By this day one year from now, I will either be fully retired or almost fully retired. That is, if the Navy Commission I was named to actually comes into being (still not a sure thing), its mandate ends 15 January 2026. So I’ll either be feet up 31 December 2025 or feet up in 376 days. Either way, I’ll be pretty happy.
In the meantime, there is a ton of work to do with people I enjoy and projects I care about. That has always been the luster of this little consulting gig I set up twelve years ago. Catherine’s forbearance has always given me the leash I required to walk away from clients I don’t like working with (or don’t think I’d like working with), and the ability to say no to projects I had little interest in, irrespective of how valuable my contribution my be. She has been my life’s best decision in countless ways, but if you’d told me 18 years ago when I happened upon her, that I’d build something in the next 18 years that would allow me to retire in my 60th year, I’d have thought you daft. But here we are.
We have a saying in the Navy, and it is that you want to “…go down with an empty magazine”, meaning when it is all over, have nothing left. That’s how I look at this year. I think the world is terribly unstable right now, more unstable than at any point in my life. Yes, the Soviets had 30,000 nuclear weapons with our names on them, but there was a ghastly, terrible balance to that world and that time. From my understanding of Cold War archives, adults were largely in charge on both sides, even if our versions of adulthood were somewhat different. I am no longer as sure.
So, in my tiny little corner of the geopolitical sphere, I’ll try and make a difference. I will continue to try and help the Navy become a better version of itself. More ready. Better trained. Larger. With more weapons and more capabilities. None of this should be a surprise to anyone, especially longstanding and attentive readers. I will be loud, and I will be relentless. But when this year is done, I intend to walk away and leave things to others. I’ve telegraphed a lot of this through my essays of late, but I don’t think I’ve time-lined it as finely as this.
I’d like to think that I’ve contributed, that my ideas on American Seapower have had some influence on others. I’m not really sure about how influential I’ve been in force structure and fleet architecture though. I don’t think much money has moved as a result of my thinking.
Which is one of the reasons that I am good with walking away. If I felt like the system NEEDED my voice (among all the other fine, intelligent, voices), not only would I be wrong, but I would be delusional. I have been loud and constant not because there was a need for my volume and consistency, but because it was what I liked to do. And so a year from now, I will do other things I like, which is good.
At first a little wary of my retiring so early, Catherine and her crew have laid on a pretty fair number of trips in this coming year that have buttressed my case to bail while relatively young. I mean, if you want me to come along, I have to be available, right? Again, this commission could tamp down my personal fun travel though, as, if done right, the members are going to have to be “air mobile” for a few months to poke around and ask important people very inconvenient questions.
Snow Coming Our Way
Two days ago I saw the first reports of forecasted snow for the DC Metro region on Monday the 6th, and as I was scheduled to fly out of Dulles on Monday evening for the West Coast, I had to evaluate my plans. I could play chicken with the weather (interestingly, it looks like more snow in Easton than at Dulles) and perhaps have my flight canceled, throwing my entire week into a tizzy and potentially causing me to bail out of the trip. Or I could move my flight up 24 hours and leave on Sunday night before the snow. Yes. I did. Dash 2 also had a Monday flight, and she moved hers up a day also, so I’ll swing her by her airport on my way to mine tomorrow afternoon.
I would dearly like not to make this trip, if for no other reason than I should like to be home all day in my warm house by the fire watching 3-5 inches of snow accumulate on Monday.
Also, with me leaving with Dash-2, Catherine is left alone for the snow. And by alone, I don’t just mean without me and the girls. I don’t even mostly mean without me and the girls. I mean she is alone in the house on a snowy day without the dogs. Black labs on a pure white snow day is a thing to behold, and Baloo and Zuzu loved them some snow frolics. Catherine loved them too.
It is shocking how often I still walk across the front of the house toward the kitchen and am surprised to see no saloon door in place, one of the many artifices we used to keep the dogs and their black hair from getting all over the house. It was also the main means of keeping them from nabbing little tasty treats from the various cat boxes they (mostly Zuzu) made a bee-line for whenever the doors were left open. I still find it hard to believe that the last thing I do before going to bed is no longer spent walking with one or two dogs under the moonlight. I loved this time of year most of all, as the still, cold, nights were eerily quiet, save for the various goose noises rising from the cove and an occasional fox call.
From the weather reports available, there may be some lingering snow on the ground when I land on Friday, but there is no comparison between snow lying for five days and snow five hours old.
A Terrible Day
Tomorrow is the four-year anniversary of one of the most terrible days in my life, eclipsed only by September 11th. Writing about it today will be seen by some as an act of provocation and an occasion to to take to opposing ramparts, which is why I will not allow comments to this post. I honestly do not give a rat’s ass about your charges of election fraud, your defenses against an obvious attempt to overthrow the Constitutional order, your citation of the mob gathered as peaceful citizenry, your citation of the great threat to national security of “wokeness”. You are wrong if you have those opinions, and if you see that day as anything other than the single most serious threat to the American system of government since the Civil War, you are equally wrong (and welcome to unsubscribe to this Substack and never read it again, as is your right under the system of government that you supported overturning of).
That the orchestrator of insurrection is returning to power in a fortnight is a sign of a fallen people. One half of the electorate supported or excused a coup, and the other supported or excused a conspiracy to prop up an addled anachronism, until such time as he could be replaced by an unprincipled weather-vane. Whenever a fellow citizen shrieks “we deserve better”, I shake my head and chuckle. No. We have exactly what we deserve. That is a system feature, not a bug
Congress is an embarrassment, having long-ago decided that preening was more important than its Article I responsibilities, including legislating, budgeting, and the evaluation of Presidential appointee fitness. We are shortly to be treated to the spectacle of our Senate sitting in judgment of unqualified and dangerous candidates for their assent to positions involving the national security and public health of the nation. They will in all likelihood, vote with their teams, as their central nervous systems have been replaced by simple electoral impulses. That a U.S. Senator could sit in that body and say with a straight face that their job is to give the President the team that he desires—is malpractice of the highest order.
This while our nation has no FY 2025 budget, simply the zombie direction leftover from 2024.