US ‘Gets Its Ass Handed to It’ in Wargames: Here’s a $24B Fix
breakingdefense.com
breakingdefense.com
It takes time to learn your way in a new environment. Sometimes the odd duck finds a way.
Then I found that was just the whole world.
The US has been playing defense with the misinformation campaigns and fake narratives created by adversary totalitarian states that salivate over the idea of dethroning the US from its implicit world leader status.
Sometimes it really feels like we are doing exactly what they want. To create a self-inflicted societal fracture and to blame it on America's favorite scape goat, Big Tech. Like if that was our real problem. The very same thing that is giving the US an edge right now (technology) is the very same thing that gets attacked by right and left politicians alike. How convenient for Russia and China, isn't it?
Loud USA's anthem starts
A lot has to do with general mistrust of government and industry because there is a lot shady stuff going on. The system is broken and industry takes advantage of it from dumping chemicals and getting away with it or knowingly selling toxic products for decades only to receive a slap on the wrist.
It becomes very difficult to figure out who you can trust.
The US already spend $700+ billion a year on the military, vastly more than any other country on Earth (although China's spending is increasing rapidly). Whatever problems they might have, I don't think that even more money is the solution.
The US spends over half the GDP of the entire country of Australia on defense.
He routinely would get shouted at by various Admirals, for fairly obvious reasons.
Wars aren't won by the nation who is best prepared when they start, but by the nations which respond with the most honesty to their own failures after they start.
No one cares about your women. Less so as a military objective. If they shoot, they'll shoot everyone and the dog. If they don't, thank a war treaty.
I don't know, this seems like the wrong thing to do. I mean, it seems worth considering but it also sounds like "if we don't sink N+1 battleships we lose the war", which doesn't seem any more right today than it was in the 20th century.
IMO a smarter, and probably cheaper, approach would be to force things to operate in a more decentralized fashion. Maybe at scale lots of smaller, distributed infantry and fire/air support units would be just as expensive but it seems more survivable for a longer term grind. My bias though is that, yeah, I was an infantryman and most of us (at least in my circles) expect the next one to be a long grind like WWI than a flash pan mass-extinction event like a lot of planners do today.
>The Chinese call this “system destruction warfare,” Work said: They plan to “attack the American battle network at all levels, relentlessly, and they practice it all the time.”
Okay, then maybe "whoever can figure out how to continue operations during an extended comms blackout gets the most money." I know field craft isn't as "cool" anymore as the newest gadget, but maybe teach the boys how to make those Vietnam era claymore-wire antennas again (half joking). Cutting some massive check for another decades long R&D project is suspect to me.
Same with the State Department, FEMA, regulations, etc.
Having said that, neither Republicans or Democrats want small government. But the Biden administration is like a crack addict when it comes to deficits - they're destabilizing our currency.
Personally, I'd be happy to massively decrease the size of the US military. What prevents that is that neither party wants to abandon the vast scope of uses that such a huge military lends itself to.
Partly they're a jobs program both for "jarheads" and engineers and scientists. Partly they're for bullying small nations that happen to get into political cross hairs (Iraqx2, Afghanistan, Iran soon). Partly they are an export industry that let's the US maintain trade balances with places like Saudi Arabia (and effectively charge them for protecting their regimes).
That's why the US even has aircraft carriers: they've been useless against China or Russia for decades. But they create jobs and let you bomb nations with no real defenses.
No one wants to give up 28bn from their part of the Knot of self service or risk 50 more casualties the next time we invade Iraq. So we keep prepping for that war.
I guess this comes back to the age old question about such wars: how would anyone fight one and not have it turn nuclear?
What the USA needs to do is revamp the whole thing top to bottom, get some gamer minds in there, buth students and experiences. Sweep out the guys that won the last war - we will not be fighting that again as this time it will lose - we do not want that. Get new missiles, get new radars - all designed my military colleg grad students. I could go on... What the war games reveal is what Churchill saw when WW2 started - dead wood, so he trimmed it. He had his flaws though.
You may wish to eliminate the "last war" echo chamber but you'll pay for it if you lose their expertise entirely.
I can’t tell if this is satire or not.
Hitler was no warrior, or strategist, or general - he was a populist, a rabble rouser - didn't the USA just get rid of one of those? Had Hitler given his generals the keys and said win this war. They would have done so. They would have destroyed the RAF and airplane industry on the ground and invaded and taken the UK before the USA entered. Then they could have carved up Europe with Russia as well as the middle east and wire netted the Mediterranean against subs and ships and allow who they like. The UK fleet large as it was would have to flee to other ports or surrender. Then what would the USA do? They would see a fortress europe. Would stalin invade, or digest the meat hitler had given him while Hitler grabbed the middle east oil. At this time Russian oil was unknown. The generals would not let the Jews be killed - they are our best instrument makers and physicists, so no Holocaust. Even Hitlers own officers waned him killed.
I am sure glad he ran their war into the ground with his bed strategies and diplomacy.
I for one am glad he lost
Saying “Hitler would have won if he did this” is a total bias of hindsight. It also ignores the fact that if Hitler was behaving differently, the allies would have responded differently.
For example, the coup in Bolivia: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/was-coup-against-evo-moral...
China might win the first battles with that rocket barrage, but it will also firmly cut itself off from world trade - ores, food, gas, oil. There's no winning move.
There are large-scale dysgenic Demographic changes occurring in the West: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/iq-rates-are-dropping-...
China needs merely wait a few generations (if it has the patience) and it will have a much easier time asserting itself. Alternatively, to just buy off Western politicians (as it is already doing) - which beats rockets for cost efficiency.
And I personally wouldn't count a bit on saudi arabian allegiance in a scenario like this. I wouldn't be surprised if they just follow the "strong wo:man" in the world, which right not still is the US.
Africa itself is an unstable part of the world, the people are not friendly to China, and the population is growing rapidly. Its easy to see the local population turning on Chinese citizens or businesses in the event of some economic or food shortfall.
By contrast the USA basically has all of the resources it needs inside its own country or nearby allies. Many of the 'rare' resources of the world are not particularly rare, they are just too expensive or too environmentally damaging to mine in the West at current prices.
I'm surprised that China doesn't just offer to buy whole sections of Africa, and formally annex the land into its country, and move (voluntarily) the existing African populations as part of the payment terms. For example, the GDP of Mozambique is $16b - China has 200x this value just in USD reserves.
The article you linked dismisses the "dysgenic" idea immediately. Yet that's what you picked to make your point?
Surely you must've known some of us would read the article. It concludes with wild swings and guesses...I'm wondering why you linked it.
> China needs merely wait a few generations (if it has the patience) and it will have a much easier time asserting itself.
I'm on mobile and lacking the patience to type a more nuanced, thoughful reply. I suppose "we shall see" will suffice.
Especially the part regarding china (or russia, or north korea, or iran, for that matter, in order of decreasing confidence) seems to be just true to me.
A good example of people betting wrongly on new technology is air power, or specifically, strategic bombing. Early air power theorists (we're talking the 1920s here) made the case that once you start lobbing some bombs at civilian targets, you'd so shatter the morale of the target country that it would collapse in a few weeks--a few months, tops. When WW2 came about, both sides indeed attempted to end the war via bombing the other side's civilians into oblivion. And both times, it failed miserably. Even the US Strategic Bombing Survey struggled to find examples where it came close to achieving its goals, hardly a ringing endorsement of the concept.
The tone of the article is "we've got a missile gap! but don't worry, only 24 billion dollars will fix it". Yet we already spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the military and don't seem to balance that against other things we could do with the money (pandemic preparations, anyone?).
No a nuclear deterrence is supposed to stop a nuclear war.
It doesn't help anything if you're both operating below the nuclear threshold.
I mean that literally doesn't even make sense as a sentence... the threshold for deciding to use nuclear weapons in a given situation... is being able to use them in a particular way? What?
I'd be way more interested in a solution that cuts $24B from the military budget. Hopefully more.
But setting these agenda items are not the responsibility of the Military. Congress should be deciding where the money goes, and they should actually get around to infrastructure and education spending that will allow the next generation to be more effective.
The 9/11 attacks are estimated to have cost $40 billion in insurance losses alone, not even including all the additional spending that went into the military and security budgets (including the new Department of Homeland Security) afterward. [1] Additionally, it cost at least $10 billion in property damage, almost 3000 deaths, and 25k injuries. 340 of the dead were firefighters and 72 were police. [2]
Maybe if you are an avid consumer of twitter bubbles, you'd think that domestic terrorism is a more widespread problem (well, no argument there). But that doesn't mean it's a good use of money to try to prevent it by giving to local law enforcement, that has neither the ability, legal rights, nor will to seriously tackle. The way you reduce domestic terrorism isn't by hiring more cops, it's by tackling the things that lead to terrorism: namely conspiracy theorists, religious cults, and economic hardship. Cops don't factor into the equation at all.
It's incredibly rare for cops to know about a possible domestic terror incident before hand. We see it with every mass shooting. I can only think of one incident where people were arrested before hand, and that was a rare incident involving an entire gang of individuals, rather than the lone shooter which is the most common situation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_of_the_Septem... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks
China in particular may well not believe you’ll use nukes on them, despite you having already used nukes twice on populated cities, given how dependent you now are on China for manufacturing.
For some reason, most Americans seem to discount the fact that weapons are a two-way street.
If China began to bomb Taiwan, the US absolutely should launch non-nuclear missiles at Chinese bombers / fighters / drones / missiles.
MAD assures that China won't use nuclear, and the US won't use nuclear either. But normal non-nuclear combat is fair game.
While first strike sounds good, don't forget that there are nuclear subs everywhere in the world, at all times, just waiting for the word.
So to answer the question
> Would the US be willing to launch a bunch of non-nuclear missiles to China
No, because China has to treat them as nuclear either way.
It's easy to justify nuclear escalation when fighting this form of total war, and difficult to when the only casualties are military and the bombs mostly fall on equipment. While a land invasion or surprise strike of the continental US/EU/China/Russia would surely trigger a nuclear response, a direct battle over territories/international policy wouldn't be as clear cut.
China would launch their own defensive missiles, as well as offensive missiles at aircraft carriers in the South China Sea and nearby US landing strips. This is exactly the wargames that they are discussing that the US continually loses at because they can't defend their base infrastructure in those areas.
Reagan wanted to upset that balance with his failed "Star Wars" program, but seeing how the nuclear powers interact, it seems no one has achieved asymmetrical nuking. Yet.
I guess we can disagree on which states benefit most from the program, but we shouldn't ignore the fact that essentially it is a program that is used to bribe senators and representatives through job spending. It doesn't have a lot to do with what is actually strategically sensible.
[1] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
The southeast has cheap land, lots of rainfall, low living costs, and mild winters for year-round operation. Which is also why so many military bases were built there.
Tldr: Nukes don’t solve all conflict, not even all major conflict.
A bigger issue is how well (or poorly) past predictions on what is required for defense have turned out. Similar to how the U.S. was often ranked #1 in the world for pandemic preparations, with western Europe close behind, but in the first six months of 2020 all of the hardest hit countries were either west European, or the U.S. Figuring out how to spend the money to prepare for a crisis (medical or military) is harder than getting the money to do so.
It's important to know that the US and Europe also collectively have higher populations, and are more interconnected (so their risk of contagion is higher than for small countries).
And when it comes to research and vaccinations, it's clear that the US quickly developed effective vaccines and was able to distribute them. While this is still an ongoing process, you only need to look at India to see that other countries are still far behind on vaccine supply, research, and distribution efforts.
These kind of things are relative, I'd say that the US did seem handle the crisis relatively well, all things considered. Certainly room for improvement though.
In the cold war a lot of military planning effort went into ensuring that direct conflict between the US and Soviet Union would escalate to nuclear conditions fast by ensuring that American forces were always in the critical path of a Soviet invasion of Europe. In reality the Americans would have lost a conventional war in Europe quickly, but this reality also ensured tactical nukes would be used to protect against a route and that the Soviets would need to respond with strategic weapons.
There is no trigger for a nuclear war if China invades Taiwan, and there is a lot which could go wrong in SK, Japan, or southeast Asia before nukes entered the picture. Arguably the US nuclear deterrent in Europe is also approaching the point where one could credibly assume that the US wouldn't escalate to nuclear war.
As smart munitions become commonplace its hard to see a world where a country escalates to a wold ending nuclear response over a few thousand well targeted cruise missiles. Even a crippling attack on the continental US military-industrial base with ~100k cruise missiles wouldn't have a fraction of the casualties a single strategic bomb would carry.
Israel responded with high tech missile defense, the technology exists, the US just needs to start implementing it in huge numbers.
Instead US strategy is to promise to obliterate any country that messes with it. The trouble with that is that the enemy will hide amongst civilians.
Production was funded by the US, but Development was not, it was entirely in-house.
No, the Iron Dome was developed by Israel. US funding only came at the end of development, during production.
> Also, the rockets coming out of Palestine are a lot different than what would be lobbed at the US.
People always forget about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David%27s_Sling and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_(Israeli_missile)
In fact, what you're talking about sounds similar to Reagan's "Strategic Defense Initiative" [0], which ultimately failed/morphed into another agency, the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO).
In 2002 the BMDO morphed into the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), whose stated mission is to "develop and deploy a layered Missile Defense System to defend the United States, its deployed forces, allies, and friends from missile attacks in all phases of flight." [1]
Interestingly, the MDA co-developed the "Arrow" family of anti-ballistic missiles in conjunction with Israel [2].
The ideas you're suggesting have certainly floated through the halls of DC, and Israel and the US clearly work together very closely on these initiatives.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Defense_Agency#Mission...