John Konrad V

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Many asked me to update my Hormuz Hypothesis since it went viral in March. Problem is… it still holds. So instead I dug into the unforeseen ramifications. The ones with truly historic consequences 👇

Because you are a former Royal Air Force general, let me put the reason for @PeteHegseth’s D-Day speech in terms you will recognize. In 2005, Boeing hired James McNerney, a disciple of Jack Welch’s school of cost-cutting, as CEO. He later said, “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent,…Show more

Quoting @KonstantinKisin

The Great British Delusion

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Nations are not economic zones. That matters, because from a pure GDP standpoint the ideal citizen is someone who gets cancer, gets divorced, crashes the car, and hires a small army of professionals before dying. Nobody contributed more to UK GDP this week than Henry Nowak’s killer. Think about that. Police…Show more

I just want to know why there is still zero accountability for the bafoons who built 35 of these aluminum junk ships!? Why did we decommission our minesweepers when this LCS crap isn’t ready?? Why are we still naming a ship after Obama’s SECNAV who authorized it? Why is a ship specifically designed to fight Iran…Show more

A saronic’s boat is a real accomplishment. Problem is it’s wrapped in a lie, a dangerous lie. “A pace American shipbuilding hasn’t seen since World War II.” Read that again. It only works if you’ve never visited an American boatyard. Because the thing Saronic just did, design, build, and launch a 150-foot…Show more

$112 Billion That’s how much chinese importers are under declaring imports each year @typesfast tells @ti_morse That’s 7 nuclear aircraft carriers worth of tariff fraud! That’s China alone. ZERO ACCOUNTABILITY WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT NO MORE TAXES UNTIL FRAUD STOPS!!

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This is America SharrellAnne, we believe in long shots and eternal grace. Please join me in prayer... Heavenly Father, we thank you for the life and service of Alan Shaw. May he rest in your peace and may those who loved him find comfort and strength. We entrust him to your mercy and ask this in the name of Jesus…Show more

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Since my Dad’s death from cancer caused by Agent Orange just over a quarter century ago, 9/11 has been the hardest. He was FDNY, and I get choked up all day. His birthday. Hard too. Random days, hard. Days I visit him in Arlington National Cemetery. Really hard. Memorial Day is different. I don’t know what about…Show more

Quoting @johnkonrad

The Financial Times “Big Read” this week is why London has lost its luster. Not one mention of Muslim immigration. Zero. It says “less safe” once. No mention of grime. London was once my favorite city then, just before BREXIT, I did a post about my stay in a fancy London hotel run by Italians. It was a disaster. Lost my reservation. Missed a wake up call. Then there was an actual fire and they evacuated the building but nobody called 911. I love Italy. Spent weeks there last year. But I don’t go for efficiency. I go for the food, museums, art, and the joy of getting lost down a winding street until time stops mattering. Here’s the thing. I’m in my late forties, had Rome been my favorite city in my twenties and thirties then I’d be a basket case right now. What absolutely pissed me off about the nice hotel was they completely missed the intent of my trip. I did not go to London for Aperol Spritz in a lobby designed by a gay man with a quirky sense of mediterranean elegance. I went for a wake up call from a hotel manager names Clive who travels to Greenwich observatory monthly to set his watch precisely from a John Harrison original. As @jockowillink writes, "Discipline Equals Freedom". Well the London of youth inculcated you in discipline and prescision! It taught you the importance of sacrifice for intellectual gain. The changing of the guard. The efficiency of Paddington Station I wanted. No sorry, I needed in my twenties a hotel manager who looked at the off balanced knot in my tie and grimaced. A Maître d'hôtel who would not let me in with scuffed shoes. Rules Standards Tradition And I needed a taxi driver who knew every corner of the city and could rant about small problems because he had driven the city for years with his eyes wide open. A man who got the job not because of his intellect or charm but because he had the discipline to memorize every ally and road to pass the test. I’m from New York City. You don’t come to NY to relax on a beach. You come to learn balancing situational awareness with alacrity. Many complain about the Americanization of the world but is that true? The great cities are turning into the boring block grey of Scandinavia, the arrogance of Paris, the relaxed attitude of Capri, the gay quirks of San Francisco. The well off and successful Millennials I know have the extra thick passports filled with stamps but every destination is a copy of the rest. Airports suck. Flights are exhausting. They take these quick jaunts around the world and they want familiarity because they are worn down. They need to relax. That’s not the purpose of travel! If you read Roosevelt or Churchill or Robert Louis Stevenson you will find out that travel was inspiring. Not relaxing. I love Jocko, I love the stoics, I love reading Joseph Conrad. Reading is a prerequisite for success. But inculcation is how the lessons of books gel in our mind. I owe a lot of my success to the inculcation of discipline, precision and self respect I gained in the London of my youth. But I learned nothing from visiting a British hotel run by Italians. And I learned little more than contempt visiting London last year. The solution? If they can’t or won’t stop migrants then the only solution is for Britain to colonize itself. It knows how to drive efficiency from a multicultural diaspora. This is something the British know how to do. Reject the millennial travelers and their wads of dollar bills. Attract travelers like the young me who want to be inspired by what makes you, you. Hold everyone every person who enters the City Of London on official business to a high British standard. You did it in Cairo, you did it in Bombay. You can do it in London too.

Inculcation. That is what’s missing. Two lesser necessities hide behind it: rumination and distillation. Take Jocko Willink. I respect him. I believe his mantra, “Discipline Equals Freedom.” But there is a fatal flaw in the program. You will not learn discipline reading a book. You will not learn it in a seminar,…Show more

I bear partial responsibility for the entire Naval Woke College debate. I’ve been hammering them for years. Let me tell you why…. 🧵 Strap in, it’s a LONG story. Go all the way back to the start of the Trump 1.0 administration. Actually, go back further. Go back to Obama. The Navy is NOT in charge of…Show more

Quoting @DOWResponse

Secretary Hegseth just addressed the warriors and families of the USS BAINBRIDGE: “TO THE BAINBRIDGE—WELCOME HOME”

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This arrival is unique and more incredible than is reported. Let me explain… This trip was planned earlier in the month, and I was invited to fly down with @PeteHegseth. For security reasons, none of us had a clue it was for the arrival of the Ford. Then POTUS pulled @SecWar onto Air Force One for the trip to…Show more

Some of the top naval “xperts” told me the Navy would quietly drop the Trump Battleship by summer. I even got cancelled from my regular appearances on a top navy podcast for saying THIS IS HAPPENING Well folks. The Navy didn’t back down. They doubled down with nuclear power!

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Quoting @johnkonrad

Dear @JerryHendrixII: The Maritime EO and Action Plan your White House team wrote to restore the U.S. Merchant Marine are brilliant. Patriots all. Now the chaser: A USMM flag in the Oval Office and keelhauling for anyone who refuses to fly it at veterans events.

My suggestion for a new US Merchant Marine service flag. Our existing flag on top. The new design based on our WW2 victory logo below. What are your thoughts?

Mom is literally a superhero. To us, she was this. Loving, crafty, smart, and always around at night to cook dinner and help with homework. But during the day, she was a visiting nurse in the most dangerous housing projects in the South Bronx. This was at the height of crack and AIDS epidemics of the 80s and early…Show more

Just concluded the Great Battleship Debate with @ZackCooper taking the con and me taking the pro battleship side. One thing we both agree on is the new Battleship will never be built under existing US Navy shipbuilding policies and procedures. What will work is a crawl, walk, run strategy. Crawl We build the…Show more

Stopped at a small auto parts store yesterday. For the last few years they had migrant workers behind the counter. Nice guys. Competent at pulling parts from the warehouse and would go out of their way to help you loading heavy stuff like batteries into your car. But ask a

Ryan was once a friend. He’s been out sailing on my boat. I helped him sketch the initial pivot to writing about the Stoics. Sadly, this isn’t his most shocking video. That distinction belongs to the ones featuring his kids at Trump rallies. He’s a smart guy and a deep thinker,

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Major win for 🇺🇸 Bill is a former submarine captain turned banker and advisor. He was instrumental in preventing Subic Bay shipyard from falling into the hands of China. A patriot Razor smart Genuinely good guy. Oh yes… and he’s a devout Christian

BREAKING: New Trump Class Battleship drawings have dropped. Early reports indicate that Hung Chao has upgraded the bow mounted cannons.

Ok, I’ll bite. Why are all the old people in my town protesting Trump this time?

TL;DR: “Bunkers” just means ship fuel. “Bunker C” is a specific, nasty heavy fuel oil that now requires exhaust cleanup and special conditions. Activists conflate the two to make modern ships sound dirtier than they are.

And yes every part of this post is abbreviated and important context was left out From the history to the fuel grades. I have a word count I need to hold. Twitter is not the place to learn context but hopefully this post encourages a few people to go read actual books on these

This is fantastic @SteveHiltonx. It is absolutely insane that Gavin shut down refineries and made California dependent on Iraqi oil. BUT please do not fall into the liberal “Bunker fuel is nasty” talking point. Historically, sailors slept in bunks and kept their belongings in

The motto of the US Merchant Marine is Acta Non Verba. Actions Not Words. We run the largest moving structures on Earth. Big, dirty ships that move oil, machinery, and coal. Biden personally pushed through the first female service academy cadets. Did he put them at the Naval

John Thune has become a punching bag for good reason but there is a more insidious force at play nobody can talk about. Let me explain… The staffers in Thune’s office have been asking Trump Naval and Maritime appointees questions about me before confirmation hearings. I doubt

Can’t hide that I was critical of Secretary of the Navy John Phelan. I blasted him this morning. I also can’t pretend I’m not excited for @HungCao_VA to take his place. That said, Phelan was a fantastic first year SECNAV. He did not shy away from hard decisions. He killed the

Called Hormuz before anyone What did I get for it? Rage, podcast cancellations, hit pieces.. anger. No matter. I’m not here for approval. I’m here to tell the truth, push real reform, and fight for a better nation under god. And IDGAF if they cancel me… I’ve got options 👇

Absolutely everyone is getting Hormuz wrong and over a year into this administration the SHIPs for 🇺🇸 Act is far from passing. Should I retardmaxx some ocean? The real problem behind Hormuz, U.S. shipbuilding delays, and the Royal Navy not being able to deploy even one

This is why Americans are the deadliest fighters on earth. I met a priest yesterday who just got accepted to chaplain school in Newport. I asked him the obvious question: Marines or Navy? Navy, he said. His face fell a little. He told me he could never be a Marine because every

BREAKING: US Navy will not open the Strait of Hormuz Trump gives nations who import oil from the Middle East three options: 1) Buy your oil from US and Venezuela instead 2) Secure the Strait themselves with limited US support Or 3) Wait for Hormuz to reopen naturally

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Trump said we need Greenland because we can’t trust NATO to let us use it in a war. He said we need a battleship 100x more powerful to keep straits open. Europe laughed. Trump was right.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Ya know. I get all the Merchant Marine hate. I understand why they get so angry at us. Call is a fake service. Tell us we don’t know anything and are glorified bus drivers. I get it because all that time people like @infantrydort were getting shot at, friends bleeding out,

Getting a Pentagon press pass has been nothing but a hassle. Late night drives home on the NJ Turnpike, hotel costs, and the old press corps trashed the offices before leaving. Now we might have to work in a tent!?? Worth every second. It’s been the honor of a lifetime to

For year the NYTimes has written hit pieces on the “ballooning cost” of Navy warships. It was a smoke screen to coverup fraud by making people think the defense budget was the cause of the debt. The truth: A $3B DDG pales in comparison to the value of the cargo it can protect.

Let's unpack this.. What if the White House has no intention of reopening the Strait of Hormuz? What if this war is really about ships & tariffs? I had a long discussion with senior DOE official yesterday on background. I can’t share any details but it’s clear everyone’s

Not gonna sugar coat this and do not care if it costs me my new Pentagon press credentials and access to this administration. The left smeared my name in a major WAPO hit piece and the right can do the same. I’m a captain, I can live alone in the ocean. 👉 The Strait of Homuz

Nobody can say I didn’t literally pound the table and yell at a room full of admirals at the world’s top Navy conference. They were so angry they launched an NCIS investigation into me. All after I won an award in Bahrain for exposing the exact same problem… in 2016❗️

We had a good thing, Britain. A really good thing. You taught us this game. Mahan studied you. We just wrote bigger checks. The deal was simple. We spend the trillions. Fight the hard wars. We even let you sit out Vietnam. And you? You hold the chokepoints you already own. You

If you aren’t following gCaptain please proceed directly to a physiologist office to get your head examined…

How big of a deal is a Medal of Honor? The tradition is for everyone in this photo to salute CW5 Slover when he walks by. That’s how respected it is.

Wow, just wow The most absolutely bonkers and TDS infused podcast on national security I have heard ever I am so absolutely fed up with the war on the rocks crowd that I cannot even begin to explain it This episode literally ends with zach claiming that the Trump class

Here it is folks. The moment my 100k followers have been waiting for…. “We can not rebuild our industrial base without the US Merchant Marine. They are critically important,” @PeteHegseth, Secretary of War 🫡

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BREAKING: A security company run by a Navy SEAL and EOD was fired from a BAE Systems shipyard after refusing to use untested EV patrol boats to guard U.S. warships. The replacement? A mall cop company. Their electric boat sank two days ago. They pulled it out. It smoked all

Last night there was an active shooter at my son’s school. He was trapped in a library bathroom. Seventeen kids in the building with the gunman. My phone lit up and the world shrank to the size of that screen. Nobody knew what to do. I did. I told him they need a leader.

My review of Trump's new Maritime Action Plan to restore American Maritime dominance. 👇

“Women are our biggest strategic advantage” False You have three broken diesel subs, zero destroyers, tiny “icebreakers” and more generals than working tanks. Being next door to the United States is your only strategic advantage.

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