Like using the keys below; only I can see who you are.
This is a riff on a Ralph Petters article in STRATEGIKA from July 2024.
I’ve been on this rant before, and I will be again. America simply won’t pay attention. Anyone paying sober attention to the invasion of Ukraine has witnessed the resurgent power of mass over finesse. Staggering cost differentials constrain the utility of elegant, expensive weaponry that works well, such as in air defense. But employing a million-dollar missile against a hundred-dollar drone is unsustainable. In a war of even greater scope, such lopsided expenditures would shatter budgets as munitions stockpiles dwindled. If there is one description that definitely does not apply to the current American way of war, it is “cost-effective.” No; the most appropriate term for America’s approach to general war or even neo-colonial dustups (“Iraqistan”) would be “wishful-thinking warfare.”
While the spectacular MIDNIGHT HAMMER strike against Iran in July was high-tech war at its best, the target was worth billions more than the weapons used (perhaps not the delivery system), and the cost of using anything less catastrophic. As attractive as the Israeli success against Hezbollah with the exploding pagers was, that took years to put into place, and was held as a contingency for just the right moment. But, whether evaluating the follies of an individual or the behavior of a complex institution, never underestimate the seductive power of self-delusion and the ability of both lost souls and powerful decision-makers to perceive reality in the most convenient and comforting terms…for them. For decades, the US has lied to itself about:
The nature and motivation of their enemies. The US government, no matter the party in power, insists that religious faith has nothing to do with their religious-zealot enemies, their professed purposes, the alacrity with which they sacrifice their lives, and the tenacity of a foe who insists that—for them, at least—American wars with them are the duty of believers. How can anyone win when they are afraid to admit what their enemies are fighting for?
The likely duration of future wars. In the late 20th Century, the inability to purchase, support, or rearm enough weapons to survive—let alone win—a long war in the expensive Western industrial fashion became obvious. Defense contractors want to sell these costly, underperforming and often malfunctioning trinkets, and ambitious officers looking to retire as their lobbyists and politicians eager for their shares (and later sinecures) readily bought them, often for missions they did not have. To compensate, the defense establishment simply declared future wars will be short. The US has already written off two decades in Iraqistan as irrelevant.
The enduring need for deep reserves of raw destructive power. Exemplified by the gunner’s anti-historical infatuation with limited numbers of low-yield precision munitions and the ever-appealing fantasy of minimally destructive war, the US has forgotten what it takes to win violent and existential strategic conflicts (hint: It’s more than striking a few nodes on an electrical grid or blocking a dictator’s favorite porn site).
Now, in the farm-team contest in Ukraine, NATO is running out of artillery ammo. US reserve stocks of these incredibly cheap-yet-expensive-when-we-don’t-have-them munitions have revealed themselves to be alarmingly shallow. Vladimir Putin’s otherwise-shabby forces benefit from enormous volumes of cheap (and old) shells, furthering his will and capacity to win through massive destruction. The wastelands of eastern Ukraine are but a preview of what it could take to prevail on future battlefields, of what a full-up war would look like, once the American’s sleek new toys broke down, ran out, or proved more vulnerable than their peacetime cheerleaders promised. Putin and the Russian generals know they cracked the old sophistication-vs-numbers chestnut at Stalingrad and Kursk in 1943, and are using up equipment they saved from that war to fight this one.
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
Barbara Tuchman
The US also shrinks from the human reality that fighting to win takes a lot of merciless killing, and dying. On-the-ground reality throughout history tells us that poor-but-smart enemies learn to undo the initial advantages of self-satisfied, wealthy opponents, viz Hamas in Gaza. What made the cash-starved US Army and Navy of the 1930s the foundation of global victory in World War II was poverty. When generals and admirals can’t spend, they are forced to think.
Every war is going to astonish you in the way it has occurred and in the way it is carried out.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The US will probably remain prisoners of their wealth. Policymakers have finally acknowledged the threat from drones (a threat noted decades ago by outliers in the defense community and dismissed until the Ukraine war), and they may even accept, grudgingly, the need for brute force sustained beyond the enemy’s ability to sustain, as seen in Gaza. But they will never field truly economical counter-weapons to them—not even when you can walk into a hobby shop and buy a reliable weapons platform for less than a carton of cigarettes.
If there is one attitude more dangerous than to assume that a future war will be just like the last one, it is to imagine that it will be so utterly different we can afford to ignore all the lessons of the last one.
John C. Slessor
They will settle on sloppy compromises that guarantee profits for defense contractors and votes for politicians, who have dictated America’s “big war” doctrine since McNamara set up defense acquisitions as if war was just another business. Note that every sustained war or war-by-another-name the US has engaged in since has ended in either ambiguity or a humiliating withdrawal. The US military will add “must-have” gimcracks that, mysteriously, no one else seems to need, and the politicians will mandate that key components be produced in their districts. DOD will turn a fifty-dollar drone into at least a fifty-thousand-dollar, or more, drone that takes five times longer to build, train and deploy.
At present, there is no serious consistency in cost-effective, appropriate weapons and countermeasures in US defense spending.
Beyond all the silk-lined hair-shirt wailing and whining, there is still a deep-down conviction that the money will never really run out, that they can afford to pretend that future wars will accommodate them. For example, they continue to insist on the lunatic stance that the aircraft carriers will prove survivable in a general war, when the reality is that fear of swarms of cheap off-the-shelf drones will bottle the USN’s surface fleet up as completely as was the German Navy after the tragicomedy of Jutland.
The US is splendid in their largesse and suicidal in their complacency.
The Fire Blitz: Burning Down Japan
The US went into WWII believing the Panama Canal needed B-29s to protect it. They ended it by incinerating nearly every city in Japan with those airplanes.
And Finally...
On 18 October:
1942: Hitler issues his Commando Order, mandating the immediate execution without trial of all captured Allied commandos, in uniform or attempting to surrender. Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel, along with other German officers, implemented the Commando Order, and were later tried and punished for the war crime.
1954: The first commercially produced transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, appears in Niemen Marcus stores in New York, New York, for $49.95, a price that could feed a family of four in 1954. Marketed as a fashion accessory, the TR-1 used a 22.5 volt battery that lasted about twenty hours and was not rechargeable, yet sold very well.
And today is SWEETEST DAY in the parts of the world that observe it. It’s the day you’re supposed to be nice to the objects of your affections—one at a time advised—regardless of, um, “relationship status,” whatever that means.
Perhaps you've seen this.
https://fractalcomputing.substack.com/p/delivering-ai-super-compute-on-the