Tremble for your nation when
you reflect how the leaner, smarter, more adaptable military gets
into fighting trim. The 50-year-old carrier
USS Enterprise will start its final deployment with a training
exercise against a bunch of made-up civilizations Gene
Roddenberry himself would have found hard to dramatize. From
Navy Times: 

The carrier and its entourage of support ships are in the
Atlantic Ocean, somewhere east of Florida, with land completely out
of sight. But for the purposes of the drill, they’re cruising near
the fictitious Treasure Coast. Maps displayed on the bridge’s
monitors show the contours of the Eastern Seaboard, the Gulf of
Mexico and a good chunk of the Midwest, but all state borders have
been removed and replaced with a handful of countries that come
with their own boundaries and political allegiances.

Enterprise and its strike group are focused on Garnet and North
Garnet, countries that support terrorism on the Treasure Coast.
They’re fundamentalist Shahida states — a faux-theocracy — and they
want to reunite with Pyrope, one of the nine other made-up
countries.

On Enterprise, intelligence analysts evaluate the situation,
fighter squadrons plan sorties, and the ship’s newspaper, “The
Shuttle,” prints an extra section that details the international
political situation. It’s a novella set at sea that grows more
complex as hours past.

“Those pesky Garnetians,” strike group commander Rear Adm.
Walter Carter Jr. told sailors after a day packed with maneuvers,
launches and landings.

The Navy says the training isn’t specifically tailored to a
possible U.S.-Iran scenario.

“We’re training for all the mission areas,” said Rear Adm.
Dennis FitzPatrick, commander of Strike Force Training Atlantic.
Those include anti-submarine warfare and counterpiracy
missions.

The drills do have applications for potential tension with Iran,
however. Treasure Coast includes a fake strait about 200 miles east
of Orlando that, like the Strait of Hormuz, is about 35 miles wide
at its narrowest point.

“There obviously is an emphasis on where we think the ship will
go,” FitzPatrick said.

Thanks, Admiral. You might even put a little more
emphasis on where the ship will go. Is there some pattern of
revanchist governments looking to form a Bismarckian superstate in
the Persian Gulf that the liberal media haven’t been reporting on?
(And wouldn’t that be just like the liberal media?) 

I’m no supporter of U.S. policy in the Middle East, but the
situation there is pretty clear: A country (Iran) led by a
demagogue with dwindling popular and political support may or may
not be making the necessary effort to develop nuclear weapons while
at the same time meddling in the affairs of one country (Syria)
whose dictator appears to be on his last legs, solidifying its
gains in another country (Iraq) whose hostile dictator was
helpfully removed by force of American arms, and supporting a
militia in another country (Lebanon) nobody cares much
about. 

Bonus points for blurring the distinctions between U.S.
territory and that of other nations, however. That will certainly
come in handy when the Navy finally cracks down on Occupy
Guam. 

Courtesy of
Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge, who writes: “[T]he farcism that has
defined capital markets for the past 3 years is slowly migrating to
military planning.”