Fuck you and your fake news USFREEDUMB
How Did the Trump Administration Lose an Aircraft Carrier?
The White House said the USS Carl Vinson was headed for North Korea as it sailed the opposite direction—the latest example of a communications failure inside the executive branch.
That brings us to a baffling news item on Tuesday.
On April 9, as tension between the U.S. and North Korea over missile tests rose, the U.S. announced it was dispatching the USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier, and its retinue, toward the Korean peninsula. “U.S. Pacific Command ordered the Carl Vinson Strike Group north as a prudent measure to maintain readiness and presence in the Western Pacific,” a Navy spokesman said at the time.
There was one flaw in the plan, as The New York Times reports:
The problem was, the carrier, the Carl Vinson, and the four other warships in its strike force were at that very moment sailing in the opposite direction, to take part in joint exercises with the Australian Navy in the Indian Ocean, 3,500 miles southwest of the Korean Peninsula.
The result is the sort of thing that would comical if it didn’t involve nuclear brinkmanship. The announcement of the Vinson’s movement jacked up the tension between Washington and Pyongyang, which called the travel “reckless” and thundered, in a statement to CNN, “We will make the U.S. fully accountable for the catastrophic consequences that may be brought about by its high-handed and outrageous acts.” Had the North Korean government, unsure how to interpret Trump’s tough rhetoric, actually started a hot war, the Vinson would have been 3,500 miles away, rather than ready to act.
How did this happen? Was it Trump’s vaunted unpredictability? Nah:
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.
The confusion might never have become public if not for another miscue: The Navy posted a picture of the Vinson steaming through the Sunda Strait in Indonesia, far from where the White House had placed it—a case of the government failing to take simple steps to cover its own tracks.
The boat blunder is only the latest example of how failure to communicate between units is undermining the Trump administration’s ability to articulate and execute a policy. In this case, the White House blames the Pentagon for providing misleading information and a premature press release, though a fuller story will probably emerge over time. (It’s important to remember that Mattis, a decorated and respected Marine general, was supposed to be one of the more competent figures in an administration full of thin government resumes.)
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/04/how-did-the-trump-administration-lose-an-aircraft-carrier/523458/
im willing to give him more slack.
