United States government the insurer of last resort for Gulf shipping.

A sovereign nation has positioned itself as the backstop for war risk insurance on the world’s most critical maritime chokepoint. The DFC facility, coordinated with CENTCOM and Treasury, offers hull, machinery, and cargo coverage on a rolling basis to eligible vessels.

The United States now controls the on/off switch for the Strait of Hormuz. Not through naval firepower. Through insurance.

But here’s the tell.

The DFC facility covers hull, machinery, and cargo. It does not cover P&I liability: pollution, crew injury, third-party claims. Moody’s flagged this immediately. Without liability cover, most shipowners still won’t sail. The facility is deliberately incomplete.

If the White House wanted the Strait fully open tomorrow, it could expand the DFC facility to cover P&I liability with one directive. It hasn’t.

That gap is not an oversight. It’s a strike price on an option the administration is choosing not to exercise. Yet.

But now that insurance is mostly settled the ships still aren't sailing. Why?

That insurance isn't backed by the DFC, it's backed by a green light from the US Navy. A green light that hasn't appeared.

Read the latest @DOTMARAD Navy warning carefully: U.S.-flagged, owned, or crewed commercial vessels that are operating in these areas should maintain a minimum standoff of 30 nautical miles from U.S. military vessels to reduce the risk of being mistaken as a threat

They can't pass without Naval ships stepping aside to let them through.

What was clear from the DOE conversation: Europe is going to have to figure this out themselves. And the White House is not sprinting to help.

I was hesitant to post this earlier today but the latest truth social posts confirms some of my suspisions.

so here goes...

Read 22 tweets

John Ʌ Konrad V

@johnkonrad

Mar 3

X is producing excellent Iran coverage but also lots of slop. Ninety percent of what passes for “analysis” on the platform is recycled footage, unverified claims, and engagement-farming slop. Most of mainstream media is too focused on political theater to cover the military and economic dimensions that actually matter.

As founder of the most visited naval and maritime website on earth, @gCaptain, here's who I'm tracking on X

A 🧵

OFFICIAL PENTAGON & GOVERNMENT

Primary sources. When CENTCOM or 5th Fleet posts, that's ground truth. Start here.

@RapidResponse47 @DOWResponse @WhiteHouse

★ @CENTCOM (U.S. Central Command) — The combatant command running Gulf operations. Every strike, every statement starts here.
★ @US5thFleet (U.S. Naval Forces Central Command / 5th Fleet) — Headquartered in Bahrain. Daily Gulf naval operations, carrier movements, task force actions.
★ @DeptofWar (Department of Defense) — Official DoD announcements. Slower than CENTCOM but carries full institutional weight.
★ @thejointstaff (The Joint Staff / CJCS Gen. Dan Caine) — 22nd Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. First non-4-star nominee. Advising POTUS on Iran escalation risks. When CJCS speaks publicly, maximum signal.
★ @USSOCOM (U.S. Special Operations Command) — SOF strategic messaging. When SOCOM goes public on Gulf ops, signal is maximum.
@USAFCENT (U.S. Air Forces Central) — Air operations in the CENTCOM AOR. Strike packages, sortie counts, BDA.
@aircombatcmd (Air Combat Command) — All active duty fighter/bomber operations funnel through ACC.
★ @DOTMARAD (U.S. Maritime Administration) — MARAD advisories on Gulf transit safety. Official U.S. government maritime safety voice.
@US_TRANSCOM - Logisitics wins wars

OFFICIAL PENTAGON & GOVERNMENT PEOPLE

@SecWar @PeteHegseth (Secretary of Defense) — High-level policy and strategy.

@PressSecDOW (Pentagon Press Secretary) — Official DoD spokesperson. Press briefing clips and statements.

@SeanParnellASW - assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs

@USAmbUN (Mike Waltz) UN Ambassador

@USNavyCNO (CNO Adm. Daryl Caudle) — 34th Chief of Naval Operations. Took over Aug 2025 after Franchetti removal. Gulf naval operations go through CNO.

Service Secretraries - @SECNAV @SecArmy @SecAFOfficial

USCG (unofficial) Secretary - @SeanPlankey

US Merchant MArine Secretary - @SecDuffy

@DNI_GOV (Director of National Intelligence) — Strategic intelligence assessments. Rare posts but maximum signal.

@PressSec - White House Press Secretary

@StevenCheung47 - White House Director of Communications.

@JerryHendrixII - Navy Vet. White House shipbuilding

@maphumanintent - Commerce

@Kristinawong - Department of War

Read 26 tweets

John Ʌ Konrad V

@johnkonrad

Feb 20

BREAKING: A security company run by a Navy SEAL and EOD was fired from a BAE Systems shipyard after refusing to use untested EV patrol boats to guard U.S. warships.

The replacement? A mall cop company.

Their electric boat sank two days ago. They pulled it out. It smoked all day. Then it exploded into a major conflagration.

And as I've been screaming about for five years, there's STILL no proper fireboat in San Diego. 🧵👇

After the USS Bonhomme Richard burned for FOUR DAYS in San Diego — destroying a $1.2 billion warship I wrote directly to Vice Admiral Kitchener demanding the Navy buy fireboats.

They ignored me. They ignored Congress. They ignored Dr. @mercoglianos . They ignored every maritime professional who told them the obvious.

San Diego, homeport to hundreds of billions in warships STILL doesn't have a proper fireboat. gcaptain.com/us-navy-lied-c…

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