RE: Military Spending

[nebris]

~Given the dust up regarding military spending etc in the comment threads of our distinguished Mods post A little wisdom from Dean Baker, [yes, that was a suck up so stfu] I though it might prove salutary to examine the paradigm of American military spending, which I believe Germain to this community considering the rather significant portion of

Comments

The Modern Navy

[theheretic]

TED Talks had several speeches about 4th generational warfare and basically came to similar conclusions: the military is full of dinosaurs and the officers are REMFs but the general giving the speech was much more polite. He suggested that the military needs to aggressively review the current war and base its military on fighting that type of enemy, not ones from previous wars which don't exist anymore. Expending two tons of munitions and fuel to kill a single enemy is deeply retarded, to any military. We've seen those videos over Afghanistan, hunting individual human targets with a 105mm howitzer mounted on those aircraft is a great example of idiocy in action. Many things can be done to return the military to fitness and junking the obsolete crap is an important first step. Let the chips fall and get rid of the obsolete officers and staff. They've done it before in prior wars and peacetime. We sure didn't need horse cavalry in WW1. Total waste. We didn't need battleships much after WW2, and even then they were very easy to kill with aerial bombardment. Little more use than self propelled artillery, when it comes down to it. Today's nearly obsolete targets are the carrier battle groups. While they do allow for a aircraft landing platform, they're easy to nuke or sink using rocket-torpedoes, which go 200 mph so can't be dodged and the Russians and Chinese both have them. Put a nuclear payload in and you can kill a whole battlegroup with complete surprise in one shot. Might not even lose the sub doing the attack. Of course, without nukes its a longer fight but you could still take them down within a few minutes. Modern navies are big floating targets, sad to say. They are little better than Picket boats or signposts now.

Real wars are fought on the ground and are often asymmetric, a point the general from TED talks made. Human Terrain Systems tactics are necessary to have any hope of winning by removing support for the opposition by the non-combatants. This is why we lose Somalia, and Vietnam, and are losing Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. The locals support their heroic "freedom fighters" against "the great satan" of the west. Blah blah rhetoric. When things get to this point the only win is genocide, and we're not ready to commit that just to win a war. Well, not again anyway. Or not openly where it can be seen and published and the public reacts badly. Ahem. It comes down to getting a proper mission and appropriate equipment rather than ego fuelling and limping along aimlessly, providing soldiers as targets and making everything worse.