The lost armada
So last week at this time Trump was telling us that we were sending an "armada" to the Korean peninsula but he couldn't say more because, you know, he thinks the US needs to be wily, cunning and sneaky in all our national security dealings. For some reason. But then again, he needed to announce the US Navy was steaming toward Pyonyang. But he was backed up by defense secreatry Mad DogMattis and NSA H.R McMaster both of whom made public statements about the armada being on its way.
Trump was demonstrating his manhood and Kim Jong Un and everybody in the world needed to see it. Sean Spicer said:
I think when you see a carrier group steaming into an area like that, the forward presence of that is clearly, through almost every instance, a huge deterrence,” he added. “So I think it serves multiple capabilities.”
The problem is that is was total bullshit. It turns out that the "armada" hadn't been dispatched to Korea. It was 3,000 miles away and going in the opposite direction. And since other countries in this world have satellites everybody knew that Trump and his top military advisers were speaking nonsense.
Now, maybe you think this was some kind of clever feint designed to confuse China and North and South Korea for some reason.
It wasn't. The New York Times reported:
“White House officials said on Tuesday they were relying on guidance from the Defense Department. Officials there described a glitch-ridden sequence of events, from a premature announcement of the deployment by the military’s Pacific Command to an erroneous explanation by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — all of which perpetuated the false narrative that an American armada was racing toward the waters off North Korea.”
This massive cock-up was revealed when the Navy posted a picture taken on Saturday of the carrier group sailing through Indonesian Islands thousands of miles away.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting today:
In South Korea, Hong Joon-pyo, the presidential candidate from former leader Park Geun-hye’s ruling party, said it was inappropriate to judge before receiving final confirmation of the Carl Vinson’s whereabouts. But, in an interview, he said: “What Mr. Trump said was very important for the national security of South Korea. If that was a lie, then during Trump’s term, South Korea will not trust whatever Trump says.”
Join the club.
This is truly frightening. The military was supposed to be the one institution that had its act together (as scary as that is in itself) and it turns out they're just another department in the dumpster fire known as the Trump administration.
The question now isn't "what could go wrong?" It's "can anything go right?"
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