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If it’s true, as somebody said, that you fight your war with the equipment you have, we’re in a lot of trouble next time.
If America, god forbid, should be dragged into another large scale war — or be pushed into it by a president seeking better ratings — there is every reason to think that it will be prosecuted with the same competence, preparedness, and general all-around brilliance we have just seen brought to bear on the struggle against the coronavirus. That struggle revealed our public health system and our government to be in shambles, utterly unprepared and unequipped and underfinanced to do the job they were created to do.
Likewise, America’s military forces are in shockingly bad condition. This despite the fact that they are the biggest, richest military force the world has ever seen. We spend — happily, virtually without dissent — nearly a trillion dollars a year on our military, which is approximately equal to our current annual deficit. It is triple China’s military spending, and ten times Russia’s. Yes, ten times that of Russia, the country often invoked as the reason we have to support a military budget that is double what it was at the height of the Cold War. And this is what it has bought us:
- The F-35, the world’s newest. most expensive, highest-tech fighter-bomber, meant to be the backbone of not only the air force but the air arms of the army, navy and marines, turns out to be slower, less maneuverable, less reliable and less accurate than the aircraft it’s meant to replace, and everybody else’s fighter bombers. In combat, says one military analyst, the F-35s would be “clubbed like baby seals.”
- The USS Zumwalt, flagship of what was supposed to be a fleet of 32 of the world’s newest, highest-tech, most expensive destroyers. Since the beginning of the $3 billion-each program in the 1990s, it has been dogged by studies showing that its hull design, intended for maximum stealth effects against enemy radar, had the unfortunate side effect of a tendency to capsize in following seas. The Navy was anxious to show off their triumph when the Zumwalt, on her maiden voyage from the builder’s yard at Bath, Maine to her station in San Diego, broke down in the Panama Canal and had to be towed. Current plans are to build two of the beasts, not 32.
- The USS Gerald R Ford, the Navy’s newest, most expensive ($13 billion each) aircraft carrier. One of its high-tech baubles is an array of 11 high-speed, electromagnetic elevators designed to lift ammunition from the hold to rearm aircraft. Obviously, should the ship ever see action, resupplying its combat aircraft would be a critical function. Only two of the elevators work. After years of struggling with the problem, the Navy has called in a team of experts from outside the defense industry (!) to try to come up with a fix — while the Ford is at sea. Speaking of aircraft carriers — the United States has 11 in all. At the moment, six of them — every one of the carriers deployed on our east coast — are tied up in Norfolk, Virginia for repairs and are unable to deploy.
- Manpack is the result of a decades-long struggle by the US Army to provide its troops with reliable portable radios. The Manpack units cost $72,000 each, is twice as heavy as the radio it replaces, has a shorter range, and overheats so badly it inflicts burns on the person carrying it.
There is, as they say, so much more. The Empire has deployed troops to 150 countries to bestride the world with planes that can’t fly, ships that can’t sail, guns that can’t shoot and people whose morale is so bad, after endlessly repetitive, underequipped, undertrained deployments in the Empire’s endless wars that they can’t do their jobs.
So the thing to do, according to the warlocks in Washington, is to have another nice little war. Prosecuted like the war against coronavirus, the next war could be our last.
Furthermore we live in the age of the missile rendering all these naval behemoths as mere target practice
I grew up an Army Brat, and I seem to remember the term ‘target intensive’ bantered about on one occasion when the brass got together for a few cocktails. They were referring to battle ships. I didn’t know quite what it meant – I was a kid. Then I saw the movie ‘Tora Tora Tora’ and I got it.
re: US military spending being 10 times that of Russia
Throw in NATO and that figure climbs to more like 35 to 1. And if we are talking WW III, then in regards to the weapons’ system that WILL BE the difference maker,* ballistic missile submarines, France, Great Britain and the US have 25 “boomers” between them, and Russia has 3.
Barrack Obama had it right, when he let it slip, that Russia is nothing more than a “rump state.” Hence, the “China Pivot.” A looming, existential threat/menace – more along the lines of the old CCCP – was desperately needed if MIC was to continue chugging along with any true sense of legitimacy, and China was the only logical choice (partly because Al-Queda and ISIS just weren’t cutting it anymore, being as they were, sometime allies), and happily for the American War Machine, China seems more than willing to play along.
* Difference maker in the sense that they will either produce a speed-of-lightening victory (we won WW III in like, 5 minutes!), or there will be a tie, and unlike co-ed softball, where a tie goes to the runner, in this case, a tie results in everybody on the playing field being Overkilled.
Such things don’t matter, until they matter…
Destroyers are so passe.
When militaries become industrial-sized, the way to defeat them is to go small and agile and earnest (guerrilla warfare.)
But since they have these behemoths, maybe they could cover the aircraft carriers with dirt and trees and vegetation, and hide the airplanes under camouflage.
A bomber would lose precious seconds checking to make sure it was the target, and not some uninhabited island.
Oops. I just blew the cover.
All true enough, but misses the main point of the manufactured virus. Covid 19 is an excuse for the lockdown. The lockdown is rapidly destroying the world economy. It is being done intentionally in order to bring about a crisis which will result in the deaths of most of us serfs. The Davos crowd came to the logical conclusion years ago that there were too many debt slaves to care for in conjunction with the likelihood that the growing numbers represented a real threat to themselves, al la the French Revolution scenario. In the US, this is going to get very bloody indeed when the masses begin going hungry. When it gets bad enough, all the firearms and hoarded ammunition are going to come out and there will be civil war from sea to shining sea. And the government will sit back and enjoy the carnage until only a small percentage of the 330 million survive, and most of the ammo has been expended. The cleanup operation will be a breeze.
The result will be a much more manageable number of slaves — precisely what they desire.
So you’re saying the capitalist overlords want to kill off their labour force & customer base?
I always thought an abundance of labour drove wages down for them? Think they do next to nothing to curb illegal immigration because they are all progressives? Tell yourself.
One day the overlords & their managers are incompetent idiots, the next they are hyper competent, hyper organized & united as one with a secret grand plan vs the plebs.
I said they wish to eliminate MOST of the surplus slaves, not all of them, and I provided the motive; that they fear the numbers are too high for them to effectively control. The fear for their own security overrides the factor that the strategy would take out a large percentage of the consumer base. A mere slice of the pie is better than none at all.
They are very aggressive at this point, and the hope is that the sin of overreach will backfire in their faces. We can hope.
I agree with Scanlon. I think you give the so-called ‘overlords’ too much credit. Where our leadership is concerned, I see incompetence as more of a problem than any evil intent.
Max-424 – Win the battle, lose the war?
Darrell, Dr. Scanlon, Greg , Are we not discussing humans who long for AI? I am afraid that placing an intrinsic value on humanity is a thought processes beyond the ken of those we discuss.
Truth in Advertising: Upon closer analysis I admit that I am fully human and thus, “Dumb as a box of rocks”.
“Win the battle, lose the war?
Something like that. It’s a tricky proposition trying to win WW III. A lot can go wrong when nuclear tipped missiles are involved.