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Totally normal the dept of war
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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Prior to this clown show, the Navy was. Logistics has been THE biggest thing about the US military that has set it apart from the rest of the world, for the last 80+ years.
That's gone down the shitter with these buffoons in charge. That's what happens when you put an alcoholic TV host in charge of the military.
The US military base in Bahrain was there for much longer than the administration. While it may have been sufficient for operations in Iraq, it makes absolutely no sense to supply an aircraft carrier operating outside the Persian Gulf from within the Persian Gulf... I don't understand how any planners thought this made sense. They knew Iran could shut off or severely endanger passage of the Hormuz straight.
How could the base resupply the Lincoln even if it wasn't destroyed? Did the US really have no logistical capabilities in the Arabian Sea? They have facilities in Djibouti and Oman.
I think we are letting Hegseth's stupidity take the fall for a clear diplomatic or military planning failure.
They knew Bahrain was a problem and therefore moved operations to Diego Garcia, which is further away. Djibouti can be hit from Yemen, where the Iranian allied Houthis are after all. However then Diego Garcia was hit as well. They did not destroy too much, but the Navy moved logistics further away. However that would have pulled Lincoln out of combat range. Otherwise it would have to stay in place in range of Iranian missiles. Iran hitting an aircraft carrier would have been a massive issue.
So apparently they believed it was smarter to keep it in the fight, since Trump was going to end the war in a few days anyway since a few months now.
This is why the US used to avoid going to war with Iran. They knew it would turn into a shit show.
They have 11 carriers in service and no other active war. West Coast to the gulf takes 40 days. Why not exchange the carrier?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_of_the_United_States_Navy
They do with George Washington coming from Japan to replace Lincoln. Bush has done the same for Ford. Nimitz is currently sailing around the Americas as a sort of good bye journey, as she will be replaced by Kennedy soon.
The rest is training or being maintained. Generally speaking warhsips are often ordered in multiples of three. One training, one being maintained and one deployed.
You're right, it's not Hegseths fault. It's his fault + all the Republicans enabling the destruction of america + all of the dumbest people in charge, who's only qualifying feature is making Trump richer.
That’s the thing. We have a base in Djibouti.
It’s a little farther and would have taken some of the focus off of AFRICOM, but would have been a regional base outside of Iran’s capability.
And Houthis are just across the strait. Seemingly whole thing depended on USA being undisputed top dog.
The US military as a whole was basically a logistics company that shot people. That was the main thing that kept the United States such a high rate military power.
Then they replaced a General who understood that with a Former Major who thinks the Army runs on testosterone and crusader rhetoric and now everyone's surprised everything has gone to shit?
What’s the quote? Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics?
There's that one and "Tactics win battles, logistics wins wars".
As long as you keep people fed, clothed and moderately comfortable, they'll fight anyone, anywhere for you.
Yeah, the logistics behind the military were honestly staggering. There was an old joke about how the US military could get a fully operational (built, supplied, and staffed with trained crew) McDonalds anywhere in the planet within 48 hours. Except that it wasn’t really a joke. If the military wanted to, they probably could.
The sheer scale behind the military’s logistics was so vast that people have trouble comprehending it. The same way people have trouble wrapping their mind around how big a billion of something is. Conceptually they may know how big it is, but actually putting it into practice is too large for any one person to truly comprehend. It’s the old “a million seconds is 11 days, a billion seconds is almost 32 years” problem, where the human brain simply isn’t designed to comprehend the sheer scale of something that large in a realistic way. Every comparison we make ends up with people devolving back into concepts in order to keep track of it in their mind.
And we’ve seen all of it begin to unravel in only a few years, because the POTUS has surrounded himself by Yes Men instead of competent leaders. It’s the same way so many despots and dictators have historically been brought low… They surround themselves in Yes Men, and nobody wants to be the one to break the bad news. So the leader is kept blissfully ignorant, while everything crumbles around them. And then they’re shocked when they have angry mobs and/or a coup d’état.
POTUS can be impeached. The problem is either much bigger or it's a ploy.
I'm not trying to be overly pedantic but we deploy Burger Kings from. AC-130s. Not Mc trash
(We actually do use C-17 Globemaster III cargo planes to deliver containerized burger kings though)
It wasn't a joke. During the initial invasion of Afghanistan, one of the first pieces of infrastructure was a self-contained Burger King truck. Airdropped in on a C-130.
Even way back, one of the biggest things during the Pacific Theater in WWII was the fact that the US had three ships dedicated just to transporting frozen and refrigerated foods, so that the troops had fresh food. The ships colloquially became known as ice cream barges because they had the capability to make a ton of ice cream. The Americans in the Pacific were eating fresh meat and ice cream, while the Japanese soldiers were eating shitty rations. It was a major morale killer for the Imperial Japanese.
Dammit, you dropped the two pieces of trivia I wanted to! hehe
The only other one I can think of is also from WWII, where the Germans became aware that Americans were sending things like birthday cakes to their soldiers - that would arrive before spoiling, indicating how good the supply chain was, and no only for weapons, but enough room for personal items like that.
Yeah that was a huge part of it.
What modern Republicans would call a “waste” was a major form of power projection.
It was a signal. “We are so strong that we can send our troops shit like cake to keep them happy and fed. You’re eating slop and wearing torn boots. We’ve already won.”
Not only did it boost American troops morale, but it crushed the enemy morale.
An enemy that feels they’ve already lost because of the massive machine coming towards them is easier to beat than a motivated enemy that can smell the incompetence from a mile away.
It's like the old anecdote about Kruschev seeing full grocery stores and realizing how far the US was ahead.
Now we know the food was full of HFCS and slowly killing the people. All those regime changes that are necessary for the bases around the globe are a hidden dept.
It’s all been propaganda lies. The whole time. The US military has lost every single engagement since world war 2. Every single one.
Arguably won the first Iraq war, the one where there were clear goals that were achieved, and did not turn into a prolonged quagmire.
I suppose you could argue that it was just a setup for the second Iraq war, but that setup was also a bunch of lies.
Panama? Granada?!?
Sorry, just.... no.
US military logistics cannot be dismantled in 10 months by political appointees. It's literally designed with a chain of command to prevent that, and it's certainly not because of budget either. The reality is that the US military has been a paper tiger only capable of fighting shepherds, poor people, school children, hospitals, and babies. The minute they try to fight anyone with a decent capability, they fall apart. And Iran is probably the most capable adversary the US has fought since the Third Reich.
Yes it absolutely can be.
A, he has fired over 100 senior officers in the chain of command with little to no notice or turnover and promoted up sycophants with no experience and the only requirement is pledging fealty to the king. My father-in-law was a logistics officer in the Marines. When he retired a decade ago, it was required that he have a full two-year turnover with the incoming officer to cover all of the logistical details for the MEF. They flat out wouldn't approve his retirement with less notice than that. When the Log-O in my unit got their promotion notice, it was over a year before they pinned and moved to their next command because of the amount of turnover needed. And this was just battalion level. Under this idiot, turnover is a few weeks. If that.
B, we are 19 months into this shit show. Not 10. And that ignores the 4 years of damage he did his first term that can't be undone. You can't fire officers and senior enlisted with 20+ years of experience and replace them with new ones in 4 years. The linear passage of time just doesn't work like that.
Efficient logistics is the first thing to go with incompetent leadership. It's the single most important and fragile piece of the military. And it's seen not just in the military, but in the commercial side as well. Bad top-down leadership is the quickest way to destroy an organization.
Good write up. I assume corruption and theft are also taking a toll on the supply chain.
Fair enough. I just didn't think the military was so fragile that a single election could turn it from the world police into the keystone kops.
Failure of the entire system is almost always is always at critical bottlenecks. Avoiding these bottlenecks is a key component of military and economic competency.
The U.S. military and economy has been declining for decades. Why? Consolidation of companies into mega-corporations. Less competition = more cost for less results. Less players also means more potential bottlenecks in the system.
It's been being held together by a shoestring for decades now. It's getting more and more unstable as time goes by. This is where gross incompetence at the leadership level can sink not just an industry but an entire nation.
Could it be that they are preparing for privatization and to outsource logistics to Amazon?
Entropy, my guy. It applies to everything, not just physics. Breaking things is and always will be vastly easier than building them up.
Maybe people engaging in such bravado laden claims without knowing the reality along with anyone reading this who didn't know beforehand how fragile complex systems can be, even the US military - maybe everyone will think twice before letting a corrupt evil moron get elected just to "shake things up".
Thanks for the detailed explanation.
I feel like this applies to a lot of places, and I can draw parallels to prior workplaces where things were going downhill. If you don't give your people what they need to do the job.... It does not get done.
It applies to every interaction between two or more human beings.
This is precisely why in the anarchist world, the emphasis on positions of responsibility (as opposed to positions of power within a standard hierarchy) are so goddamn important and the one of the most misunderstood tenets.
You cannot perform long term planning without a long term view, and you cannot achieve a long term view, without looking from the needed vantage point for a long time.
Damn, I wish more people understood this.
So many people are short sighted.
I really think the jagoffs in charge thought this would be just like the Venezuela situation where they could instantly topple the government and then run Iran like a client state.