A special Mein Gott update ...

Yesterday Mein Gott made a promise ...

Peter Thiel has been a longtime Trump supporter and is trusted by the US President-elect. Both Musk and Thiel were involved in the early days of PayPal and although they split Thiel later helped Musk with capital for SpaceX at a crucial time. Thiel knows Musk’s strengths and weaknesses.
(As I will describe tomorrow, these two men are set to have a huge direct impact on Australia.)

Promise made, promise kept ... and so this special late arvo Mein Gott update ...

America needs to change its stance on the F35 and so do we, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel will no doubt be in President Trump’s ear about the failures of US defence. Hopefully our government can listen in.

It's a new era, defence is a major concern, and we urgently need Lebensraum ...

Sorry, sorry, the pond doesn't know what came over it, the opening illustration wasn't the Messerschmitt Bf 109, it was America’s Joint Strike Fighter/F35 program has been plagued with problems. it is emblematic of major defence issues. Picture: Roslan Rahman/AFP

It turns out that Mein Gott has now displaced the bromancer as chief defence expert at the lizard Oz, and has grand plans and inspirations ...

Few are closer to US President Donald Trump than technology titans Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Both are telling the American President the horrible truth about the failures of a cornerstone of US and Australia’s air defence — the Joint Strike Fighter/F35.

Both have defence credentials. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it shut down Ukraine’s internet communications and consequently expected a quick victory. But, Musk’s SpaceX had a new system running in two or three days which saved Ukraine. But, when Ukraine wanted to launch an assault on Crimea Musk feared a nuclear war and stopped Ukraine. Thiel is a co-founder of rocket and missile group Andurill.

As I described yesterday Elon Musk is heading Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which aims to slash the US bureaucracy by up to $US2 trillion.

Musk wants the whole JSF/F35 program scraped, saying the fighter is an obsolete and poorly functioning weapons system whose mission is best replaced by un-crewed aircraft.

Musk says the JSF/F35 is a “jack of all trades, master of none” because it was “required to be too many things to too many people” and was the result of a “broken” requirements system. He also said the jet was the “worst military value for money in history.”

Jawohl ... not once, but twice, to erase the possibility of error, "Mein Führer, I can walk!"

Sorry, sorry, the pond has learned that the correct snap at this point is, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk during Monday’s (US time) inaugural parade in Washington, DC. Picture: Angela Weiss/AFP

There, there, a much more benign snap, pleasing to the hive mind ...

Please, do carry on, the pond is feeling much more relaxed and secure ...

Thiel is more restrained, but believes the defence establishment needs to be restructured.

The current structure has stifled innovation and blocked vital change, leading to poor performance on major programs such as the development and usage of the JSF/F35.

If Trump takes the advice of Musk and Thiel it will have enormous implications for both the United States and Australia.

In the US the top people in the defence establishment must know China’s Chengdu J-20 is superior than the JSF/F35 in key areas, and the emergence of high-technology drones is challenging older aircraft like the JSF/F35.

If current policies are continued the total cost of the JSF/F35 project will be about $US1 trillion.

Indeed, indeed, or as Jon Stewart would have put it, we need to be wary of messenger pigeon carrying a message ...

Sorry,, sorry, the pond understands and stands corrected ... the correct snap at this point featured Peter Thiel will be an important voice in President Trump’s second administration. Picture: Leigh Vogel/Getty Images

Apologies, in the original it was very, very large, almost Triumph of the Will large ... please continue ...

The aircraft is ineffective for countries like Australia because it can’t fly far enough without high-risk airborne refuelling. Endless problems keep arising but when one is solved more keep emerging

The US has the F-22, but it is no longer in production and ageing.

For Lockheed Martin, the Joint Strike Fighter/F35 had been a bonanza because the contract was set up on a ‘cost-plus’ basis and the decades of profitable remedial work required have underpinned the group’s profit.

While Musk and Thiel have alerted Trump, both Lockheed and the defence establishment will fight Musk and Thiel, pointing to the more than 250,000 advanced manufacturing jobs in the project — particularly in the Fort Worth area in Texas — and the $US9.4bn in annual economic impact.

In space exploration, Elon Musk relaced Lockheed-style cost plus contracts with fixed price contracts and applied his ‘idiot index’ management system to slash costs.

Musk (plus Amazon’s Jeff Bezos) replaced Lockheed Martin in space development, but not in aircraft. Musk’s incredible innovation has taken the US to a leading position in space.

Why it's a leading position in just about everything ...

Sorry, so sorry, do continue, this is serious ...

Musk and Thiel must know current defence establishment processes will not be easy to stop. But, if they succeed, part of the Western world’s global military expertise may be lost and replaced by venture capital operators.

One outcome is that both US defence chiefs and Lockheed admit they failed and the JSF/F35 program does not deliver anything like air superiority. They abandon cost-plus contracts but find a way to retain technology skills. But, such revolution will require different leadership and Musk will be urging Trump to embrace a new approach.

In Australia we have even more fundamental decisions to make. Over the past two decades Australia’s top military defence hierarchy have made equipment mistake after mistake. They dis not have the equipment skills required and they ignored advice and warnings from groups like Air Power Australia

Using Air Power and other sources have I been alerting readers to the JSF/F35 disaster for a couple of decades. I gain no pleasure from the implications of what it looks like is happening in the US.

Our past military chiefs not only made the wrong decisions on the JSF/F35, but made a series of other disastrous military equipment decisions. The mistake-prone generation of defence leaders appointed the current people, so there is risk they too do not have the requited skills and will make the same mistakes.

Since Kim Beazley retired as defence minister in 1990, defence ministers from both sides of politics have been snowed under by the military establishment.

Beazley was like Musk and did not rely on management reports, but checked the detail himself. Australia does not have the US equivalent of Elon Musk or Peter Thiel to tell the Prime Minister the truth.

First came news there were no subs, then came news there were no planes, and to top it all off, apparently there's no Bomber Beazley ... though there was a snap of him for nostalgia's sake ...Former defence minister Kim Beazley. Picture: Martin Ollman

Do carry on ...

Irrespective of who wins the next election, what is happening in the US is too serious to be left to defence ministers. This is a matter for the national security committee.

We need to begin a program of consultation with the US — including Musk and Thiel — urging the truth be recognised, but harnessing existing US, Australian and global skills in different directions. Air Power is another group of top advisers outside the defence department which can help once the truth is recognised.

A necessary part of the process is recognising what is happening in our region and the technological strength of China, not just in aircraft but in anti-submarine, frigate and drone weapons.

We need to examine what is actually going to be required in future defence, rather than being sucked in by salespeople. The security committee needs frank assessment of whether we have the talent among our defence chiefs to come to the correct conclusions.

But, our decision-making is not made easier by the fact that in the US they too have developed a set of defence chiefs who do not fully consider what others are doing. If Trump embraces the recommendations of Musk and Thiel then we will need to adapt.

Well indeed, indeed, learning to salute correctly will be a priority ...

Learning to have demented visions about the apokálypsis will also be necessary, as explained by Peter Thiel in the Financial Times. 

A sample of the madness, visionary thinking if you will ...

...“Nothing,” wrote Boccaccio in his medieval plague epic The Decameron, “is so indecent that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it.” 
In that spirit, Morens and former chief US medical adviser Fauci will have the chance to share some indecent facts about our own recent plague. Did they suspect that Covid spawned from US taxpayer-funded research, or an adjacent Chinese military programme? Why did we fund the work of EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers into remote Chinese caves to extract novel coronaviruses? Is “gain of function” research a byword for a bioweapons programme? And how did our government stop the spread of such questions on social media?
Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American backing, in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? Were we complicit in Australia’s recent legislation requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end of internet anonymity? Did we muster up even two minutes’ criticism of the UK, which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech triggering, among other things, “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”? We may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free internet in Oceania.
Darker questions still emerge in these dusky final weeks of our interregnum. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently suggested on Joe Rogan’s podcast that the Biden administration debanked crypto entrepreneurs. How closely does our financial system resemble a social credit system? Were an IRS contractor’s illegal leaks of Trump’s tax records anomalous, or should Americans assume their right to financial privacy hinges on their politics? And can one speak of a right to privacy at all when Congress conserves Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which the FBI conducts tens of thousands of warrantless searches of Americans’ communications?
South Africa confronted its apartheid history with a formal commission, but answering the questions above with piecemeal declassifications would befit both Trump’s chaotic style and our internet world, which processes and propagates short packets of information. The first Trump administration shied away from declassifications because it still believed in the rightwing deep state of an Oliver Stone movie. This belief has faded. 
Our ancien regime, like the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, thought the party would never end. 2016 shook their historicist faith in the arc of the moral universe but by 2020 they hoped to write Trump off as an aberration. In retrospect, 2020 was the aberration, the rearguard action of a struggling regime and its struldbrugg ruler. There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past.
The future demands fresh and strange ideas. New ideas might have saved the old regime, which barely acknowledged, let alone answered, our deepest questions — the causes of the 50-year slowdown in scientific and technological progress in the US, the racket of crescendoing real estate prices, and the explosion of public debt. 
Perhaps an exceptional country could have continued to ignore such questions, but as Trump understood in 2016, America is not an exceptional country. It is no longer even a great one.
Identity politics endlessly relitigates ancient history. The study of recent history, to which the Trump administration is now called, is more treacherous — and more important. The apokálypsis cannot resolve our fights over 1619, but it can resolve our fights over Covid-19; it will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who govern us today. The internet will not allow us to forget those sins — but with the truth, it will not prevent us from forgiving.

Indeed, indeed, let the thousand year Reich begin ...

Sorry, sorry, Mein Gott had a few last words of wisdom ...

The biggest new decision our defence chiefs have made is to join the nuclear club in the AUKUS project.

Strategically it makes a lot of sense, but the US submarines we propose to buy are the product of a failed US defence establishment decision-making process. China is using molten salt-cooled thorium-driven submarines. In addition, their submarine detection weapons are now far more sophisticated.

Once the Americans have faced the truth on the JSF/F35 we might be able to get into a discussion about whether the Western world is heading in the right direction with submarines given the Chinese are going in a different one altogether.

Sheesh, no subs, no planes, and yet the war with China due by Ēostre ... the apokálypsis is nigh ... but don't lose hope, he did some good things, you know, and so will Herr Uncle Leon and Herr Peter, and Mein Gott will be there to transcribe their thoughts and work things out...

PS, dear Australian state governments and assorted plods, the pond doesn't endorse, it merely reports ...