The United States Navy’s brand new combat ship, the Milwaukee, broke down on Friday and had to be towed for emergency repair. This happened just three weeks after commissioning and several days of propulsion system problems. While they haven’t specified exactly what those problems are, many are blaming it on haste, an overblown budget and concerns over the warship’s ability to survive actual combat.
According to the Navy Times, The USS Milwaukee was heading towards its homeport in San Diego when it suffered the engineering failure. It was traveling from Halifax, and planned to stop at Mayport, FL, before making the final trek home.
It was towed more than 40 nautical miles by a salvage ship called Grapple to the joint Expeditionary Base in Little Creek, VA, where it now waits to find out the cause of the failure so that repairs can be carried out. The question on everybody’s mind now, is what exactly happened?
105 retired admirals have already warned us of this.
See the initial indications on the next page.
Well said
Sabotaged
Yes
There goes more tax money wasted
Obuma dont want our military doing anything ,, obuma needs to be arrested now, n taken out of office n white house,
Dave Buzulak typical liberal in denial of historic Facts. Truly Pathetic unamerican!
realistically now, Head of State is never impeached, title is far too important, will never happen.
Republican presidential candidate and business mogul Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to build up the U.S. military if elected president.
But it is not clear he will have the experienced commanders within the ranks to do it.
In the halls of the Pentagon, there is a different plan afoot for the Trump presidency. Here, officers are privately contemplating what they would do should Trump become their commander-in-chief. And more often than not, they proclaim they will leave.
“By 2016 I will have my 20 years in and can get out of here,” one military official said, referring to the amount of time a service member needs to collect retirement pay.
Spend enough time with a service member, and the topic of Trump comes up, always unsolicited. It is far less political than it sounds. Trump’s attack plans for the so-called Islamic State widely known as ISIS—his call to ban Muslims from the United States, his suggestions that cutting off the flow of information through the Internet can protect the homeland—many said, are an affront to the values they vowed to die to defend.
Each one of them took an oath to defend the Constitution, which protects freedom of speech and gives Congress, not just one person, the power to send the nation to war. They also swear to “obey the orders of the president of the United States.”
In other words: The plans of the next president are personal to them.
Some said repeatedly hearing Trump and the other GOP candidates spelling out a plan that is only a more brazen —and perhaps reckless—version of the current strategy was not reassuring. They noted that for all the talk of supporting the troops, Congress has yet to pass an updated Authorization of the Use of the Military Force, which would in effect mark a congressional buy-in to the war effort. That some of the candidates have said they support a new AUMF, but have yet to pass one, was only moderately reassuring, they said.
This Daily Beast correspondent has heard such sentiments from at least a dozen commanders in the past few months. Such conversations can also be heard at common areas—in cafeteria lines and around lunch tables.
There are fears of being asked to carry out futile war plans that would bring instability. Almost all of today’s commanders are veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They all know someone who died in combat; indeed, they may have sent someone on a mission that ended with death. And because of that they bring a unique vantage point to lessons learned, from the frontlines where the cruelty of warfare is impossible to miss. Those who send them, meanwhile, sit thousands of miles away and learn what is happening through the filter of distance.
The U.S. military still is rebuilding after a decade of repeated deployments and overworn equipment. And the prospect of endless quasi-war thousands of miles away —even if it’s fought mostly by drones and elite special operations forces—is not tenable, they argue. These commanders are too focused on recovering from the last war to hear politicans talk about the prospect of a future one.
“This is not the country I joined to defend.”
“I am turning in my papers.”
“I’m moving to a farm.”
The words broadly echoed what flag officers have said in the past about the reality show star: “Personally, I hope no one will be called upon to serve under a President T… I can’t bring myself to type the words,” retired Rear Admiral John Hutson, who once served as the Navy’s top lawyer, told The Daily Beast in July.
To be sure, those views are not uniform. Commanders deployed outside the Pentagon said they hear enlisted troops enthusiastically support Trump. Some describe enlisted service members fighting with family or other soldiers in defense of the real talk from the real estate mogul. But the Pentagon is an unusual military posting, one where it is easier to spot a general than a corporal. And if the divide between the enlisted and officers is true, the former—the base of Trump’s military support—are not a well-represented population within the headquarters of the United States military.
Regardless, such fervor about political matters is a jarring thing to hear at first from those in uniform; they serve in a part of government that urges service members to drop any sense of identity or partisan politics. It is unusual to see someone in uniform even say whether they are Republican or Democrat, and if they do, often it is whispered like a secret; the final case of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” if you will.
But in the course of the 2016 campaign it is clear that the nation’s political polarization has seeped into the military, particularly after Wednesday’s debate, which focused on national security.
None of the candidates’ proposals appeared to gain traction at the building Wednesday.
Still another soldier said, “Good luck with that
Unfortunately this is true.
Made in Mexico?!!!