Theme: Coercion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh4HYNoSO4g(ruminations)

Not strong video but makes a few good points I’d like to call out, which is (a) limited (insufficient) inventory of munitions, (b) limited ability to scale production, (c) vulnerability of satellites, (d) vulnerability of fragile electrical and data infrastructure, (e) fragility of monetary (ability to get and use money), (f) vulnerability of entire supply chains – even domestic. (g) decline in *(relative)* quality and fitness of (average) troops, (h) particular decline in quality of navy and troops.

So it’s not that countries are no longer relatively autarkic, but that the individuals within developed countries are not, and the individuals in some other countries ARE (Russia, China, France)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh4HYNoSO4g

In Addition:

—“[The US Army going to lose the first battle of the next war. And, in the twenty-first century, Americans may not get a chance to fight a second battle. … The Army’s problems are not financial. … The failures in Army modernization and readiness are due to the Army generals’ fanatical resistance to fundamental organizational reform, prudent modernization and change in the way the Army must fight in the future. … Civilians frequently assume that general officers are ruthless and unsentimental when it comes to discarding obsolescent tactics, organizations and technologies. They are not. How else did the U.S. Army enter World War II with regiments of horse cavalry long after the German army had overrun most of Europe with armored forces? … However, the Army four-star generals are ruthless when it comes to crushing innovation inside the regular army that threatens the status quo. They are more comfortable sinking billions into unproven technologies that promise war-winning capabilities in the distant, uncertain future, as well as spending money on the upgrade of old platforms and systems designed in the 1970s. Clearly, few in Congress object to these actions. … the U.S. Army is facing a crisis.” Senators drew attention to the Army’s ever-growing multibillion-dollar acquisition graveyard including the titanic $20 Billion Future Combat System and the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, a six-billion dollar failed communications program.”— Douglas Macgregor, the National Interest

I”m going to state this differently as ‘accountability has been eradicated from the senior staff in all aspects’.

The Big Questions:

—“one of the things we’re all facing is that the military services have all shrunk. The Air Force is 40 percent smaller than it was in 1991 and the appetite to use the military as an instrument of national power has not diminished at the same rate. And so we just don’t have enough to do everything we’re asked to do and everything we could potentially be asked to do. If the term “simultaneity” enters the discussion, we have a problem.”—Welsh

–“The Army’s proposal, based on the need to prepare to fight high-end, conventional conflicts, emphasizes the traditional role of the National Guard as a strategic reserve. Mobilization restrictions and training requirements make it highly doubtful that the National Guard could generate brigade combat teams rapidly enough to meet the initial response timelines for future conflicts. At the same time, the National Guard’s roles in homeland defense and under Title 32 in support of state missions are likely to become more important.”— Welsh

I’m going to state this differently as (a) the government and the army are predicting internal civil war (b) the number of men physically fit, and sufficiently trained for war is insufficient, (c) because conflicts are increasingly ‘4gw’, harder, slower, and longer fights, that exhaust existing soldiers, and cause mental casualties, (d) and failure to use more men in the military disintermediates the military from civilians and (e) limits the social status from having served, and (f) reduces social and political pressure by those that served against those that haven’t.

Moreover, (a) the failure to pay such soldiers market wages weakens recruiting especially when we consider the persistent physical risk that ends in persistent mental harm even without physical risk.

And we don’t separate and pay professional warriors (special forces etc) differently from desk clerks.

And we try to create careers for too many, rather than mix civilian contractor, “indentured” civilians, and “enlisted” full-time warrior roles.

So dropping the army to 450k soldiers … That’s maybe fine if they’re a territorial army. When they say they have 1M that’s false. They have 250k soldiers, 250k staff, the reserves and the national guard make up the 980k. So on one hand they say they can’t rely on those men, on the other they can’t, and regardless they can’t fight a 4gw.

The military uses the euphemism “talent Management” but what they have is a pay, numbers, and organizational problem.

Worse, they have lost prussian military culture of our ancestors due to the addition of women, and the timidity of the snowflakes, and the use of the military as a social program instead of an elite warfare capability. And worse than that ist he toxic leadership problem that has evolved between the Clinton de-prussianization and the Obama politicization of the military..

—“The biggest change in Iraq and Syria, and ISIS, and from an air perspective is, in August of ’14, when this began, we looked at them as a terrorist group and we targeted them as a terrorist group, and we tried to collect intelligence on them as a terrorist group. They are much more than that now. And they—as a result of that, the initial strategy that Mark referred to let them have a vote and kind of direct activity for probably the first six, eight months, in my view. … And then we started to realize that they looked an awful lot like something much more than a terrorist group. They had infrastructure. They had training infrastructure, recruiting infrastructure, financial infrastructure, governance infrastructure. They had what looked like fielded military forces. And they had this terrorist component. “—General Mark A. Welsh III Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force

—“Russia never went anywhere. We just quit paying attention. (Laughter.) And so I think from our perspective, due diligence would require us to assume that Russia is an enduring concern. And I think whatever they’re doing now, they are still a very capable military and they clearly have shown an intent to be disruptive, at least in the region.”—Welsh.

—“The strategic situation with Russia is fundamentally different than it was prior to, say, 2005, 2004. Russian behavior changed. Russia has aggressively crossed sovereign international boundaries that have been sovereign countries since the fall of the Berlin Wall in ’89 and ’90. That is a strategic condition that has not existed in Europe for seven decades. The ‘56 Hungarian invasion was—they weren’t a sovereign country at the time. They were part of the Warsaw Pact. Soviet forces were already there. Sixty-eight, in Czechoslovakia, Soviet forces were already there. … it’s happened in Georgia, it’s happened in eastern Ukraine. And then add onto it all these aggressive incident-type behaviors, and barrel rolls over aircraft, and challenging ships, and submarine activity, and cyber activity. You add it all together and you connect those dots, that’s a fundamentally different external behavior of a nation state.”— Milley

My prediction for the future is that all war is now global; every country will be able to afford lots and lots of smart missiles; ai and autonomy will be the most competitive advantage since the human component of military arms is what makes them expensive; more and more countries nuclear weapons, and war will be conducted largely by ‘information warfare, economic warfare, poltical propagandism, religious conversion, immigration’ combined with terrorism. Becuase you don’t have to take territory any longer, just end your enemy (competitor’s) influence, and economy. And this means democratic countries will be destroyed by religoius and ideological countries.Updated Aug 27, 2020, 1:32 PM