$1 Trillion And This Is All We Get?

More bad news for the Pentagon as another highly expensive warship goes dark.

“On July 24, 2026, while conducting routine operations in the Indo-Pacific, Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold (DDG 65) reported an engineering casualty involving its generators, causing a loss of power,” reads the statement. “There were no injuries to the crew, who demonstrated resilience, grit, professionalism and unwavering steadiness in their response.”

The loss of power meant sailors were without galley services, toilets and air conditioning. Potable water was also affected, Comer said. He did not respond to a question about how sailors handled waste.

I’ve already written about the woes of the USS Abraham Lincoln which is reportedly about to be replaced the the USS George Washington (without the USS Benfold in its entourage), leaving zero aircraft carriers in the waters around China for the first time in many years.

Military types have been less than impressed with the disrespect, gaslighting, and minimizing of the Commander in Chief and his minister of war about the Lincoln’s woes, a 5,000 person ship that must now be supplied from Diego Garcia 3,000 miles from Bahrain where Iran destroyed a crucial U.S. naval base.

“The U.S. had no plan going into this war”

Retired Maj. General Randy Manner on Friday accused President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth of “spewing lies” about the reportedly deplorable conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and its extended deployment in the Middle East.

A professional military that sees national defense as a sacred calling and that embraces martyrdom if necessary it is up against a whiny Gen Z force that mostly thinks of the U.S. military as a job. My husband: “Probably the only job they could get.” He’s right if we’re talking jobs with benefits like health care and college tuition for high school graduates.

The leadership of this crack military force? They are focused on spending big, bigger, and biggest bucks on elaborate systems like Golden Dome that are highly unlikely to produce interception of hypersonic missiles as promised.

But military-industrial promises are made to be broken.

In the excitement over finally pulling Russia into war, General Dynamics promised to build artillery shells that U.S. proxy Ukraine was running through rapidly. GD took $533 million from taxpayers to equip a factory with state of the art robots purchased from Turkiye.

Those involved described a project that was rushed and ill considered from the start. Congress paved the way, removing government contracting guardrails — meant to ensure taxpayer money isn’t wasted — so that Ukraine-related defense projects could be funded quickly. The Army took advantage, handing General Dynamics lucrative no-bid awards without knowing whether the machines it planned to use could perform the desired work. The Army’s due diligence was inadequate, four former Army and General Dynamics officials told ProPublica.

Descriptions of the malfunctioning robots reads like bad sci-fi and suggests, at least to my mind, sabotage.

The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission for a week..

according to interviews with 12 former factory workers.. the flaming robot arms also kept smashing into things. They slammed into computer numerical control machines, breaking their windows and bending their doors. They knocked over shells. They bashed into safety fences. Workers talked about the arms going “rogue” and began calling one of them “Johnny 5” after a sentient military robot from a 1980s movie..

Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular pounding with a sledgehammer [emphasis mine] to function properly but still botched the shaping of nearly every shell. “We really didn’t have any standardized practice,” said Quantel White, a former employee. “It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night.”

If someone comes up with a better metaphor for the U.S. approach to maintaining its imperial ascendency, please let me know.

Who will be held accountable for the artillery shell boondoggle? Not GD executives.

Wages of Failure: Since the Army halted two production lines at the factory, the General Dynamics unit responsible for the debacle has received contract awards totaling $2.5 billion.

Maybe Turkish robotics firm Repkom will take the blame?

Paranoia set in. Repkon refused to share passwords needed to control important equipment, according to five former General Dynamics employees. Sometimes workers would be startled by the sight of a machine moving by itself and realize it was being controlled by someone in Turkey. Spooked, General Dynamics workers tore out hardware to cut off remote access to the machines, two former workers said.

If this is starting to sound like a bad movie plot with espionage and sabotage threads, keep in mind that you paid way more than $17 to see this film. But not to worry! Private-public partnerships with contractors all over the globe are racing ahead to produce fast, powerful military hardware that will attempt to compete with Iran, China, and Russia. All three of which are currently demonstrating the decisive power of a loyal, patriotic work force called upon to step up production in the face of existential threats.

General Dynamics workers in my state go out on strike regularly for better pay and working conditions, while their CEO slurps up another bonus.

In April 2024, General Dynamics CEO Novakovic told investors: “In the U.S., we are rapidly increasing ammunition production with the opening of our Texas facility.” General Dynamics failed to conduct a scheduled first article test in Mesquite that same month.

I’ll let Xi Jinping have the last word here. From his 2015 plans for The Governance of China: