The US Military Is Not Ready for the New Era of Warfare
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Drones just made it even more unlikely that enemies see each other before they die of shrapnel wounds, mines, or what ever.
Those videos are propaganda.
Edit: "/s". Referring to some unnamed WW1 quote.
Maybe the distance soldiers are of each other, pretending to be killing each other, have increased from 300-500m to, dunno, 1600m?
I don't think mortars were a big thing in the 1WW. Otherwise, the trenches would have be further apart. You know, the main reason to fire at the enemy is to let them know where you are. Just to make sure they know. Otherwise it might get ugly. Artillery is further back and does not care about the deal.
This has been the state of affairs since WWII. Now the world is starting to realize that the US has been sustaining this spending level to the detriment of their health and education, and that lack of education has created a group of bozos poised to take over the government and control those armaments.
It's a sad state of affairs.
Of course not, how could we be prepared unless we continuously invest? In what other sphere does life continue to flourish in the face of evolving threats without continuous co-evolution?
As an American I am not an at all concerned about the total amount spent. I am highly concerned that it gets spent effectively.
> to the detriment of their health and education
The US is starting to realize that Europe has neglected its own defense in favor of social projects, while relying on US taxpayer defense spending.
>It's a sad state of affairs.
Agreed.
It's not that simple. Our social programs matter more to our citizens. The US wastes a lot of money on feeding its military industrial complex, including waging totally unnecessary and inconsequential wars like the second Iraq war or Afghanistan. As soon as they pull out after wasting trillions, things are back the way they were. And in the case of Iraq a lot worse (ISIS). The money for those wars would have been better spent on health and education, and less lives would be lost as well.
What is most important for our safety against countries like Russia is the nuclear umbrella. And the US doesn't want to see more than France and Britain have nuclear capabilities.
Partially correct. Given the US taxpayer funding Europe's defense, the European public wants social programs rather than spending their own gold on their own defense.
Europe's security needs are being met, so they don't want to spend incremental funds on more security.
>And the US doesn't want to see
Yes, the US gets to make the choices when we're the ones paying for Europe's defense. If Europe (as a whole or individually) could match or exceed the US's military might, then Europe would not need the US's permission to make a nuclear umbrella.
>The US wastes a lot of money on feeding its military industrial complex
100% agree. We waste a simply breathtaking amount of money. But again, I am less concerned about the total spend and more concerned with the effectiveness of the spend. I agree that we don't always spend effectively.
You could argue that at some point the "security" is the main threat against your security. It is like if I had some armed guard at a post outside my front door. The risk of him shooting me, or my drunk kids crawling through the bushes to avoid discovery, by mistake or at will due to some dispute surely out weight him protecting me from a 1/100 000 risk or what ever of lethal home invasion.
274 years ago to Present time includes a lot of European wars. Claude AI gives me the following:
7 years war, Napoleonic wars, Crimean war, Franco-Prussian war, WWI, WWII, Ukraine-Russia
It's just that we don't really have a serious security problem. A bit more so now since Russian agression. But military is not about showing muscle, it's about having sufficient to do the job and not more. Having a military is a prerequisite of freedom but not an end goal in itself. In the US it does seem to be like that.
> Yes, the US gets to make the choices when we're the ones paying for Europe's defense. If Europe (as a whole or individually) could match or exceed the US's military might, then Europe would not need the US's permission to make a nuclear umbrella.
This is the thing about the US. It's always about money and war. Not about quality of life.
In Europe we don't care as much about having a powerful military because we're not looking to march all over the world protecting our interests. It just needs to be powerful enough to protect our borders and meet NATO commitments (which it does now).
Don't forget the US offered us to join NATO, partly in an attempt to prevent us from aligning with other geopolitical entities. If we hadn't had that, we would have built more.
And yes, I agree that the US does have a geopolitical interest in paying for Europe's defense, but if we didn't, it's likely that Europe would look very different today than it now does. My guess is that it would be a lot more militarized and that there would be less money for QoL programs.
I have to say though that the cold war wouldn't have gotten so out of hand in Europe if it weren't for the US. I think the USSR would have happily let us lie because we didn't have any beef with communism (and in fact during the cold war many Western Europe countries were pretty socialist). We do with dictatorships (which the USSR really was), but not in a sense that we'd want to invade them. Like how Belarus is being left alone as well.
It's the US that was afraid of the world turning communist and willing to fight for capitalism. This caused the arms race. Of course it came from both sides but ever continuing escalation was really the wrong move.
This is the problem I have with the US, they often get themselves into wars that aren't really needed. War should be a last resort and most of them have been far from that. The second Iraq war was based on pure lies. The invasion of Afghanistan accomplished nothing (and Bin Laden was even trained by the US in an earlier war against the soviets). Then there's Vietnam (Admittedly started by France), Korea etc. And of course citizens of other countries start hating you if you blow their countries to bits, increasing terrorism threats. The only one I think was justified was the first gulf war as it was a direct result of Hussein invading Kuwait.
For us "defense" doesn't reach beyond our own borders. The only time it does is under NATO commitments or international pressure.
It's just sucked up by health insurance companies.
Spending less on war won't fix healthcare. Spending less on war and more on healthcare will just make healthcare worse because it will give the private equity vampires running the system more cash with which to bribe politicians and screw us over even more.
Fixing healthcare means spending less.
Spending less on healthcare means we get to spend more on war.
If the US would just get off its ass and implement single-payer we could save so much money that we could have a military capable of killing God.
Same goes for K-12 education spending. The US is consistently in the top 4-5 nations as a percentage of GDP per capita. The money is being wasted. On what, I don't know, I haven't looked into it.
But I do know that the US could halve what it spends on healthcare and "only" be spending what everyone else is spending.
That would save like $2.25 trillion per year.
$2.25 trillion dollars can buy a lot of B-21 bombers.
Thousands of them.
I don't know if the US could halve their spending on healthcare, but I do believe they could reduce overall healthcare spending by 25%, and be able to provide healthcare to ALL of their citizens.
Their problem is they have too many citizens who believe they can only climb by pushing others down, and so they need to deny their fellow citizens healthcare so they themselves can believe they're succeeding.
Such a selfish civilization is doomed to collapse. Even AI agrees with me! :)
This is wrong. What happened is that the amount of anti-aircraft systems deployed prevents both sides from deploying a viable air force.
No chance any F-16 or Migs can defeat systems like the Patriot or the Russian S500, that converge to targets at Mach 10. The only systems of the US Air Force with any chance of surviving on this type of environment, would be the most sophisticated stealth systems, that would not be deployed for regular operations. The future belongs to drone swarms working in tandem under the control of an AI....Sadly....
The key assumption is that stealth would enable the USAF to operate at will within or close to air defence zones, but this has not been tested against a near peer foe.
Any ground-based air defences today are useless and are just a sitting duck against any modern air force. It's just that the Russia doesn't have one. I know it - i passed training as a radar unit commander for Russian radiotechnical troops. We've been trained to understand that our mission us futile and we will never see anything of value on our radars - best we can do is to try to keep them from being destroyed (by employing false emitters, strategically switching off emission when threatened, and frequently moving) and out personnel from getting killed - by explaining them that HARM's shrapnel is small and command trailers have light anti-shrapnel armour and attack comes on a very short notice, so under attack the enlisted will be a lot safer sitting on their assigned places rather than running away.
When you switch on emission, you don't get to see anything today because ECMs do a very good job. But everyone can see you.
That's been 25 years ago but the equipment we've been trained to operate (it was brand new back then), is still the mainstay of the Russian radar troops, such as Nebo-SV. Slightly modernised versions are entering service now but they won't do a radical difference (modernisations are mostly about using fewer components from ex-USSR countries, because they are either politically hostile or producers gone out of business, not about specs improvement, anyway). In those years, Western anti-radar equipment and tactics have vastly improved though, so if it was one-sided then, it's most certainly so now.
Seems like the Army and USAF are stuck between a rock and a fog layer. There's now another warlayer and the Key West Agreement doesn't cover it. Perhaps we need a US Drone Force, because the drones the USAF/USN are thinking about are $10M F-35 wingmen.