We know we’re in strange times:

In 1977, Carl Bernstein published an exposé of a CIA program known as Operation Mockingbird, a covert program involving, according to Bernstein, “more than 400 American journalists who in the past 25 years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.” Bernstein found that in “many instances” CIA documents revealed that “journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.”

Fast-forward to December 2016, and one can see that there isn’t much need for a covert government program these days. The recent raft of unverified, anonymously sourced and circumstantial stories alleging that the Russian government interfered in the US presidential election with the aim of electing Republican Donald J. Trump shows that today too much of the media is all too happy to do overtly what the CIA had once paid it to do covertly: regurgitate the claims of the spy agency and attack the credibility of those who question it…

Do read the whole article. I find it astonishing that the MSM – and the larger left – is taking the CIA’s word as gospel. This is the same MSM – and larger left – which for the past 40 years has assumed that anything the CIA says is a lie. James Carden – the author – keeps that tradition alive, but he seems a pretty lonely voice on the left these days.

To be sure, I don’t hold with the general leftwing concept of the CIA – which Carden does hold: you know, making out that the CIA is this nefarious group overthrowing government’s at will, etc. Even in things like the Iranian and Chilean coups, my reading of it is that the CIA merely helped local forces who wanted to oust their particular governments and as those governments had a distinctly anti-American bent, it was something worth doing, given the overall situation during the Cold War. On the other hand, I don’t trust the CIA as far as I could throw it. This stems from the realization that the CIA was cobbled together at the start of the Cold War and got a lot of it’s personnel from the WWII-era Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was riddled with Communist agents. Histories I’ve read indicate that the new CIA vetted itself – which is about the dumbest thing an intelligence agency can do at the get-go, and which in my view pretty much ensured that at least some Soviet agents were employed from Day One at CIA…and over the years would just keep ensuring that other traitors were employed. Add to that the fact that the CIA has become another ossified bureaucracy chock-full of the same sort of Progressives that staff the rest of the federal government and all I can say about the CIA is that we’d better abolish it. But at least Carden is maintaining a healthy doubt – including, to his great credit, doubt about a CIA report which works out politically to the benefit of his own political side. Credit where credit is due – and sticking to genuine principal is getting rare these days. My hat’s off to Carden.

Carden goes on to write about the bizarre defense being offered for the CIA – essentially, people are holding that respecting a CIA rumor is the only patriotic thing to do, and that criticizing the CIA is somehow un-American. But Carden notes that even laying aside partisan politics for a moment, the CIA doesn’t exactly have a stellar record as an intelligence agency:

…Consulting the CIA’s historical record, one is confronted by a laundry list of failures, which includes missing both the break-up of the Soviet Union (during the 1980’s a CIA deputy director by the name of Bob Gates called the USSR “a despotism that works”) and the 9/11 attacks.

In the years following 9/11, the CIA has been caught flat-footed by, among other things, the lack of WMD in Iraq (2003) {Ed Note: methinks Iraq had the WMD, but they were moved out before the war…but, the CIA should have caught that, too, and didn’t); the Iraqi insurgency (2003); the Arab Spring (2010); the rise of ISIS (2013); and the Ukrainian civil war (2014).

More recently, CIA Director John Brennan made false statements before Congress over the CIA’s hacking into the computers of Congressional staffers.

I recall that the CIA assessments of the USSR appeared absurd in the 80’s, and the fall of the USSR confirmed my view – me, just a then-20-something nobody who bothered to read history a bit was coming up with more realistic assessments of the USSR’s viability than the CIA was. Remember, the CIA was telling us that the USSR was strong, rich and permanent. Flew apart at the merest push, of course…and was found to be a bankrupt kleptocracy once the Iron Curtain came down (did not a single CIA agent even bother to read The Gulag Archipelago? Solzhenitsyn clearly detailed how the statistics produced by the USSR to show what they were doing were complete fantasies). The prime thing, of course, for the CIA is to detect foreign threats – the thing was created, after all, to prevent another Pearl Harbor – and yet with all the CIA’s resources, they completely missed the 9/11 attacks. That right there proved to me the uselessness of the CIA. But here in 2016, the word of the CIA is golden, per the left…simply because some elements at the CIA cooked up a “hack the election” story which fits in the Progressive Narrative about Trump.

It would be hard to convince the American people that we don’t need a CIA – too built-in to the public mind. But trying to figure out what the enemy is up to is enormously difficult…and by having a secret agency trying to ferret out enemy intentions, the chances of getting an intelligence agency willing to play domestic politics becomes too large as that is easier than coming up with the next target of a terrorist attack. I do believe we need military intelligence, but even then only to figure out the military capabilities of foreign forces…figuring out their intentions is entirely a political matter which doesn’t require a spy agency but, instead, people in political leadership who know their…well, you know what from a hole in the ground (this is a rare commodity…but having an intelligence agency which has probably got it wrong inform a dimwit who doesn’t know what is going on doesn’t really work to our advantage, either). Bottom line for national defense is to maintain such a powerful military force that everyone knows that attacking us is a death sentence…and then showing the world that, indeed, it is a death sentence, even if the State actor is using a third-party cut-out to attack us. We’d only have to do that sort of thing rarely – and done properly probably not more than once in 50 years. We keep getting attacked simply because those who attack us don’t pay a high enough price…make them pay that price and the next trouble maker down the road will back off.

Be that as it may, it is going to be a strange four to eight years – I am determined through this time to keep to one, solid principle: too seek and tell the truth, as best as I can determine it. The people on the left are drowning themselves in lies about Trump, but so are many on the right…of course, with exceptions (like Carden, here). I want to live in the real world – I’ll see what Trump does. If I think it good, I’ll praise him – if I think it bad, I’ll condemn him. The last thing the world needs is yet another blogger/writer/pundit who is going all out trying to make facts fit his or her Narrative.

I got into another Twitter tiff recently – came out when the story of Russian hacking of the election was made big news on Friday night. Personally, I don’t believe the story – it all seems to come down to an allegation that some hackers once-removed from Russian intelligence did some of the hacking of the DNC…which might put a Russian angle on it, but if anyone thinks that Hillary was made unpopular by the leaks, rather than the leaks just confirming why she is unpopular, then I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Anyways – the argument came down to the nature of the Russian threat, which I view as practically zero.

Russia, to remind, has a GDP somewhat less than South Korea’s. Roll that over a bit – South Korea, a tiny, resource-poor nation on the Asian periphery makes more money that Russia, sitting on 1/6th of the world’s land surface and stuffed to the gills with all manner of natural resources. Sorry, but people with that kind of base to build on who don’t wind up among the world’s richest people just won’t be viewed as a grand threat by me. Russia as a threat is just living off the impression of Russian might resultant upon the outcome of World War Two…with Russian troops triumphant over the ruins of the Hitlerite capital city. Don’t get me wrong, that was a grand and useful achievement and if I were to ever meet one of those Russian soldiers, he’d get my salute…but the bottom line is that with Russia vastly outnumbering the Germans and with 40% of the German military tied down in other theaters, they still only barely managed to bludgeon their way into Berlin…and were utterly exhausted by the effort. Had we unleashed Patton’s Third Army on them in the fall of 1945, they would have been pushed back to Smolensk in short order. Russia has nukes and has power and can cause us endless trouble, but they aren’t an existential threat to the United States.

China, however, is.

And that was my main point in the argument – to think that we’ve got to worry obsessively about the Russian bear while China is out there actually building the military force to fight us with is asinine, in my view. Key to understanding this is China’s Type 001A carrier – no great shakes against a Nimitz or Ford class carrier, but it is China’s first domestic product…and they are building it after spending years studying carrier design and operations (including obtaining the HMAS Melbourne when the Aussies put her up for scrap). They are building a fleet-air arm – and the only reason anyone on this Earth would build a fleet-air arm is to fight our fleet-air arm. Count on it – as night follows day, China will one day challenge our naval supremacy…and it’s either fight or surrender, at that point. I’d rather we fought – and in fighting we’ll need a few things. One of them is an alliance with Russia…a tricky thing to achieve if we’re busily thwarting them from gaining territories which are mostly populated by ethnic Russians.

But, we’ll also need a much large industrial economy than we have now. You see, among the other things China has is vastly larger ship building capacity than we do. When the Germans sought to challenge Britain for naval supremacy in the early 20th century, they never had a chance – Britain had far larger ship building capacity. Even if the Germans managed to steal a march on the Brits and put out a superior class of ship, the British could respond by putting out a better one, faster, and in larger number. This is why when the German High Seas Fleet ran into Britain’s Grand Fleet at Jutland in 1916, the only thing the Germans had in mind was to run away as fast as they could. The Germans had to – they were outnumbered in capital ships 37 to 21 and the British ships were bigger, faster and carried much heavier armament. Just now, we’ve still got that – any fleet heading to sea against us is only preparing some interesting, new wreck dive sites for future hobbyists…but 10 years or 20 years from now? Not so certain – unless we build and build and build our industrial economy back up to snuff.

In the matter of our economy, we can’t just be hung up on what makes the most money – part of our consideration is long-term national survival. During World War Two, the United States commissioned 16 Essex-class carriers. That was in less than four years. True, these are much smaller and less complex than modern Ford-class carriers, but the USS Ford was laid down in 2009 and won’t go into commission until next year. That’s 8 years. What if we got into a major naval war? We have to assume (a) we’ll need more carriers under any circumstances and (b) some of the carriers we’ve got will be damaged or sunk. We’ll need capacity to rapidly increase the number of carriers…and we simply haven’t got it…but we can’t put the war on hold for 8 years while we wait for more.

This is what the dogmatic free-traders don’t get – but it is something we must understand. The world can be a merciless place, and it is most merciless to those who take no thought for tomorrow; who make no preparations for catastrophe. It is said truthfully that we weren’t prepared for World War Two when we got into it – but we also weren’t entirely un-prepared. The Essex-class was ordered in 1938 and by the time of Pearl Harbor, three keels had been laid – and when the war came, we had the ship building capacity (the overall industrial capacity) to massively ramp up production…not just of big carriers like the Essex, but a host of smaller carriers, destroyers, cruisers and other attendant fleet vessels. We must have that capacity at all times. We never know, precisely, when we’ll need it. It doesn’t matter if steel manufacturing (and other parts of it like coal and iron mining) don’t pay as much as the neato-new bit of I-Crap…we have to have it. And if that means a bit of tariff walls and some other economic juggling to keep capacity alive in the United States, then we simply have to do it. Your cool GDP numbers from last quarter won’t matter at all if three of our ten carriers are sunk in a naval battle and you’re still years away from even one replacement.

Military power is not just the ships, planes and tanks you have in being when the guns go off – it is the ability to replace losses and increase numbers. Russia learned this in World War One. They actually had a fairly splendid military force in 1914, but they had only limited capacity to replace losses and even less capacity to expand production (one small light on this: the Russians didn’t have a single facility for making tannin – a vital ingredient in the tanning of leather; which, among other things, was needed to make Russian army boots. They had purchased their tannin before the war from Germany…hurrah for free trade, huh?). We are, if not fully in that position, getting close to it. I doubt our ability to rapidly increase production of vital military materials. No problem if we’ve got small wars against badly armed adversaries – but put us up against someone who is powerful and can increase production rapidly and we’ll be in a great deal of trouble.

China is a threat. Iran is a smaller threat. Russia is an annoyance. Keep things in perspective – especially keep in mind that Russia’s population isn’t half ours and if they ever did want to go to war with us, they’d lose. Badly. Also, if one is really thinking that Putin is planning a grand offensive into central Europe, then the fact that the EU vastly out-classes Russia in every capacity should be a bit of food for thought…if they can’t fight off the sickly Russian bear, then of what practical use are they in world affairs? I’m all for helping out people in trouble – but the EU should be able to look after itself, at least vis a vis Russia. Sure, with some help from us…but only if they show some fight, for crying out loud. Poland is increasing it’s military forces…so far, haven’t seen much desire on the part of France and Germany to follow suit. Meanwhile, Sweden has “reformed” its military to the point where they are admitting they can’t defend themselves. Need some work there, guys. Meanwhile, we’ve got our own issues to deal with – and if we are to send another Expeditionary Force to Europe, I’d like to have at least some assurance that an European Expeditionary Force would be around if we need them in the western Pacific.

Our biggest threat, however, is our own folly. We’ve allowed things to slide – allowing ourselves to print and borrow money to buy cheap consumer goods while our real economy – the economy which makes, mines and grows things – was allowed to atrophy. We’ve got to bring it back. Best to bring it back with innovation and new technology applied to old needs, but bring it back by hook or crook, regardless of cost. We will need it – and we might need it sooner than we expect.