Vic Socotra

01 August 2009

Down With the Ship

(Down by the Bow)

You may have noticed that the once-vaunted naval power of the artist formerly known at the Soviet Union has hit a slippery patch.

You may also not care; goodness knows there is enough to worry about elsewhere. Here in the sultry Imperial it is possibly more urgent to contemplate that recess-departing Democrats are calling “additional contributions” to the public trough from the Middle Class, the folks beyond us plutocrats and oligarchs the President is going to use to pay for fixing the health care system.

The sense on the Hill is that the rich can be twisted for the health bill, but not much further. Going at them again to attack the deficit is going to be a hard sell, since it eats away at what is left of the tatters of the American Dream, which seems to have morphed from making your own fortune to spreading someone else’s around.

It should be noted that we are not talking about paying off the deficit, just not creating that much more of it.

A note of reality was sounded by Ms Isabel V. Sawhill, who was a Clinton Administration budget official. She was quoted in the Times this morning as saying “The middle class is going have to contribute as well.”

Contributions. Jesus, these people make me sick. It is a “contribution” if I decide to give it, after looking at my monthly balance sheet. If the Federals seize it, it is robbery.

No point in getting upset about it, though, since we are well beyond all of that now.

I read a little history, and being a child of an empire at zenith, I am always looking for the tell-tale signs of when the fair fruit is a little past ripe.

They are all around us. People seem to think that taking away from Peter to pay Paul will somehow make things better, and certainly Paul would agree. Peter might just shrug, like Atlas, and decide to do something else.

There is always hope, though, and I would never bet against the Good Ole USA. Who knows. Maybe we will muddle through this to a new golden age.

That is going to be hard to pull off, though. The whole confiscation-of-wealth thing was done with such bloody aplomb in the old Soviet Union, and I would hate to see that here. It also doesn’t work.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand even applies to the practice of the government when it interferes with the market. When the State takes all and gives all, there is no incentive to produce value. People being what we are, though, of course an entire alternate economy was created. The closer we get to that point the more likely it is that capital will simply pick up and move.

The same article- compiled by Jackie Calmes- claims that the top tax rate, all inclusive, in the states of Oregon, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York and California, will be 57 percent.

That may be one of the tipping points. You can see it now, with business fleeing those states for others with more generous tax laws. It also suggests to me that expensive things in the budget are going to have to be put aside.

The military is one of them. I’m sensitive to that, and I won’t even attempt to hide my bias for a first-rate Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.

It is not going to be affordable in today’s dollars. The Air Force is demonstrating that as the budget has never been higher, and its planes never older. The Navy, bless it, is cursed with the fact that our ships are expected to last for fifty years. The USS George H.W. Bush, for example, is just fitting our now, and is expected to be steaming, maybe, in 2060.

I don’t know how this is all supposed to work, unless it is the same story that has plagued every dominant power of its respective age.

Sometimes it is easier to look overseas than into the eyes of your fellow citizens. I asked a pal of mine who is smart about these things a key question the other day: “What is the price point for the Russian Navy?”

Our erstwhile rivals for global hegemony sort of went out of the navy business when their economy melted down. They were bold, back in the day, and constructed some pretty good ships and submarines and some truly extraordinary missiles.

My friend thought for a moment, and said: “My working number for the Russian price-point is $70 dollars a barrel for oil. The higher it goes above that, the more adventurous they can be. If it is under that, the whole thing falls apart. They cannot afford it.”

So, I keep tabs of the price of oil as a sort of gauge on how irritating the Kremlin is going to be on any particular day. Remember when we were zooming to $150 dollars a barrel for Brent Crude last year?

The Russians were really obnoxious last summer.

This year, not so much. But the price of energy is volatile. The interesting thing is what happens when you stop spending money on things for a while, and start to do so again.

You forget that people who used to do these extraordinary things have either died or moved on to other things. The program manager for the Bulavasubmarine-launched ballistic missile was a guy named Yury Solomonov. He got canned last month after a disastrous series of launch failures.

The Bulava was supposed to put the Russians back in the game, big time. The missiles carriy ten MIRVed warheads over 5,000 miles, and are intended to be the main battery of the new Borey-class boomers.

It is not working out that way. Between things the disaster of the Kursk sinking and the disaster on the new Shark-class SSN Nerpa that killed twenty, you begin to suspect that some key people are not around anymore.

When oil was high last year, the chief of the Russian Navy, Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky, was crowing that he was going to add six aircraft carrier battle groups to the fleet.

That is, of course, quite impossible now. Several objective observers think that the Russian Fleet is essentially finished. The last of the Soviet-era hulls are on their last days, and when they all go, there will be nothing to replace them and no real capability to even build them in the numbers required to have anything but a toy fleet, incapable of serious power projection.

Well, what the hell. Russia was always a land power anyway, though the demographics of the population suggest that will be hard to manage.

If you think I am crowing with a little schadenfreude at the misfortunes of a former adversary, you would be wrong. I made my career in the great rivalry, after all, and for all the thrills and spills of the Cold War, had a grand time with all the tax dollars we spent.

The deal is this: I am just looking at something falling apart and realizing I am looking into a magic mirror. It is a silvery surface with a slight distortion that shows the future of all the superpowers that have ever been.

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