Craig Hooper

Me? I'm over in the Bluesky place under @craighooper.bsky.social.

@CrispinBurke Heck, let’s throw in a Calvary charge too…or was that already done back in 2002? (In reality, I do think there are some interesting island options out there worth mulling: forbes.com/sites/craighoo… )

@NextNavy What if we threw in an airborne operation while we’re at it?

I guess “Amphibious landings are dead” essays are the gonna become the tactical equivalents to Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History”.

Vive le France Libre !

If somebody, somewhere in the Pentagon isn't muttering something along the lines of "there seems to be something wrong with our bloody mattresses today," then we need to fix Navy PME right away, STAT. (Apologies to the Royal Navy's Admiral David Beatty)

FDR: "To change anything in the Na-a-vy is like punching a featherbed. You punch it with your right and you punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the damn bed just as it was before you started punching-Smoking out the mattress is the only way"

@timothyjwyant I think we're up to 1000 mattresses now

@NextNavy "History is replete with capital ships lost to runaway laundry fires, but with this $13 billion investment, all we need to do is replace 600 beds. Incredible stuff."

A tired guy at the bar scans his phone, sighs, looks up, says to nobody, "One of the biggest justifications for the massive Ford Class Carrier $13 billion price tag were, ah, big improvements in damage control." He shifts in is chair, takes a sip, and turns back to his crossword.

@capitalweather Well, over here in Takoma Park, I just sat through what sounded like two big wind-driven tree falls, and at least one—but I think two—power-line takedowns, and the power is now out for half the block, so, uh, I’m pretty OK with the storms not reaching their potential. I’m good.

We understand the concerns about the predicted storms not reaching their potential today. That said, we still have one more evening round to come, which may bring a burst of wind. Tomorrow, we'll post a discussion on what limited some of the storm activity today.

@vcdgf555 Anyway, it’s going to be a mess to fix, and that crew is gonna be restive as all get out if we can’t pull that carrier offline—and get it into a shipyard—soon.

@vcdgf555 So, you’re looking at a big repair bill and months of fixes—on top of the extra wear and tear of the record deployment. And, already, if the Ford has a full crew, bunks were already at a premium, cause the ship was built for optimal manning that…didn’t pan out.

30 hours sounds like a long time to battle a fire at sea, especially one that costs nearly 15% of your beds. #USSGeraldFord

Antarctic Geopolitics: A view on the implications of current funding in the US Antarctic Program- Modern War Institute mwi.westpoint.edu/retreat-at-the…

"The fire started in the ship’s main laundry area last Thursday. By the time it was over, more than 600 sailors and crew members had lost their beds and have since been bunking down on floors and tables, officials said." nytimes.com/2026/03/16/us/…

Ditto

June 1983. A 28-year-old Steve Jobs walks into a design conference in Aspen, Colorado. He asks the room who owns a personal computer. Nobody raises their hand. He says “Uh-oh.” Then he spends the next 55 minutes describing the next four decades of technology. Jobs told the audience Apple’s strategy was to “put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you, that you can learn how to use in 20 minutes… with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook up to anything.” That’s an iPhone. In 1983. The Mac hadn’t even shipped yet. He described an MIT project that sent a camera truck down every street in Aspen, photographed every intersection, and built a virtual walkthrough on a computer screen. Google Street View launched 24 years later. He said office networking was about 5 years away and home networking 10 to 15 years out. The web went mainstream in the mid-90s, about 12 years later. Dead on. He described software being sent electronically over phone lines, with free previews and credit card payment. That’s the App Store, 25 years before it launched. He even compared it to the music industry and said software needed “the equivalent of a radio station” for free sampling. Apple built the iTunes Music Store 20 years later. The AI prediction is the one that hits different now. Near the end, Jobs talked about machines that could capture a person’s “underlying spirit” or “way of looking at the world,” so that after they died, you could ask the machine questions and maybe get answers. He said 50 to 100 years. ChatGPT arrived in about 40. The weird part is this speech was lost for nearly 30 years. The full hour-long recording only surfaced in 2012 when a blogger got a cassette tape from someone who attended the original conference. The Steve Jobs Archive didn’t release actual video footage until July 2024. His timelines were consistently too fast. He wanted the “computer in a book” within the 1980s. Apple’s first attempt was the Macintosh Portable in 1989, which weighed 16 pounds and cost $6,500. The iPad arrived in 2010, 27 years late. He guessed voice recognition was about a decade away. Siri launched in 2011, nearly 30 years later. The vision was right every time. The clock was wrong every time. Apple was doing about $1 billion a year in revenue when Jobs gave this talk, with under 5,000 employees. Today it’s worth $3.7 trillion.

That's fascinating.

James Forrestal offers a great operational template for SECNAVs and Navy Undersecretaries in wartime. Embrace your inner Forrestal! Support the Navy and USMC!

Ahh, the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ began today, March 13. To the present day, this has been the cautionary tale on how a failure to appreciate logistics can, in the end, kick you in the keister.

@NextNavy You stay niche, man. The world is counting on you

Washington bureaucrats don’t have all the answers! We need YOU to tell us how we can do our jobs better—because we want to deliver more WINS for American families🤝 America FIRST 🇺🇸