cdrsalamander

Everyone takes things the wrong way on twitter, and that is why we can't have fun.

Ali Larijani’s successor, Hossein Dehghan, holds a PhD in Management. He was one of the students who occupied the US embassy in Tehran. He also commanded the IRGC forces in Lebanon and was among the orchestrators of the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut. The look on his face says it all.

New footage from the inside of Taiwan's first domestically produced submarine Hai Kun (711). President Lai and several senior officials toured the submarine earlier today. 📽️: Youth Daily News

Footage from earlier tonight shows the moment that a fragment from an intercepted ballistic missile launched by Iran nearly struck the individual filming said video on a street in Haifa, Northern Israel.

@MRTs_Haircut @MikeyDiMercurio @kilroyJC Was it Victor III hull-15 or hull-16 who was the "Prince of Darkness" circa 1990/1?

@MikeyDiMercurio @kilroyJC I was stationed at ASWOC / TSC sigonella we had fun with a Victor III and others.

THE KIROV STORY Before we start, I need to make it clear that nothing that happened was my fault. Totally not my fault. So you may or may not have heard of the "Kirov." This was a Soviet battleship straight out of Star Wars. It bristled with radars and every weapon imaginable. To see it out the periscope was to see your life flash before your eyes. It was that terrifying. The background music, Darth Vader's Death March. And Kirov was at an anchorage. The problem? The anchorage was on what was, for us, the wrong side of THE LINE OF DEATH. See, there's a bay off Libya called the Gulf of Sidra. The Line of Death is an imaginary line segment from Benghazi to Tripoli. The water is shallow with a smooth sandy bottom. And the evil dictator of Libya vowed that any American vessel intruding beyond the Line of Death would be fired upon, and that was not an empty threat, since he had the Kirov on his side. So, you might be asking, Mikey, if the Kirov is on the bad side of the LINE OF DEATH, why would you and your submarine decide to sail over the line? Well, I'll tell you why we sailed over the line. There was intel that a Soviet Project 671 Yorsh-class nuclear fast attack submarine would be surfacing and anchoring at the anchorage. We and NATO called the "Yorsh-class" the Victor-class, since, at the time, we in the trenches didn't know what the Soviets called it. You might be asking, Mikey, why would the Victor be anchoring at the anchorage? Well, I'll tell you why the Victor was anchoring at the anchorage. You see, all these Russian ships were from the Northern Fleet. A long way from Libya. And on a 6-month deployment, the boys need some R&R. Some liberty, as the American Navy would call it. And it's not like they could just go ashore to Tripoli or Benghazi. Rumor is, the women there were not (a) hot or [2] loose. You need the correct combination in a liberty port, see? So what did the Soviets do for sailor morale? Well, I'll tell you what the Soviets did. They sailed in a bigass cruise ship, painted gray, which they called the comfort ship. Comfort as in, friendly hot slavic women. VERY friendly. That's right, free hookers for every man Jack on the crew of the Victor. "Captain," I remarked, "I'd really like to go to the Russian comfort ship." So, you want to get in trail of a Victor submarine? Best thing to do is be lurking, waiting for him when he goes somewhere you know he's going to be. None of that open ocean searching. Trouble is, in a shallow water anchorage, how are you going to loiter on-station without being detected, surrounded by Kirov and its accompanying destroyers and frigates, all of them impressively versed in antisubmarine warfare, and, like the Kirov, bristling with weapons? Well, I'll tell you how you loiter without being detected. You sail our submarine DIRECTLY UNDERNEATH THE KIROV. Barely enough room to thrust under there without hitting the bottom or bonking the top of our sail on his keel. Trouble is, the Kirov has a sonar set in the bulbous bow that is so powerful that it boils water when it blasts out a sonar ping. This is not the "one ping, Vasily" bullshit. This is a continuous police siren sound, rising and falling in frequency and never stopping, the sonar electronics able to transmit and receive AT THE SAME TIME. This sonar kills any fish within 500' of it. We called it the Death Ray sonar. It was a terrifying thing. With the shallow bay and the power of the Death Ray sonar, the Kirov, if tipped off that we were inbound, would "snap us up" (detect us) and, emboldened by Libya, put some weapons on us to kill us. I know what you're thinkin'. The Russians wouldn't fire ordnance on an American submarine during the Cold War since that would cause escalation, perhaps even leading to a nuclear exchange. Yeah, tell that to the dead crew of the sunken submarine SCORPION. So how did we avoid getting snapped up by the Death Ray sonar? Well, I'll tell you how we avoided detection by the Kirov. We let it leak through sailors and prostitutes that we'd be sailing into the anchorage on Thursday. When, in actuality, we sailed in Monday. And we hovered and thrusted right under the Kirov's hull, with us rigged for ultra-quiet. Ultra-quiet is a blessing and curse. You tiptoe. No maintenance. If you're not on watch, you are REQUIRED to be in your bunky. But the galley is shut down. You want food? Content yourself with cheese and crackers, buns and cold cuts with mustard and potato chips. A few days at ultra-quiet, you start to miss hot food something fierce. And food on a nuclear submarine is impotent. In all the U.S. military, it is the best food. Closest thing you'll come to Aunt Maude's home cooking. So it's Monday, and we just linger there, underneath Kirov, waiting for the arrival of the Victor. As expected, at dawn on Thursday, Kirov lights off the Death Ray sonar, looking for us. And not finding us, because a sonar like that can't find an object closer than 300 yards or so, and certainly can't find an object directly underneath its hull. But that fucking sonar was blasting out for three days, and was so loud inside the hull that to communicate with someone, you'd need a pad of paper (shouting was bad form during ultra-quiet). Sound can exhaust and fatigue you, which is why it's used in torture. And man, we were tortured by that fucking Death Ray system. Every watch, we'd thrust stealthily out and pop up the periscope to see if we could see the approach of the anticipated Victor. If any Russian sailors would have been out on deck, leaning against the railing, smoking a cigarette, we'd be dead. "Uh, Captain, I saw a periscope." Finally, Mr. Kirov shut down his Death Ray sonar. Our ears rang for days afterward. I wonder how many VA disability claims arose from that event. And praise the Lord Holy God, Victor showed up and moored at anchor and offloaded his officers and ratings in shifts to go to the comfort ship. Eventually, when the entire crew of the Victor was fat, dumb and fucked out, he weighed anchor and sailed off, then submerged into the deeper Mediterranean Sea. With us right behind him. For 40 days and 40 nights, we trailed that Victor with him none the wiser we were there, except when we collided with him - and that was TOTALLY NOT MY FAULT. This was the 56-day run where we ran out of food on Day 40. Sorry kids. No grocery stores 546' beneath the tossing waves of the Med. It's apple juice and coffee for you. For 2 weeks. The captain ordered us to report to him the number of hours of coffee left aboard at the end of each watch. He said, when we got down to 80 hours, we were coming back in. You can't run a nuclear submarine without coffee. People think it runs on bomb-grade uranium. Nope. It runs on coffee. Eventually, P-3 ASW planes dropped sonobuoys at our direction, and another submarine, the SCULPIN, arrived to take over trail of the Victor. Once SCULPIN reported on Nestor UHF secure voice that they'd gotten the Victor, we broke trail and headed for the tender ship off Sardinia. I had a friend on SCULPIN. Later, over bourbon, he confessed that they had the Victor for 40 minutes before they lost him. The Victor sailed off, never to be heard from again. All that, for nothin'. And now you know...the Kirov story. Good day!

Will the relatively expensive Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM) be replaced by much cheaper drones that are now capable of matching the weapon's range and targeting abilities? I wouldn't bet on it. Since its first combat usage during Desert Storm just over 35 years ago, the US Navy has fired over 2700 TLAMs at more than a dozen countries. The TLAM's speed, relatively low signature, and warhead size fired at 1000 miles over the horizon from a strategically mobile, heavily defended launch system is still a pretty powerful combination against an integrated air defense network.

Me circa 1998 being "helped" by shipmates at a bar in Souda Bay 30-min before curfew, as shown through interpretive dance.

I'm listening to Plutarch & he starts the life of Pericles with a basically unrelated ramble about how certain women buy 'puppies and young monkeys' instead of having children. Truly nothing is new under the sun

🚨: After 48 years of travel, NASA 's Voyager 1 is nearing one light-day from Earth, almost 16 billion miles away. A proud milestone for humanity, and a humbling reminder of how small we are in an infinite universe.

USS Missouri fires her 16 inch guns - Summer 1987

@dustinrwalker No kidding...

This is my shocked face.

The Government will collect £331bn in income tax this year, and spend £333bn on welfare. In other words, we now spend more on people not working than we raise from those who do. And the cost? Debt per person has risen from £11.5k in 2000 (inflation adjusted) to over £41k today.

In the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the United States had 86 aircraft destroyed or damaged by enemy action. Of those, more than half (~51) were attrited within the first 20 days of the onset of the air war. (Gulf Airpower Survey, p. 61.)

New from me: Up to 1.5 million 'American' children are being raised in China thanks to birth tourism and a grotesque interpretation of the 14th Amendment. This decade, many of those kids reach voting age. nypost.com/2026/03/19/us-…

🚨🇫🇷 NEW: The location of the French aircraft carrier, FS Charles de Gaulle, has been given away by a sailor using Strava whilst jogging on the ship deck [@lemondefr]

Just in time for the Davidson window

@JoritWintjes Ummm, a few. One I count as a friend who worked in the office two doors down from me. He lived in the same neighborhood. Our daughter were close friends. Not bad for an infantry officer.

@cdrsalamander Ok, now I'm curious. Given your experience in Europe, you never came across any Danish person, let alone someone from the Danish military?

If this is true, which I doubt, then I would recommend that the entire Danish diplomatic and national security nomenklatura who is responsible for U.S. facing concerns be invited to pursue excellence elsewhere in the economy because they are sh1tty in their present jobs—a danger to themselves and others. I am sure they are like some of the earnest Euro nomenklatura I met while a NATO staff officer: their view of the U.S. is strictly limited to what they read from WaPo, NYT, or derived sources. Their American friends, should they have any, represent the intellectual diversity to be found in liberal arts colleges from DC to Boston, with California for geographical diversity. They don’t know the U.S., just a parody of it.

“You want me to do what with a what? Naw man, I’m good.”

Amen.

“A 27-year old drank 15 beers in four hours.”