Military uniforms – Expense and stupidity too big to camouflage
economist.com
economist.com
America is not fighting a war of national survival on a limited budget. It's fighting some wars of choice and maintaining a defence procurement industry on a seemingly unlimited budget. There is no way even the total failure of the war will personally affect the people doing the producement, and there is no need for them to economise because they can't run out of other people's money.
So, everyone involved is free to have endless meetings. Senior management can commission studies at great expense then ignore the result on a whim. They can engage in turf wars and internal empire building; after all, the real enemy is the people you're competing with for promotions.
The procurements that have been successful are mostly those resulting from urgent operational requirements, when losing to insurgents with a tiny budget became embarrassing.
(The UK is not immune to this; we've built an aircraft carrier that's supposed to use the F-35, which may not be available and we can't really afford)
However, saying "gap between the payer and the user of activities" suggests that you might think a market solution would work. For the military this makes no sense and cannot work; protection is necessarily collective.
It would be nice to set the anti-tax-and-spend libertarians against the military budget, but they don't seem interested.
That 'seeming' may stem from your sources of information on those libertarians. Places like lewrockwell.com and the von Mises institute have railed against military spending for as long as I know.
(which even manages to repeat the popular conflating of quicksilver vs mercury bound as a part of a compound – maybe we should stop drinking water since it contains highly flammable hydrogen. Oh, and highly flammable oxygen.)
Of all the people you pick to blame here, you pick... the libertarians? Really? Really? The guys that have Ron Paul as their spokesman? You know, the guy that has spoken out every chance he gets about military spending and the cost of wars.
That said, the military could use a lot more cost-benefit analysis in decisions like what's the best way to organize, and which weapons should be bought relative to each other. (And worry less about forcing suppliers to offer jobs in each senator's state)
That has largeley been solved with the adoption of a new series based on improved color-temperature of background tones--something overlooked when all the focus was on the patterns.
The deployment of coyete in lieu of green/olive and the current multi-cam is pretty good stuff. The problem with marpat and some of the other ACU stuff was that the color temps (ie, too much blue-ish undertones in a desert) can make you stick out more than having the wrong pattern.
This was a problem that resulted from trying to have a rural/urban combination that would work for troops fighting terrorist cells in cities and not just in classical land-warfare scenarios in open-country.
You can read some more background here:
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2012/06/28/army-to-recomm...
And if you dig it up you can find the comparison field tests that illustrated the weaknesses in the field of the earlier designs.
Obviously fashion shouldn't trump everything, but looking and feeling the part is a considerable part of the moral component of fighting power. I think denying that is denying some basic human psychology. Why do armies spend money on flags, dress uniforms, buglers, horses, mascot dogs, medals, bands and so on? It's because the ethos they create is a seriously important part of building a group of men who can operate together in extreme situations.
The USMC and other branches are worried about how their uniforms look and how distinctive they are because it's one essential part of preparing to fight a war.
That pride and attention to detail then carries over into their fieldcraft and tactics.
Young men don't fight for the Ministry of Defence, they fight for their regiment and their mates - a group created by looking and acting just a little bit differently to other people.
The Air Force camo was introduced as a pure ego move. It doesn't blend, oil & hydraulic stains can't be wiped off the boots, and it's too hot. And unlike the green polyester duty uniforms of the 70's & 80's you can't shorten or roll-up the sleeves.
My understand why they don't all buy the multi-cam is that the design is copyrighted and the DoD and the owner couldn't come to an agreement on the licensing fees.
tl;dr:
> Continuing its efforts to reduce costs to the Army and in an attempt to eliminate the Army’s concerns that MultiCam® was more expensive than UCP, Crye submitted several formal proposals which proved that the Army could procure MultiCam® gear at prices within 1% of UCP gear. Crye’s proposals additionally showed that this could be accomplished with no upfront cost to the Army.
> The Army rejected all of Crye’s proposals and did not present any counter proposals, effectively saying that a proven increase in Soldier survivability was not worth a price difference of less than 1%.
"All in all, the saga of British Army boot procurement is pretty pathetic: that we can consistently buy such rubbish, thus inevitably incurring far higher costs than would be necessary in buying one of the many excellent commercial products, is astonishing but symptomatic of British Defence Policy. At a rough estimate, 50% of British soldiers wear boots they have bought for themselves when on operations or exercise. "
e.g. "British Military Procurement Mysteries"
http://www.arrse.co.uk/wiki/British_Military_Procurement_Mys...
> The Pentagon intends to spend roughly $399 billion to develop and buy 2,443 of the planes. However, over the course of the aircrafts' lifetimes, operating costs are expected to exceed $1 trillion. Lockheed has carefully hired suppliers and subcontractors in almost every state to ensure that virtually all senators and members of Congress have a stake in keeping the program -- and the jobs it has created -- in place.
The Marines wanted VTOL and that made the plane worse in every other way.
I realize sarcasm is a poor excuse for humor, but if all ten are unavailable (because of shooting and getting shot at), i think we (the US) would have a pretty rough time getting those planes working.
If their not available because of non-war reasons, it seems like the mission isn't really that big of a deal anyway.
I sort of think the US goes for the Cadillac solution for everything. Perhaps that's my bias because i only hear about the expensive stuff. I'd sort of expect there to be a nice gradient between really super high tech, down to cheap simple and reliable. But whatever, armchair quarterback.
In the case of the JSF program, maybe if that requirement had gotten split off from the rest of the program it could've been done for a cheaper price that would make it worthwhile. But the costs of the F-35 are still not done soaring out of control and at the end of it all I can't imagine that it will be worth the cost for the Marine Corps to have air cover during amphibious landings.
If the problem is not enough Marine firepower from the full deck carriers, the Marines should just buy more CTOL aircraft and put them on the carriers. All of the carrier air wings have been downsized since the cold war, and carriers are only going to sea with 65 or so aircraft, when they can hold 90. I'd much rather have 8 fully capable CTOL fighters on the full-deck carrier that is definitely going to be around in any amphibious landing than 8 low-performance (range and payload) VTOL fighters from an LHA/LHD.
Instead, we get a seriously compromised F-35A and C as far as I can tell because of what happened at Guadalcanal 70 years ago.
Are there really 53 hackers paying economist.com to read it?
" You have reached your article limit Register to continue reading or subscribe for unlimited access "
for chrome at least. Firefox has similar functionality, though I'm not sure if it can be accessed from a right-click.
Everyone I knew thought that the introduction of multicam in AFG was a great jumping off point for all the services to share a uniform - but of course that will never happen with all the GO level pissing matches that happen.
By being separate it introduces coordination problems, results in duplicated systems, and an all around pissing contest.
Give them all one uniform, one set of regulations, and one source of funding. Then retire off all the desk jockey O-6 and and above who simply serve no purpose but to manage an acronym
Can you expand on that? Super carriers seem to be a central part of our ability to exert influence globally. Correct me if I'm wrong though.
Also, anti-ship ballistic missiles keep getting better. It's not clear whether the US Navy could stop the latest generation of Chinese anti-ship missiles.
In both cases, a supercarrier suffers a serious probabilistic problem: the attackers only have to get through once. The defenders need to be 100% effective. That's not realistic in a world where it's economically feasible to field thousands of cheap drones.
Is there a small, cheap weapon that is nasty enough, without relying on crazy luck? Do carriers have known vulnerabilities to small weapons, as in Star Wars Ep. IV?
Edit: Just read up on USS Cole, and a small boat made a 40ft hole in the side, killed 17 and injured 39 sailors. Very serious. Is this enough to disable a carrier? Also, small boats have enormously more payload than a drone. Wikipedia says an attack on USS Sullivan failed when the overloaded attack boat sank, so clearly they are using all that capacity.
EDIT: This one might be slightly better: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=military+uniforms+out+o...
What quartermasters need is a machine that will take photographs of the local terrain as input, calculate a camouflage pattern from them, and print that pattern on unmarked uniforms. The result would be matched only by a ghillie suit, which takes actual landscape features and physically attaches them to the fabric.
Such a machine would be rejected any day of the week by a council of colonels during peacetime. During actual wartime, captains will somehow fail to notice uniform violations where the approved patterns have been defaced by the very same equipment that civilian hunters had already been using for years on the canvas for their tree stands and duck blinds.
Beware the military-industrial complex indeed. I'd say the sector was ripe for disruption, but disruptors will be shot on sight.
If you want to get the military to buy something that actually works, you have to market it to civilian outdoorsmen and make it commercial off-the-shelf technology. Some soldiers will use it while off duty or after their service contracts expire, and if you get very lucky with the good ol' boy network, someone will quietly process regular small procurements to ensure that you will not go out of business before you get the chance to save America from a land invasion by the Commie Fascist Nation of Scary Bogeymen.
There has always been a huge gulf between wartime military development and peacetime research. Peacetime always produces stuff that looks cool while doing absolutely everything that needed to be done for the last war, plus a boatload of things that might have been useful if that war had dragged on long enough. Wartime development produces stuff that is cheap, ugly, and works well for the current war.
That's how a soldier's kit can end up with silly string from a toy store or laser levels from a hardware store. By the time the army starts issuing that stuff to its units, the enemy had already stopped using tripwires to trigger booby traps. They switched to non-metallic pressure plates that use the physical movement of reactants to detonate an explosive. And so maybe someone breeds special houseflies to be attracted to the detonator chemicals, and then some poor grunt is stuck feeding the bomb-detector maggots in camp.
And you just have to hope the war doesn't end right there, because then that guy will be a professional maggot wrangler for the next 20 years, training flies to do everything from finding terrorists in truck stops to landing only on the poop from generals and admirals.
The inefficiency is built into the system. You absolutely cannot fix it from where you are sitting. You can consider it a form of welfare for veterans, like VA health care, except with fewer suicides. It would be extremely embarrassing for the military to have to admit that they make some people less qualified to hold jobs in the public sector. Whether that is due to the brain damage caused by explosive shockwaves passing through the skull or the brain damage caused by filling out reams of pointless bureaucratic paperwork is immaterial. As long as stories about neglected veterans hit the news, discharged folks will need to be put into safe jobs. And that is how military contracts go billions over budget. That is why none of this crap ever works until after the war actually starts.
Sorry about the rant though, I could read the article in incognito as @bryanlarsen suggested.
That pretty much guarantees that the only posts we'll see are from the tech bubble, and one I'd like to avoid.
As long as the workaround is as simple as it is here (right click, open in incognito), I don't think we should avoid posting articles from the Economist or other mainstream media sites here.
In any case, I'm here for discovering non-mainstream-media news.
Pfft! That's like me buying an ice cream at McDonalds with the change I find in the little cup holder of my car.
Wait! It also says 4b to replace all the "flawed" stuff. Hmmm, let me think: that like a small family dinner.
In the overall scheme of things, this is nothing.
Which is why we really want the federal government to be really small or things like these happen.
The process I've seen called "decivilizing" - the willful dismantling of the post-industrial societal state back to some goal that is effectively an 18th century corporate oligarchy.
The problem is that then you get companies which effect as governments - it's no mistake that the US flag is a spinoff of the maritime flag of the East India Trading corporation - it was effectively a de facto governing body - above the state.
The corporate becomes the state when the state is weak. They are poised to fill such a power vacuum and it happens immediately.
It's so clear.