In Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore Sir Joseph Porter sings that he’s done many things in his career that led to being named First Lord of the Admiralty, but none of them took place at sea, or, for that matter, had anything to do with ships. The Chorus tells us: “Stick close to your desks […]

I wish Secretary of Defense Shanahan all the best; by all accounts it’s a thankless job. That said, I offer these thoughts from the cheap seats, things he might want to “take a second look at.” War Plans – there are multiple OPLANS and CONPLANS (Operations Plans and Contingency Plans); someone needs to start working […]

George Washington once (perhaps apocryphally) noted that: “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force. Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” Which is important to remember in light of a recent poll by a major US university that indicated that a majority of Americans believe we […]

The majority opinion seemed to be, in the wake of the last summit between North Korea and the US, that the summit was a failure. As there was no agreement, I suppose that’s an accurate, if limited, assessment. If the whole point of the summit was to produce an agreement, no matter what that agreement […]

A good friend – a keen observer of the human condition – asked the other day if the Notre Dame fire is a metaphor for the destruction of the Western World? There’s an instant recoil from that suggestion; of course things will be okay! Then you start to think about all the negative news of […]

I have a couple Georgetown alumni in the circle. Here is what Arrias has to say about that. – Vic ======================= Reparations I’ve read that students at my alma mater are pushing the school to provide reparations to descendants of slaves the school owned – and sold – 180 years ago. Slavery was, and is, […]

“Welcome, Comrades, to another Monday! There is word of hostage release, doubling down on collusion charges, criminal referrals to DOJ from Congress- or part of it, anyway- 24 gunshot victims on the first decent night in Chicago- and the change in leadership at DHS as the Border becomes more complex. Of course there is more […]

America faces several existential threats. Two of them – Russia and China – are somewhat ordinary, in that we’ve faced them for years. They remain threats none-the-less, but we know how to deal with them. Then, there’s debt, huge, multi-tiered layers of debt – federal spending, Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, multiple federal and state […]

Sometimes you need fiction to fully grasp what is happening in the real world. This occurred to me the other day when I read a politician’s glaringly anti-Semitic remarks. A scene from Herman Wouk’s novel “Winds of War” came to mind, where the Nazi banker calmly comments to the US Naval Attache to Berlin, telling […]

In the Pentagon, fascinated as it is with “joint” warfare, few people seem to understand questions of naval policy or naval theory, but we are a maritime nation. That has a host of implications, but the most immediate is that it means our true first line of security is our navy. We need a great […]