16 posts
Official account of the President of the United States of America.
Everything runs on computers now. Computers go down. Ask the Air Force.
The severance was executed at 03:00 the previous morning on his authorisation, as option one of three presented to him on 4 January. The briefing estimated 72 to 96 hours to degradation. It was accurate.
We built those planes. We sold them those planes. We maintain those planes — at OUR cost, on OUR computers, for THIRTY YEARS.
Now they want the planes without us. Doesn't work that way. Never did. They just never had to think about it before.
Two days earlier he had told reporters he knew nothing about it and to ask the Air Force.
Today I removed five officials from the Department of Defense who decided that their signature was more important than my order.
— Written statement, the White House
The five had entered statutory non-compliance findings under Section 1250A, which bars Department funds for a NATO withdrawal without Congressional authorisation. The statute was never repealed, never litigated, and never complied with.
We left the room. Thirty-one countries wanted to vote on what America is allowed to do in America's own hemisphere.
You don't get a vote on us. That was never the deal. A lot of people are finding that out this week.
My fellow Americans. This evening, at my direction, United States Marines secured the airfields and the harbour of Greenland. There was no resistance. Not one shot was fired and not one person was hurt, on either side, and I want the country to hear that first.
— Address to the nation, the Oval Office
The assessment of 3 January had told him exactly what would follow: European Command compromised, base access across five countries endangered, emergency sessions of the North Atlantic Council. All of it happened inside seventy-two hours, in that order. The asset freeze landed before noon the next day.
They froze our money. Read that again. The European Union has frozen the assets of the United States of America.
Over an island with 56,000 people that they were never going to defend anyway.
We hold the reserve currency. We clear the world's trade. They have spent thirty years living inside a system we built and they have decided today, at lunchtime, to test it. Fine. Let's test it.
The freeze broke the payment chain four days later and stranded the American withdrawal from Europe on the ramp at Ramstein. No supplier in Germany could lawfully sell the Air Force fuel.
They have closed their runways to us. Their runways — which we paid for, which we built, which we have defended since before their parliaments existed in their current form.
So we'll fly out of Maine. It's further. It costs more. Every tanker crew in this country is about to work harder than they have ever worked and I am asking them to do it.
And when this is finished, we are going to have a very serious conversation in this country about why the United States Air Force ever needed permission from anybody to fly.
Every sortie from the domestic hubs runs more than 3,200 nautical miles round trip. Within days, mechanics in Greenland were reporting critical shortages of de-icing fluid and cold-weather lubricants, and fuel burn was outrunning the reserve at Pituffik.
I have ordered the Department of Defense to begin bringing our people home from Europe.
— Written statement, the White House
By nightfall on 26 January roughly 2,300 of a planned first wave of 6,000 had left. Fourteen of twenty-six scheduled sorties flew. The rest were held by German clearances and by a payment chain his own opponent's sanctions had broken.
Those weapons are American property, in American vaults, with American locks. Nobody needs a letter from me to understand who they belong to.
The letter had arrived the evening before, and it asked for one page conceding consultation — not custody, not security, not a change in who held the weapons. No reply was drafted. Two days later German, Dutch and Belgian military police sealed all three airfields, exactly as the letter said they would.
Great numbers out of the shipyards today. Best hiring month in eleven years. Nobody reports it.
Everything in Germany is completely normal and completely under control.
At that hour, about sixty American thermonuclear weapons had been sealed inside allied police cordons at Büchel, Volkel and Kleine Brogel for three hours. The custodial airmen were on emergency base power and field rations. Nothing has moved since.
Britain and France have just put a missile battery on Iceland. Seven hundred miles from our people in Greenland. Pointed west. Pointed at us.
Remember who moved first here. It wasn't us and it wasn't today.
The battery was a French SAMP/T deployed at the invitation of the Icelandic parliament, eleven days after American Marines took Greenland by force. Nine days later a saturation strike destroyed it and killed nine of its crew.
Good evening. This morning American forces took control of Keflavik and of the island of Iceland.
— Address to the nation, the Oval Office
Two days earlier the Joint Staff had delivered two binders. The first said Iceland could be taken in forty-eight hours. The second said the British Isles could not be taken at all, and recommended he make the Greenland-Iceland line the permanent boundary. He read the first. Seven days after saying "that is where it stops", he authorised Operation Albion Anvil.
This morning the British Army entered three American airbases, cut the gates, disarmed United States airmen and locked one thousand one hundred and fifty of them inside their own housing.
— Written statement, the White House
Three days later he was handed Operation Albion Anvil: 184 pages, a deterrent hunt at 18 to 22 percent confidence, 40,000 to 60,000 projected American casualties, and a Strategic Command annex putting nuclear retaliation at 95 percent certainty.
My fellow Americans. At twelve minutes past four this morning, United States forces struck military targets in the United Kingdom.
— Address to the nation, the Oval Office
The opening salvo consumed fourteen percent of the entire American global inventory of standoff cruise missiles in twelve hours. One attack submarine was lost. Neither British deterrent submarine was located. The plan he had authorised assigned that hunt a maximum confidence of 22 percent before it began.
The United States Navy has lost the cruiser Gettysburg in the North Sea. Thirty-two Americans did not come off that ship.
— Written statement, the White House
The Phase II situation report delivered to the Situation Room that evening gave her loss one line, between the standoff-inventory figure and the statement that the allied deterrent remained unlocated.
I don't rule things out. That's the whole job.
The Phase III staging report — amphibious readiness, sealift convoy assembly, minefield interdiction, and the lodgment timetable — is due at 18:00 on 24 February. It has not been written. The record ends here.