Where Did It All Go Wrong?
24th February 2026
Clearly, today’s Navy is badly broken in almost every respect but that wasn’t always the case. In WWII, the Navy was an efficient, deadly, fighting force that knew how to produce warriors and ships on a routine basis. What changed between then and now? Where did it all go wrong?
Let’s start with the “what changed”.
From the early 1900’s (pre-WWI) on, the Navy had an intense focus on combat effectiveness (with a few notable exceptions such as the WWII faulty torpedo fiasco). After the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, the war veterans (those who understood combat and designed ships to meet that requirement) retired leaving people whose focus shifted from combat to career. The focus became empire building, budget pursuit, and career enhancement rather than combat-effective ship and fleet design and procurement. Without the crucible and filter of combat to weed out the incompetent, idiots who were politically adroit took over and foolish policies became the norm.
February 24th, 2026 at 17:14
The Frankfurt School Long March happened.
Read about two air force rump rangers who stole millions and bought luxury cars.
What foreign sounding names they had.
February 24th, 2026 at 20:59
Re: “Where Did It All Go Wrong?”
Since the mid-1970s when it was instituted, the AVF – “All-Volunteer Force” – model of force structure has been touted as the finest means by which a modern military force can be raised, trained, organized and used operationally. Over time, this unexamined assumption has embedded itself in virtually everything that is done vis-a-vis the U.S. military. However, given the very mixed record of the armed forces over the last half-century, it is time for this unchallenged assertion to be examined in light of the decades of accumulated evidence both for and against it.
Doing so will require removing the blinders of political correctness in a way that is seldom done in Washington, D.C. or in the armed services for that matter.
The article mentions the WW2 era navy, perhaps the finest force of its kind ever assembled, and then asks what went wrong. How about starting with some obvious facts – such as the fact that the WW2-era navy had few women within its ranks, and none were aboard men-of-war operationally? Or the fact that the submarine force which broke the back of the Imperial Japanese Navy had precisely zero women in its enlisted and officer cadre? Or the fact that Naval and Marine Corps aviation had no female flyers whatsoever ashore or afloat in the vast Pacific Theater of operations.
Any real consideration of the problems of the “new” Navy will have to include a frank discussion about its role in our nation’s defense, and the roles of the other services. The WW2-era military that fought globally and successfully against fascism was based upon conscription, as well as volunteer service. The blunt fact remains that the draft-era military that ended after Vietnam had a far-superior won-lost record to the much-ballyhooed AVF which replaced it. This is not so much an argument for the draft, as proof that whatever it is, the AVF isn’t the last word in effectiveness – and so we ought to stop pretending that it is.
Are our soldiers social workers wearing camo, or are they warriors trained to break things and kill bad guys? Is the military
a jobs program for people with nowhere else to go, or a lethal instrument of force projection? Because the evidence says it can’t be both.
How many Americans know that the DOD is the largest provider of child-care in the U.S.A.? Or that single unmarried moms with kids make up a high proportion of female personnel enlisted in the various services? Maybe someone can explain this to me, because I am apparently dense: How does signing up these individuals add lethality to our armed forces?
Did you know that a female sailor who is pregnant once caused an entire task force on maneuvers to be rerouted – at the costs of millions of dollars – so that she could give birth at a shore-based medical facility? Pardon me for asking, but what on earth is a pregnant “sailor” doing at sea in the first place? Or for that matter, in the USN at all? In the old navy, female personnel who found themselves pregnant without permission were discharged for the good of the service. Maybe it is time to bring back that idea. Because as a taxpayer, I am having a very hard time seeing what it is that this female super-sailor brings to the table that is so unique and irreplaceable that a male sailor shouldn’t take her place.