Army War College paper predicts possible collapse of US military within 20 years | Hacker News Reader

Army War College paper predicts possible collapse of US military within 20 years

vice.com

71 pointslow_common30 comments

"Water is currently 30-40 percent of the costs required to sustain a US military force operating abroad, according to the new Army report. A huge infrastructure is needed to transport bottled water for Army units"

Is this for real? It seems like a gross exageration given how many man-hours of maintenance are needed to keep a plane in the air for 1 hour, or the cost of fuel, or the cost of ordinance, or a hundred other things.

It depends on the theater of deployment and mission but the majority of deployed troops are support and not combat. The Army would have the lowest percentage but the Navy in WW2 had something like 10 to 1 support to combat and the Air Force was higher but numbers have trended lower since then. I remember this from reading a lot of military history when I was younger for some reason. http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA472467

It does seem like a lot, but not so much when you consider that every member of personnel actually doing those man-hours needs water, just as surely as they need a salary - and unlike the salary, the water has to be shipped out. In the desert a person can easily drink a gallon a day, not to mention all the other uses of water on a base. That's nearly 5 kilos of supplies per person per day. Most personnel are not firing ordnance, flying planes, or driving dozens of miles every single day - but they will all go through water like clockwork.

What is "bottled water" here? (What I have in mind is an obvious waste of money...)

The potential "collapse" of the US Military (and what does that mean, specifically?) hinders on the assumption that the US will be engaged in foreign conflicts across the globe.

I think we'll turn isolationist well before that becomes a reality. Foreign policy wonks can talk up and down about the necessity of American troops to protect human interests in Bangladesh, and to prevent destabilization of neighbors, potential conflict involving nuclear states... but I have trouble seeing the Senate voting to deploy troops when their constituency thinks, "who gives a shit about Bangladesh?"

True, but since the Senate (or house) hasn't been needed to deploy troops for decades, I don't think their viewpoints will matter.

The War Powers Resolution [1] requires Congressional notification within 48 hours and limits engagements to 60 days without further approval.

Congress hasn't declared war since WW2, but they have been required to both approve military deployment and spending for every conflict since. Most controversially, the Authorization for Use of Force in Iraq [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution#Question...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit...

I'll settle for becoming "non-interventionist" -- we need to stop being the world's police. Show me where in the Constitution that is. If you can, I'll happily go silent.

Unfortunately the Senate rarely ever votes on troop deployments - Congress has long since abandoned its Constitutional responsibilities as far as war is concerned. I absolutely agree that our global military empire is unsustainable, financially and otherwise, and will eventually shrink greatly, if not entirely.

The title rewrite obscures the significance: an Army War College paper points to a possible collapse of the US military within 20 years.

Thanks, I updated the title because I completely agree.

At least for the United States, most of the dire consequences are entirely avoidable; we just have to get off our duffs and do some work, and not idle away.

Like the example given in the article of PG&E's rolling blackouts, these are mostly self-inflicted problems that are completely within our technical abilities to fix, we just have to do the work and spend the money intelligently to fix things that we've let go to seed.

"The report also warns that the US military should prepare for new foreign interventions in Syria-style conflicts, triggered due to climate-related impacts. Bangladesh in particular is highlighted as the most vulnerable country to climate collapse in the world."

This opening sentence of the VICE article is what gives me pause. It seems to imply that the US military will be intervening in all sorts of theaters due to climate change. What?

While I'm sure that the US powers will take every opportunity to increase influence, I don't believe most US citizens would support that. Especially if there were costs at home.

This feels like a report designed to keep military spending at all-time highs. Yes, climate change is an issue that must be addressed now. Contemplating "invading" Bangladesh on the pretense of climate change seems like a bridge too far.

I agree with you, but climate change isn't the casus belli here. It's more of the buildup of tinder that gets sparked by the proverbial assassination of an Archduke. Examples of this recently are the Arab Spring and Syrian Civil War.

The US didn't become involved in Syria because of climate change - rather climate change caused the conditions for the conflict to erupt, and at the time, it made sense for the US to deploy ground troops and get involved in that conflict as it aligned with foreign policy goals in the region.

With Bangladesh, you essentially have (edit:) 160 million people in a country where a third of it floods each year. Tens of millions on floodplains at sea level. Their political, ethnic, and religious borders are historically tense. When sea levels rise it will displace many of those people into Northern India, and possibly southern China.

The question to ask is what will the political response from the regional powers be when this happens? And how does it affect US goals in the region? What foreign policy tools will be available to realize those goals? This report points to the idea that the US military will not be one of them, which means if conflict erupts the US will be on the sidelines. Whether or not that's a good thing is impossible to predict.

> The US didn't become involved in Syria because of climate change - rather climate change caused the conditions for the conflict to erupt

The Syrian conflict has nothing to do with climate change. There has been longstanding discontent among the Syrian population with the Assad family, namely 1) like his father, Bashar al-Assad is a dictator with a secret police that is quite nosy and bothersome in Syrians’ everyday lives, and 2) Assad comes from a minority sect of Islam that most Syrians are not sympathetic to (and he has given important positions and financial opportunities to other members of his minority sect). The country was already a powder keg of sorts, and gradual radicalization of the Muslim population and social media lit the match.

Then, once the conflict broke out, the Syrian regime began forcibly conscripting Syrian young men to fight on the regime’s side. This was not an attractive prospect, to say the least, and so a lot of them began to flee the country, joining those who were forced out by the fighting itself, and some of them took up arms against the regime.

The report also outlines an "ever expanding permanent role for the US Army on domestic soil." Make of that what you will.

Stop linking to shitty news sites with clickbait headlines.

Start just posting the link to the study/report.

"Well that is where we are. You say we are on the brink of destruction and you are right. But it is only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve. This is our moment."

And what of the cause missing in your title that cause being climate change?

The people that wrote this are serious people, and the person that commissioned it is a Trump appointee. It's bad that so many crises are happening at once. This can't be procrastinated on even one more year. This article links to a pdf report. The report is just as dire as the article. Your life is directly or indirectly in danger. This is no exaggeration.

Fight against climate change and the interests that minimize it like your life and the life of your children depend on it.

> Your life is directly or indirectly in danger

Should I be concerned? Did they say Texas was hosed?

Pretty sure that is the point...? The United States won't be safe. So I'd assume if you accept this paper, the answer is yes you should be.

>This can't be procrastinated on even one more year.

Wanna bet?

I'm not trying to be snarky, but I wish there was any grounds to believe there will be significant action taken over the course of one more year, or one more decade, or...

That is a pedantic but valid point. We should not procrastinate. It would be terrible.

I guess the army war college is like grad school for military. I thought University of Phoenix was their grad school. The more you know.

With any luck, civilization will collapse before 2040, and then supporting the US military will be the least of our problems.

We are well along that path. When ocean acidification collapses the fish nurseries, and large parts of the tropics become uninhabitable by humans as temperature/humidity goes high enough to cause heat stroke from normal walking, global thermonuclear war is not far off.

Or maybe humans will just adapt like we always have?

We have not adapted to a billion people migrating from where they used to be able to live to where other people are already living.

Small-scale experiments thus far (with fewer than 10M people) have led directly to increasingly fascist government, in the latter places. Genocide is the predictable policy, from there on, with recent examples in Rwanda, Congo, Burma, and Charleston. Europeans demonstrated enthusiasm for it only a little less recently.

Humanity adapts, humans die en masse and take societies and nations with them.

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