Eight men are dead. A B-52 Stratofortress, that venerable Cold War dinosaur, has crashed in the Californian desert. We are told UK defence chiefs are now urgently reviewing bomber fleet safety.
This is the sort of news that sends the pundits into a frenzy of solemn assurances and droning technical analysis. They will talk of stressed airframes, ageing components, the need for modernisation. Let us dispense with that managerial nonsense.
This is not a logistical glitch. This is a parable. It is a parable of a civilisation that has lost the will to command even the machines it once built with such zealous purpose.
The B-52, ladies and gentlemen, is a ghost. It first flew in 1952. The Eisenhower administration was in power.
The world was divided, hard and clear. We built these things to end the world, and we meant it. Now, seven decades later, we keep them aloft with duct tape and prayers, not because we have any intention of using them for their apocalyptic purpose, but because we have forgotten how to build anything new.
We have traded the ambition to conquer the air for the comfort of a managed decline. The crash is not an accident. It is a symptom.
Look at the Royal Air Force. They find themselves in the same predicament, flying increasingly geriatric machinery. Why?
Because the intellectual and industrial sinew of the nation has been devoured by the welfare state, by the green fetish, by the cult of risk aversion. We no longer build Titans; we manage portfolios. We no longer train men to face the crucible of combat; we coddle them with sensitivity training.
A defence review is announced. What will it conclude? Likely a fudge.
Some tepid funding for minor upgrades. A promise to explore options. Meanwhile, the vital arterial blood of a great power’s capability continues to clot.
This is not merely a defence story. It is the story of the West. The crash of a bomber is the crash of a worldview.
We once dared to forge weapons that could annihilate our enemies from the stratosphere. Now, we cannot even keep them in the air. The eight dead men are martyrs to a cause we are too timid to name: the preservation of a sovereign, capable nation.
Their deaths should provoke not mere procedural review, but a howling at the heavens. But no. We will have a round of inquiries.
The programme will continue. And the decline, the soft, comfortable, managed decline, will continue with it. Fall of Rome?
Hardly. Rome fell in a blaze of barbarian fire. We are falling in a quiet, administrative whisper, punctuated by occasional, tragic thuds.
The B-52 crash is a bell tolling. But who among us has ears to hear?
