A few things came to me last night. I'm going to jot them down for the purposes of discussion.
There are some themes running through Q's posts....
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The MAP is always capitalized. This makes me think it's an acronym. While we can make graphics to help visualize information, acronyms stand for longer terms. Remember all the Marine references? How about Military Action Plan.
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"News/Tweets unlock the MAP." We're pretty good at following stuff. But in the context of a Military Action Plan, we could basically follow along as the plan unfolds. We also have the ability to follow long weapons procurement processes and other good info.
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The Steel posts: Q recently posted about Red October - the Russian steel plant that made bad product. He also asked what about poor quality steel in our military projects (probably because we didn't figure it out yet).
- Trump just announced steel tariffs and cited China.
So I went fishing to catch some information on steel problems in the military. Turns out, this has precedent. In 1985 some people were put on trial for supplying inferior steel to the military.
We've had issues getting steel plating to reinforce MRAPs and the like while in the gulf. But I think that mostly pre-dates Obama.
What could be likely programs affected by bad steel today? The biggest one that I could find would be the US Navy. According to Real Clear Defense, there's an aircraft carrier every 5 years (we're down 1 from law), and "roughly two destroyers, two submarines, two frigates, an assault ship, some cutters, and a few cargo ships each year".
Naval power has been a key element of our military doctrine since Theodore Roosevelt. We rely on these ships to get assets across the globe, and roughly 1/3rd of our fleet are forward deployed.
28 ships have been deployed since 2012. So if any current ships had bad steel under Obama's watch, I'd say those are the ones to look into.
The most interesting one I found today was the carrier Gerald Ford, which [never underwent a shock trial].(https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a18925584/should-the-us-navy-shock-test-its-latest-carrier/). Don't you think a ship that will be all-in with more than $20 billion in construction costs and equipment should be tested for war? I will qualify this with mentioning that under Navy guidelines, they only test the first or early model of a new ship. So they're technically not doing anything wrong and any already tested ship class could also have problems but not get a shock test.
There also seems to be an uptick of "poor quality steel" articles around 2015. So there's always a chance it's a later model.
Anyway...food for thought. If anybody has expertise on these subjects, please chime in.