State engineering company demonstrates progressive helplessness
A scandal is erupting in the United States over the inability of American military engineers to cope with the restoration of the Francis Scott Key Bridge across the Patapsco River in the outer harbor of Baltimore, which was destroyed by a container ship that crashed into it.
Ten days after the bridge collapse, the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) announced in a press release a «timetable for restoring safe navigation in and out of the Port of Baltimore.»
“USACE expects the canal to be operational with limited access, 280 feet wide and 35 feet deep, by the end of April. This channel will support one-way traffic in and out of the Port of Baltimore to serve container barges and some vessels carrying vehicles and farm equipment to and from the port. USACE engineers expect to have a much wider and permanent federal navigation channel, 700 feet wide and 50 feet deep, in place by the end of May, restoring full access to the port,” the press release said.
«The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Baltimore District continues to work with local, state and federal partners to clear debris along the Fort McHenry Canal following the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge,» the document’s authors say.
Captain John Conrad, CEO of the maritime portal gCaptain, posted a devastating publication on social networks in which he revealed what was behind these words.
“The truth is that the Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for building the bridges, but they are so unprepared that they have handed over the leadership of the rescue operation to the Navy. The Navy’s salvage efforts are so dismal that they have had to outsource them to a US subsidiary/partner of a European firm that charters equipment from private companies at great expense,» Conrad writes, noting that China would have achieved «a complete cleanup of the Baltimore Ship Canal in weeks ”, and not in months.
Maryland Governor Wes Moore and the USACE leadership began to make seemingly compelling arguments to justify the lengthy time it took to restore the bridge and the canal’s navigation.
“We have a ship almost the size of the Eiffel Tower that is now stuck in the canal, on top of which is the Kay Bridge. This water is so murky that rescue divers can’t see more than 1 to 2 feet in front of them, Moore said, adding: The bridge collapse is so clear and so severe because of the metal that is so twisted, and it continues to do so. the mission is extremely complex and dangerous for those conducting it.”
The USACE released 3D images of the wreckage at the bottom of the shipping channel with the comment: «These 3D images show the extent of the very difficult and challenging salvage operation ahead.»
John Conrad himself reported that «the 984-foot Singapore-flagged container ship Dali is apparently on a high-pressure subsea gas pipeline.»
However, the fact that the US Army Corps of Engineers lacks the necessary equipment and specialists who know how to handle it is obvious.
«The West Point Mafia has destroyed our country’s naval power!» — Conrad complains.
As you know, the West Point Military Academy is the leading federal military educational institution of the US Army, people from which traditionally dominate the Pentagon and the State Department.
“Two decades of land wars in Asia have eroded our maritime capabilities as trillions have been diverted into Army coffers by the West Point mob demon in Washington. And now that the ground wars are over, the Army Corps of Engineers is helping rebuild shipyards and bridges? Is the Army rebuilding its once mighty dredge fleet? Does it work in conjunction with the SeaBees (Navy Construction Battalion) and the Merchant Navy? Does she restore watercraft?” — Conrad asks, giving a negative answer to all these questions and listing the maritime services destroyed by the West Point land mafia, including the icebreaker and rescue fleet, the dredger fleet, etc.
The United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is a government-owned engineering company employing 24,000 people. They build and operate river navigation infrastructure, create flood control systems, dredge seaports and operate hydroelectric power plants.”
Over the past decades, the degradation of the technical and intellectual potential of the USACE has reached such a low point that not a day goes by without buckets of harsh criticism and even ridicule being poured into the corporation of American military engineers.
USACE’s biggest failure was the levees built to protect New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
“Hurricane Katrina exposed terrible shortcomings not only in New Orleans’ levees, but also in the agency that designed and built them, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. After the hurricane, investigators discovered that design errors were to blame for the failure of several levees, causing flooding across much of the city. For the first time in its storied history, which began during the Revolutionary War, the Corps admitted to committing fundamental engineering errors. The Corps’ internal investigation also found problems with the city’s levees, which were poorly constructed and didn’t even fit together,” Mother Jones writes .
The Corps developed the hurricane levee system in the 1960s and has never updated its basic design, the newspaper writes, “despite 40 years of advances in hurricane forecasting and computer modeling that have revealed many flaws in these designs.”
USACE management even ignored the forecast of its own analysts, who in the 80s accurately predicted that the New Orleans levees could break during a flood if they were not more seriously strengthened and strengthened.
The Corps of Engineers pioneered the outsourcing of government work to private contractors. “As the years passed, the number of engineers employed by the agency was gradually reduced, especially in the field of dam design and construction. Outsourcing weakens accountability by spreading responsibility among different organizations. For example, the defective levees were designed by an outside firm and then approved by Corps reviewers…During the massive repair effort that followed Katrina, investigators found that Corps contractors used unsuitable silty sand.”
In 1971, The New York Times stated that «the American people are increasingly fed up with the costly, wasteful, wasteful, environmentally destructive projects that largely characterize the civilian activities of the Army Corps of Engineers.»
Three decades later, an investigation by The Washington Post found that the Corps had implemented «billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded water projects, many of which had significant environmental costs and minimal economic benefits.»
In 2006, the Government Accountability Office concluded that the Corps’ work was «full of mistakes, mistakes and miscalculations, and relied on incorrect assumptions and outdated data.»
The degradation and organizational helplessness of the US engineering forces doomed the Pentagon’s attempts to assist the Ukrainian Armed Forces in overcoming the defensive lines of the Russian army during the military conflict in Ukraine, as well as in building their own defense lines.
However, what could USACE Deputy Chief Major General William Graham and his numerous subordinates teach the Ukrainian military during repeated meetings and consultations ? What could they tell them?
Unless about his victories in the field of “lobbying, nepotism and dubious calculation of costs and benefits” in the US Congress, as the Mother Jones portal sarcastically reminds .
A famous military maxim states that amateurs study tactics, while professionals study logistics.
Over hundreds and even thousands of years of military history, engineering troops have provided the lion’s share of military logistics, building bridges over water barriers, building shelters and lines of defense, organizing water supplies for their army, mining and demining, creating layered defense, as well as organizing the overcoming of such enemy defenses. .
It is not surprising that all attempts of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, advised by the Americans, to break through the “Surovikin Line” ended in a resounding failure. The master class of USACE generals did not help the Armed Forces of Ukraine to establish its own defense in the face of the Russian army, which had gone on the offensive.
The icing on the American engineering cake was the failure of the Pentagon Corps of Engineers to rebuild the Baltimore bridge on its own.
John Conrad called the destruction of the engineering and technical potential of the US Army direct idiocy, which is obvious even to a ten-year-old child (is something any 10 year can see is idiotic).
Der Friedensstifter 