Unless it’s deliberately placed on Youtube for disinformation purposes, could someone please tell the PTB to remove videos of 155 mm projectile production? It is giving away information.
Any manufacturing engineer watching them will automatically estimate the cycle time for the filmed production steps and from that extrapolate maximum achievable production volumes. Cycle times look anaemic.
I also cringe when I watch the measurement/inspection/QC procedures because I cut my teeth setting Go/NoGo gauges in the lab at an ammo factory as a student. I’ve lost my QC sampling tables but I guess they can be found in a library gathering dust. Forget kanban.
I suspect that a whole lot of stuff can be left out of the production cycle if a “tiger team” gets working, starting with “war finish” paint – if this stuff isn’t going to have much shelf life then maybe it doesn’t need an expensive and time consuming paint job, etcetera.
Your great grandfathers (and Grandmothers) knew how to do this. Start learning!
I remember fondly reading ‘Cheaper By the Dozen’ in fourth grade. On the big classroom book table next to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books.
If the process is revisited from first principles, I wonder if additive manufacturing could be used – probably faster overall, and certainly easier to scale (although perhaps not cheap) – if you need more capacity, just make your building a bit bigger and buy more machines.
We’ve been reliably informed here that the Russians are defeated. I don’t see why there is an issue with low volume artillery production if that is the case. We should be asking why the Ukrainians aren’t going home again to get their economy going with thier own sweat and money, but that would trouble too many of TPTB.
Vershinin at RUSI and Berletic, an independent blogger, have been banging on about ammunition shortages pretty well since the start. I refuse to believe that the people in the UK MOD or the Pentagon are dumb so they’ll have known about the problem all along. In supply and logistics the US has been in a class of its own for decades and it’s too much to expect us to believe that only recently have they found out “Oh dear. We don’t have enough 155mm.”
The efforts made to remedy the various shortages have been cosmetic only. The US has upped production by a ridiculously tiny amount. There was publicity about increased UK production but a film of one of the munition plants showed more or less a cottage industry compared with the amount needed and compared with the amount the Russians are now turning out.
So too with the rest of the kit we’re sending over. The Abrams, for example, are too few, not the latest model, and have had the high tech stuff stripped out. The cluster munitions? Cheaper to give them to the Ukrainians than pay to have them disposed of. For the bread and butter munitions and equipment we’re clearing out the barn, supplying cast-offs that are no use any more. “As long as it takes” is fake and always was. And judging from what’s coming out of Ukraine they know it.
The more useful stuff we’re supplying in miniscule quantities and to soldiers who aren’t’ properly trained in its use; and who in any case haven’t got the level of generalship to use it as it should be used in combined arms warfare. Combined arms warfare? As if what we’ve given them, ISR aid and the rest of it, is of any use given that the essential elements needed for that type of warfare are missing and always have been. Pretending that the Ukrainians are in with a chance is pure PR and always has been. We should stop going along with the pretence and ask instead why the politicians are insisting on that pretence continuing at such a cost in deaths.
You know what I feel about this war, Walrus, but even so it breaks your heart to see such courageous and determined troops given any old rubbish that’s going spare, doing what they can with it and a lot more than most would do, being pushed into essaying utterly impossible tasks, and then being told “We’ve given you all you need but you’re not using it right.” That’s going to be the get out when it all goes down and it’s as fake as the rest of this evil venture.
Still, some stuff does get over that’s useful for what it does. And is being put to effective use.
https://odysee.com/@RT:fd/donetsk-shelling-latest:8
EO,
I don’t think anyone was prepared for the kind of war this has become. We built our warfighting doctrine around attaining air superiority and delivering the bulk of our munitions by air. Given the success of battlefield A2/AD, we need to rethink that doctrine. All, including Russia, have built forces and logistical systems more geared towards boutique wars rather than the wholesale, WWII type war this has become. Russia is begging North Korea and Iran for artillery shells and are scrounging their scrapyards for useable T-55s and still serviceable ammo. I’m sure there’s a lot of rethinking going on amongst the world’s defense establishments.
TTG – more amateur musing from me but I think the only way Kiev could have survived would have been had the Americans put bases and troops in before ’22. The Americans and the Russians are very careful not to tangle directly. Too much risk of escalation.
Therefore there are air deconfliction arrangements in the background, here as in Syria. And as in Syria, if American troops had been stationed in Ukraine there would have been care taken not to let the two sides start attacking each other. The unbreakable rule is, Americans and Russians don’t shoot at each others’ regular forces.
The Wagner episode in North East Syria might look to be an exception to that rule but in fact proved it. It was the only direct confrontation I heard of – and that not regulars against regulars – and although the reports of the episode are wildly contradictory, it’s clear the Russians and Americans worked together during that episode to make quite sure there was no risk of escalation.
So had American forces been stationed in Ukraine beforehand, instead of just a few marines to guard embassies etc and the rest covert, that would have stopped the Russians dead.
Too late now. Yavoriv. The history of the war since February ’22 can be viewed as a series of increasingly desperate attempts from Kiev to get the Americans in somehow and a steadfast refusal from Biden to be got in.
He can do nothing else but refuse. HMG and the Euros can talk as big as they like, knowing they’ll never be called upon to back up the big talk and can’t back it up anyway. But if Biden escalates now to the extent of risking putting American regulars in then he risks uncontrollable escalation.
So it’s not a real war. Nothing like the “peer to peer” stuff all the war porn merchants talk about excitedly. Just an inexorable grinding down of what our proxies can put in the field plus any amount of dirty tricks – thanks HMG, according to the Russians – on the fringes. Bit like Syria there in that last respect, too, when I remember Colonel Lang’s scathing comments on what HMG got up to in Syria.
It’s afterwards, when the war is over, that it gets complicated. The Russians don’t want missile bases that could be nuclear or ABM too close to their borders. They don’t want NATO forces stationed close or exercises too close either. And no more of what Barbara Anne termed “HMS Tethered Goat” playing I dare you games around their naval bases. In short, they don’t want Europe being used to pose too risky a military threat to them.
We Europeans are doing a good line in Russophobia right now. We’re very unlikely to play ball with the Russians on any of those demands. Therefore, if the Russians really want those demands met, the only way they’ll get them met is by cutting off energy and other supplies to Europe.
According to the FT the trade sanctions Berlin/Brussels have imposed have lost the Germans a hundred billion in lost sales. The other sanctions have left Germany scrabbling around for energy to fuel their still substantial industrial economy and paying a lot more for the supplies they get. Their “Net Zero” ambitions haven’t helped either. If on top of that the Russians impose sanctions going the other way Borrell’s “Garden in the Jungle” will be struggling.
So I don’t believe the end of the war will be the end of it. Not if the Russians really do return to their 2021 European Security demands, and not if they go as far as taking steps to get those demands met.
EO: Regarding “The Russians don’t want missile bases that could be nuclear or ABM too close to their borders.”,
you mean like this
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlQy6FlDBO1LRDMFEl-O4Vc8fMnighuf ?
Yeah, I can understand why the Russians might not be thrilled with having such within easy range of Moscow.
Regarding “So I don’t believe the end of the war will be the end of it.”,
I think John Mearsheimer agrees with you:
https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/the-darkness-ahead-where-the-ukraine
Mr Harbaugh – still working my way through the list of references and sources given by Mearsheimer in the link you supply. Some noted before but good to find so many all nice and tidy in one place.
I’m not sure Mearsheimer gives sufficient weight to the background against which the Ukrainian conflict is played out: the precipitous economic decline of the West. Viewed against that background the current conflict, tragic though it is, is inconsequential except in the short term.
Only a passing reference to the “lethal sanctions”. Hmmm. I don’t think Mearsheimer grasps that in the great enterprise of damaging the RF, or even bringing it down, the war was and is a sideshow and the sanctions were the real weapon of choice.
His reading of the military side of things is heavily influenced by Western military “analysts”. Since those analysts have little clue about what’s actually happening over there or why, neither does Mearsheimer. This disables much of his own examination of the conflict.
So when it comes to practical details I’d rather go with Baud, and when it comes to examining the tangle of interest groups in Washington – a key driver of the conflict – I’d need Macgregor for chapter and verse.
All that sounds as if I don’t much like Mearsheimer, or don’t think he’s of much account. On the contrary! He’s a well-equipped and profound scholar and wonderfully courageous, both in his own academic sphere and when he ventures into the political. I never listen to him or read him but that I think that if there were more like him around the West wouldn’t be in the state it’s in. He and a few others, mostly in the States to our shame in England, are about all the true intelligentsia we’ve got! And who can argue with his verdict? (My paragraphing)
“Had the United States and its allies not moved to bring Ukraine into NATO in April 2008, or had they been willing to accommodate Moscow’s security concerns after the Ukraine crisis broke out in February 2014, there probably would be no war in Ukraine today and its borders would look like they did when it gained its independence in 1991.
” The West made a colossal blunder, which it and many others are not done paying for.”
My opinion is that Washington didn’t prepare for this kind of war because they have been convinced for a long, long time that the moment Russia got bolshie then they would simply crash its economy using sanctions.
You only need to go back to the newspaper headlines of February/March 2022 to see that this is true: dire, dire warnings before the SMO that the Russian economy would be destroyed, and then when the Russians crossed the border there was ill-concealed gloating from Biden on down that the Russians had made a fatal mistake.
Why prepare to go on a war-footing – heck, that’s expensive! – when all you need to do is turn your back on Russian exports, turn off the money-tap, and kick Russia out of SWIFT for good measure.
Nobody could possibly survive that economic Armageddon!
Only… Russia did, and easily, and once that became evident then Washington was at a loss to understand why.
It all flows from that fundamental lack of understanding of how the world works. The little countries, well, gosh, the mighty US military can throw those against a wall whenever it wants. And the big countries, heck, no need: just crash their economy and bring the country to its knees.
Yup. That’s the attitude with which the West entered into this conflict. I further assert that the Europeans were hoping to leverage that vast US financial supremacy for their own ends, but that’s a side issue here I suppose.
What isn’t a side issue was how that financial supremacy was brought to bear. Those sanctions were damaging to the West, particularly to Europe. There could have been no popular support for them had there been no compelling reason for imposing them.
That compelling reason was supplied by the “unprovoked Russian aggression” in Ukraine. That is how the SMO was portrayed to us. That is why both the European politicians and apologists, and those in Washington, are still insistent on using the term “unprovoked” and have been from the start. Their justification for the sanctions war and for all else rests on that one word.
I believe that is why the events in the Donbass and along the LoC in the run up to February 2022 are crucial to an examination of this conflict. If the SMO was “unprovoked” then the sanctions war was justified, and that whether or not that sanctions war was ineffectual.
If it was provoked then the sanctions war was not justified.
Therefore the few days or weeks before the SMO are key. It is clear that far from being “unprovoked aggression”, the military threat along the LoC at that time was such that Putin, although decidedly reluctant to do so, was left with no option but to allow a military response.
That Russian military response, portrayed as unprovoked aggression, needed to trigger the sanctions.
By chance that period – those crucial few days in February 2024 – are also being looked at on Martyanov’s site. SWMBO is pointing out that there are other pressing matters to attend to but when I have time, and if Martyanov keeps the thread open, I shall copy that brief summary over there.
http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2023/08/open-thread_11.html#comment-6253797910
I reckon that unless we get those events in February 2022 sorted out discussion of the rights and wrongs of this conflict can never lead to an unequivocal conclusion.
Walrus,
Kismet I guess. While revisiting the story of Hugh Everett, the genius who invented the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum mechanics, I came across this passage below mentioning some of his other contributions including your topic of efficiency of industrial production. Scientific American appears to have made this essay free to the public. His Wiki is too, of course. Wheeler’s critiques of MWI here are incomplete at best but it gives you a slight sense of this deeply religious man’s theological concerns. John Archibald Wheeler – JAWS. Attended Mass every morning. His Hydrogen bomb has never been used in combat – and this morning, recollecting his grace and charity in allowing me to have a long conversation with him in the nineties I wondered to myself if that might have something to do with it, but Vladimir Nabokov, whose ‘Strong Opinions’ yesterday evening told me to can sentimentality would fail me for that. There are other serious non theological technical objections to Many Worlds which this article omits entirely, really serious ones, but it would have required a huge digression and my guess is that the Sci-Fi appeal it has keeps the editors in more subscription & advertising clover than not, so they don’t go there, plus they don’t want to alienate some really flakey but fascinatingly brilliant guys & gals who work on Quantum computing. Thank you, Professor Wheeler. I miss you Hugh, I never met you but have felt your presence ever since reading about your work as a teenager.
————————————
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hugh-everett-biography/
One final chapter in the struggle over Everett’s theory also played out in this period. In the spring of 1959 Bohr granted Everett an interview in Copenhagen. They met several times during a six-week period but to little effect: Bohr did not shift his position, and Everett did not reenter quantum physics research. The excursion was not a complete failure, though. One afternoon, while drinking beer at the Hotel Østerport, Everett wrote out on hotel stationery an important refinement of the other mathematical tour de force for which he is renowned, the generalized Lagrange multiplier method, also known as the Everett algorithm. The method simplifies searches for optimum solutions to complex logistical problems—ranging from the deployment of nuclear weapons to just-in-time industrial production schedules to the routing of buses for maximizing the desegregation of school districts.
F&L, Everett”s work may be consistent with Alexander Franklin Mayers work on Cosmology. Briefly, Mayer traced an error by Einstein (who was a lousy mathematician), through work by Willem DeSitter, who saw the error but didn’t understand its signifigance and then on to minkowski who picked up the import of it but unfortunately died in a road accident before he could elucidate. He explained the import in one lecture at the Prussian Academy of Sciences before he was tragically lost. Alexander Mayer has picked it up again: there is no ‘arrow of time”, time is a local variable orthogonal to 3D space. As Minkowski put it:”From henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, have vanished into the merest shadows and only a kind of blend of the two exists in its own right.” Hence this may be the bit Everett was looking for.
The practical implication of Minkowskis work is that the big bang is bullshit. Hence Mayer is not popular. Read the slide presentation. The Webb. telescope discoveries were predicted by Mayer and they are at variance with big bang.
https://www.sensibleuniverse.net/
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hermann_Minkowski
A weird factoid is that Albert Einstein never used imagnary or complex numbers or the associated mathematics in any of his very extensive work. But he was one of the discoverers of Quantum theory, even before Bohr, and Quantum Mechanics in the Jordan, Heisenberg, Born, Schrodinger and Dirac formulations can’t be done without them. But that came way later. Bohr also had no need for them and rarely even used mathematics actually. I mention it why? Because Minkowski’s 4d formulation of special relativity is usually written down using equations which make use of i, the imaginary square root of negative one. But it’s only for the sake of convenience, to make the equations easier. In Q mechanics the imaginary numbers are really necessary if you want to do calculations.
By the way – Einstein was brilliant at mathematics, really a genius. He just wasn’t a specialist at the very involved and intricate stuff which had been developed during the 19th century. Saying he wasn’t good at math would be like saying a wild stallion couldn’t run because Secretariat would beat him by 22 lengths at the Belmont stakes, which is true of course. Feynman told me himself how he couldn’t do anything with the fancy group theory used in particle physics – it’s in his popular books too, and his IQ was 71 points lower than Bobby Fischer’s. Meaningless. Schroedinger quit all research in Q theory after his famous cat paradox paper and went to go work on General relativistic unified field theories instead (a dismal failure, it was Einstein’s idea – was Einstein therefore also a lousy physicist?). S didn’t quit QM because the cat paradox weirded him out, though that’s what magazine shelf science magazines will tell everyone. He was physically nauseated by the notation which had been introduced into the field he helped invent – the stars, asterisks, daggers, bars and umlats which began to adorn the wave functions and operators as superscripts and subscripts to represent adjoints, conjugates, etc etc which were integral to the new fancy math.
If you want to check out a real genius who used very little math (but sure could whem he needed to), see David Bohm, from Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania. A man who contributed inestimable amounts to Science and the US atom & hydrogen bomb efforts but was hounded out of the McCarthy crazed USA by Hoover’s FBI for years due to his socialist sympathies. You know of him now because his reputation was restored. His intellect made Feynman’s and Oppenheimer’s look like midgets. The antisemitism in the scientific community was very significant in some places for years. The resentment against Einstein was bigly huge too. He made some slight errors and got plenty of assistance with math from his wife and the Italian and German differential geometers, living and dead. The degree or absence of his errors on all his work is covered in great detail by Dirac’s great friend and biographer Abraham Pais in ‘Subtle is the Lord,’ but Pais was a first rate theorist and it’s heavy with math. Try reading Einstein’s original paper on Brownian Motion and get back to me on how he wasn’t too good at math.
F&L, you said “Because Minkowski’s 4d formulation of special relativity is usually written down using equations which make use of i, the imaginary square root of negative one. But it’s only for the sake of convenience, to make the equations easier.”
With respect;” NO ITS NOT’. Einstein called Minkowskis formulation “superfluous erudition” – it isn’t. The implication of “i” is that the time dimension is orthogonal to three dimensional space. Since space is curved, the time is a local variable because the direction changes . The physical implication is that, the time at B measured by an observer at A at a distance looks slower than local time and an observer at B would measure A as slower. . A third observer at C would measure A and B as the same and slower than at C.
At a photon level, this implies that red shift is caused be curvature and not radial recessional velocity. Mayer derives a new. model from minkowskis maths from first principles and the resulting predictions fit the data from SDSS and now Webb, much better than the big bang model without the use of “dark matter and dark energy” (aka faerie dust) to try and save it.
As for Einstein’s maths – it was Minkowski who denigrated his abilities and then blamed himself because he taught him.
Willem Desitter stumbled on the solution but got confused and couldn’t see the physical implication.
If mayer is correct, we have spent billions barking up the wrong tree. It’s a very small effect at cosmic scales,but I don’t know at quantum levels, there may be some new science there and we need to get to it before Russia and China.
Correct or not there is much to be questioned beside relativistic effects, research in physics is still ongoing and thus speculation about cosmology is just that, speculation!
https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.13770
Quoting:
“Indeed, ninety-five percent of the mass of the observable universe is generated from interactions between massless particles (gluons).
The term holistic might be an understatement in this case.”
Thanks, Walrus. I’ll take a closer look. You realize that x, y and z are also orthogonal to each other, forgetting about t or time?
The x-y plane (or x-z or y-z) is a slice of 3d xyz Cartesian space, not orthogonal to it, so maybe there’s something to this I don’t get. But if you magically pulled a finite x-y slice directly out from within a finite cube, say from the left, just to get a look at it, without tilting it, wouldn’t it seem perpendicular (orthogonal) to the remaining cube? Or just consider one face of a cubic die – it’s orthogonal to the other faces (except it’s opposite to which it’s parallel).
The plain old Doppler effect for sirens on fire engines is a simple analogy using sound waves for the red-shift of light’s electromagnetic radiation frequencies. Those phenomena take place absent any curvature of space, the planet surface or the street the fire engines uses. Regarding individual photons being stretched or not, it’s a tricky subject, I will have to try to understand it better.
Mathematically speaking, both Einstein and Minkowski were minnows compared to Bernhard Riemman who formalized and furthered the non-Euclidean stuff of Bolyai, Gauss and Lobatchevsky as I’m certain you know.
Minkowski’s metric x squared plus y squared plus z squared minus t squared (dropping differentials dx dy dz dt and omitting c squared for simplicity, or using c = 1 units) is a baby case of the general Riemmanian metric which has cross terms dxdy, dydz, etc and coefficients g(x,y,z,t) which are functions of the coordinates, not all equal to 1 as with special relativity’s Minkowski metric which has no cross terms. I realize you know that too, I’m just trying to stick up for old Albert a bit and throw a flag for getting overawed with Minkowski. I’m not sure how big his contribution was. David Hilbert nearly published the general relativistic field equations before Einstein did – the ones with the scary Riemmanian curvature and metric tensor.
Thanks again. You’ve reminded me to try to understand again what Professor Larry Helfer tried to tell me on the stairs of the physics building as I we passed. “You know, F&L, that General Relativity can’t be correct, don’t you?” No why? “Because a true theory has to be Affine, with no reference to coordinates whatsoever.” (A reference to affine space).
Now professor Helfer was a kind and gentle man, short, with a brown haired moustache and I never realized it till this very moment, and it’s you I have to thank, Walrus. He looked very similar to Albert Einstein as he appeared in photographs of his youth. Very. And “affine” is so reminiscent to “raffiniert” that I am prompted to cite the original German for the famous phrase of the Bern patent office clerk, namely “Subtle is the Lord, but he is not malicious.”
It really goes:
“Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht.”
Now look at “affine” and “Raffiniert.” The latter even starts with the capital R (for Riemman, or is it for Raum, space?) used for the famous curvature tensor. Professor Einstein had died in Princeton in 1955, a few small hundred miles away, only about 10 years previously. But Professor Helfer must have known him, and the latest Nobel prizes in physics were awarded to people who determined that the world is not locally real. The wave function. Just as I went to the corner to get iced coffee a few minutes ago, I noticed I had to wait while a beautiful woman with long dark hair and her daughter poured the remaining quantities of brown sugar which were stuck to the sides of the glass or plastic jar into their two heat resistant Dixie cups – it took several tries and a good bit of effort. Because I had read TTG’s Maui piece I asked the woman as she was about to leave the store with her daughter if she wasn’t from Hawaii. No, she was from Peru. “And TTG loves to discuss Kon-Tiki,” it occurred to me (and Peru backwards isn’t far from Europe soundwise). Probably she has something to do with the dark haired woman of diminutive stature who visited me in a dream early this morning. I’ve been watching videos of Johnny Cash with Reverend Billy Graham the evening before. Unusual, but I always like both of them a great deal.
Fools – Billy Graham:
https://youtu.be/pbE8RPEJ1xg
Are You Ready to Die? – Billy Graham:
https://youtu.be/-Y7kULLmtL0
“The Preacher Said” – Billy Graham & Johnny Cash
https://youtu.be/BiZ-TXmZODg
Sorry, Walrus, you don’t deserve to be subjected to such drivel, which of course I find very hard to believe in but do enjoy almost as much as anything. But when I came back from encountering the beautiful woman who I mysteriously seemed to have met in my dream hours earlier, and turned on my big screen smart TV to YouTube – guess what I saw?
The beautiful face of the Reverend Billy Graham, staring right at me. And the title of his sermon was:
When God Gets Your Attention.
Ahem…
Everett may be more of a “new-agey” scammer than a genius.
For a layman to have some grasp on modern physics I would recommend Tim Maudlin books:
https://press.princeton.edu/our-authors/maudlin-tim
(I read both, it’s also interesting to see the methodology of a professional philosopher)
He was a bit flaky on a personal level by strictly conventional standards. He certainly sounds very fd up according to that article – his daughter killing herself and him not knowing that she was even sad. I’m saddened but not surprised – there are many pathological personality types associated with great proficiency in the analytical hard sciences especially mathematics. Norbert Weiner wrote about it in his autobiography ‘Prodigy.’ Bobby Fischer and Isaac Newton and Robert McNamara are well known examples.
I was going to stick up for him a bit more, but you’re incredibly close to being 100% right. MWI has become indistinct from “cargo cult science” especially in the hands of popularizers. My only quibble would be that he knew very well that Many Worlds wasn’t what he had set out to show it was – he either wasn’t able to or didn’t have time to (or it was in fact mathematically impossible) establish what his thesis had set out to do – show that it was in fact equivalent to Copenhagen. As I recall the fault had to do with one of the criteria John Von Neumann had established in his very mathematical book on the the deep math structures of Quantum Mechanics – Many Worlds didn’t satisfy some Hilbert Space linear operator normalization or inner product condition or other. Awful stuff. It might have but the proof eluded Everett. And everyone else to this day or as of a few years ago when I last checked. But the article didn’t go into that because it would have been painful and decreased the human interest factor or the author wasn’t up to speed yet on those details – it’s from a work in progress as of 2013.
I would love to consult your source but time doesn’t permit. Thanks anyway, it looks excellent.
Predicting the market with some Bayesian correlation stuff? Well maybe but that’s almost the calling card of a bucket shop operator. I don’t think he was, but the sharks would have loved to put his name in their prospectus and if he didn’t know his suicidal daughter was sad, he would have been drunk and oblivious. Twerp, creep, drip .. ? Words ending in p.
During my short time in the Army as an officer the standard answer from Command that eventually drove me almost insane was “‘Yes, you are right, the battalion is entitled to 10X widgets for training but you can only have four because we don’t have enough stock. If we are going to war, plans are in place to ensure to get you your full entitlement in good time”.Don’t you worry about that”.Navy and Airforce had the same problem – no stocks but the slogan was different “Fitted for but not with”.So only one phalanx systems on the new destroyers. Same thing everywhere: “can’t you and your company just PRETEND to have a Stinger section? You will have if when you need it. sure thing! Yeah Right……. Stingers, AT ammo, helicopter hours, night vision, etc., etc.
….And they closed the Ammo factories and sold the land to property developers. Ammo production was subcontracted overseas. I retired when I realized that I and my men were going to be sacrificed if war came to buy time to get the stuff we should have had all along.
The roadblock to increasing production is the machine tools, tooling and the professionals who know how to run an operation with the necessary QC systems. This isn’t Kanban, it’s batch production (now called additive manufacturing?) and the old geezers who were trained like me in that stuff were fired or retired decades ago. The presses, forges, furnaces, foundries and rolling mills for copper for the drive bands, etc. are not stock items. Lead times are usually measured in years. Then there is fuse production – a specialized game in itself, as well as filling and logistics.
In WWII you had dollar a year men to drive the operations – experienced business folk who were used to command. What have you got now? A lesbian hedge fund manager or two? Unless you can overturn all the environmental BS legislation, and the woke diversity and gender equity rules, the Russians will be marching through Berlin again before you have turned the first sod of the foundations. Maybe you could borrow Elon Musk; he is the required caliber.
Walrus —
Used to have a GF who lived near the small town of Baraboo in So-central Wis. Driving up there I would pass the Badger Army Ammo Plant. Place was huge making powders. Scaled way down after VN peace dividend, then declared surplus after the cold war peace dividend. Would be nice to have now.
Walrus –
I don’t envy you your time in QC. I spent a short tour myself when Philco-Ford confused me with someone who knew about ordnance. But in my case it was during a T&E phase of 40mm shells for a new gun to replace the old M42 Duster. Never got into full production, as at the time in the early 80’s missiles and smaller calibers like the Phalanx were edging out the bigger bore guns. Hence my short time in QC. Our sample sizes were a bit larger though as I recall.
walrus
Right after Webb lit up an article came out about how what it saw disproved the “big bang;” it went away fast. I’ve just received a used copy of, “The Big Bang Never Happened,” by Eric Lerner. The more I learn, the more I discount… everything…
Everything you say in your following post is so terribly true. I’m nothing but a cheerleader grabbing at straws, but I can’t give up on those kids out there.
cobo –
It’s hard to know what to make of that Webb BB stuff yet. Florida just outlawed Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet for schools because of … Sex? Yes. We’re in the dark ages in America on the popular level and on the street level – pick your prehistoric dinosaur era. And some of the nitwit professors at good universities are complete idiots although much of that is right wing activism but obviously the “cultural marxists” – also a clever reactionary formulation for the purposes of oligarchs with $100 billion fortunes. Subtle, right? Pay some imbeciles, (by getting Unis to hire them because you sit on the University Board of Directors and State Regents) .. to say they are socialist while advocating LGBTQ and gender change. What will Joe Sixpack think? I’ll tell you: “Damn commie fags, I’m voting for Trump!” TTG might have run or observed ops like that, adjusted for the times, in Eastern Europe during the cold war for all we know.
Science is as corrupt as any field of endeavor, witness the pandemic or the swine flu vax or Tuskegee Syphilis experiments or radiation testing on human subjects exposed by Hazel O’Leary in 1993 under Clinton, or big tobacco or Dr Mengele. Check out the history of frontal lobotomy and electroshock treatment. Rich people pay for professorships if that’s their fantasy just like they do entrance to college for their kids or organ traffickers for .. . Big big plagiarism scandals involving University presidents. Nobel prize winners have been busted for faking results. But that doesn’t mean the earth is flat. The culture is corrupt due to human nature, yes, but amplified by the excessive accumulation of wealth in fewer hands. Always led to decadence, always will. And the entire culture is militarized up the wazoo. Why big bang? Why not sudden unfolding and magnificent blossing – which is almost certainly closer to the truth anyway. Because of our evolution as hunters and tribal warriors who necessary valued strength and heroism above all else. Huge mental adjustment will be needed to go forward – not just technical which is also necessary. In addition there is the ancient curse of the “leader” – look where that’s led. Florida censors Shakespeare who said the fault is in ourselves, not the stars. Wanna know who’s hated more extensively and longer and harder than Blacks, Whites, Gays, Trannies, Republicans, Democrats, Communists, Atheists, Christians, Muslims or Jews?
I’ll leave that unanswered but hint that it rhymes with ‘cart steeple’ who are often naughty, haughty, sotty and were babies once who used the potty.
I liked the Big Bang idea but not the term because if you combine the idea that all matter and energy were once gathered together in one place, with the spooky action at a distance idea of distant correlation of spins between particles that were decay byproducts of pair production event – and if you wave your hands a bit – you can be tempted to conclude that “we’re all connected, dude.” Aagh!!
F&L
I guess we’re all part of the original nothing. Yours in sympathy.
Thanks cobo. Probably the most profound thing ever written.
Meanwhile due to mental illness left untreated- did anyone notice that the words composing the phrase “Big Bang” each begin and end with the same letters?
B and G.
I liked the Beegees too, but were those scientists or God or the UFO pilots sending us a coded message? The letters correspond to 2277 which begins with 22 when the SOP began and 2207 is 11x3x3x23 and that prime factorization ends in 23, which is this year – does it mean the special operation will end this year (great!) or that it ends by beginning a war (not great).
Removing the Bs and Gs from Big Bang leaves Ian. Who’s he?
Sorry cobo. If I keep this up I’ll be multiplying 22 times 77 and that has two elves times 28 which is a perfect number, very rare, but only if you have dyslexia and make the mistake of making 22 4 times 11 which it isn’t. But 4 times 49 is 196.
22×77 = 1694, for the record. Do we change them all to Roman numerals to see what they might spell? Very restrictive – only one vowel – I. You can’t even spell “mile.” DIM makes the grade though. Darn Romans. LID is ok. MILD is pleasant. There’s no CALM though. MILD is 1551 in one interpretation – a numerical palindrome. It =s 3x11x47. Three factors and 4 plus 7 equal 11.
cobo – It’s getting us nowhere fast but there may be things about the Big Bang that guys and gals other than you and me might be overlooking.
If the Romans had a Zero as O, we’d have a whole extra vowel. Being Zero it would add or subtract nothing from number gematria. Promising very little.
F&Lol spells Foal Nod if & = and but you need another o and need to hide the second l behind the first l. If there are invisible o s it’s possible but there might be another o hiding behind the o in Lol.
(Typing Lol after that is not necessary because it’s understood that a secret Lol may be precisely aligned behind the Lol in F&Lol. Don’t be impressed, I owe that nonsense to Freud but moreso to Dr M a brilliant lady who explained condensation and hidden objects in dreams and that repressed (hiding) things can be diagnosed by such methods. But it smacks of Hocus pocus to many. Sorceresses getting you talking so the spy behind the curtains can signal his confederate that the coast is clear for burning your house or that the will should be forged with a quill not a metal fountain pen.
cobo – this just in:
Researchers halt human psychiatric testing:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/health/columbia-drug-trials-suicide.html
Federal regulators have suspended research on human subjects at the Columbia-affiliated New York State Psychiatric Institute, one of the country’s oldest research centers, as they investigate safety protocols across the institute after the suicide of a research participant.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Kate Migliaccio-Grabill, confirmed on Wednesday that the agency’s Office for Human Research Protections was investigating the psychiatric institute “and has restricted its ability to conduct H.H.S.-supported human subject research.”
About two weeks before the federal order, on June 12, the institute had “voluntarily paused all studies that included ongoing interactions with human subjects,” according to Carla Cantor, the institute’s director of communications. The decision affected 417 studies, of which 198 have continuing participation. Of those, 124 receive federal funding.
It is unusual for the U.S. regulatory office to suspend research, and this suggests that investigators are concerned that potential violations of safety protocols occurred more broadly within the institute. Almost 500 studies, with combined budgets totaling $86 million, are underway at the institute, according to its website. (More at link)
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cobo – is it possible that God only exists temporarily, and then returns for awhile and so on forever?
Temporarily? Sure. Look, I know god MAY be but can’t know what god MAY be. No one else does either. So could a god be a temporary thing? Why not.