Tuesday, August 20, 2013

The State of the U.S Military

As reviewed by Fred Reed:

 When you need a sweater, you need a sweater, and not some other thing. The Pentagon has the wrong things. It is glorious and glitters and has many buttons and screens. It is just the wrong military.

The great Chinese strategist Fred Tzu once said, “Never use a broadsword to fight a swarm of pissed-off hornets.” Exactly. You have to understand the enemy. Otherwise you are in trouble and can´t understand why. If you are a behind-the-times sort of dinosaur, the rats are going to eat your eggs. If you are an American infantry battalion, sneaky little guys behind rocks are gonna blow hell out of your up-armored Humvee with the revolving IR heads. Trust me.[...]

 The world´s most magnificent budget got run out of Nam like a scalded dog, yelling that actually, really, I mean honest, we really reallywon, shriek.

Not so´s you´d notice.

The same highly-trained martial codpiece got run out of Lebanon with 241 Marines dead, run out of Mogadishu by teenagers with armed pickup trucks, performed a comedy routine trying to rescue hostages in Tehran, lost in Iraq, and works diligently at losing in Afghanistan. Not too much bang for the buck, I´d say, or for the doe either[...]

the American military is like a dentist trying to drill teeth with a petroleum platform. It´s the wrong tool.  Multibillion dollar ratpacks of hugely expensive fighter planes are splendid fun, and say “Varoooooom!” Good stuff, that. They really are the best in the world, and nothing can stay in the sky with them.

Ah, but they are fighters with nothing to fight. The Pentagon’s problem is Ahmet the Wiley Wog who hides behind a rock with his RPG and keeps blowing up trucks full of GIs. Ahmet isn´t too flashy. He doesn´t have a conformal phased-array radar and isn´t supersonic. But he has clanking brass balls and wads of determination Oops.

And that´s the story of our whole military shebang: gaudy but mostly irrelevant. North Korea does something that upsets Washington´s digestion, so we send the aircraft carriers. These float fiercely offshore, doing nothing, because there is nothing they can do. They either (a) attack, risking all-out war on the Peninsula, not a particularly bright idea since Pyongyang has all the artillery in the world within range of Seoul, or (b) float in puzzlement and circles while North Korea ignores them. See? Wrong tool. Washington hasn´t figured this out, so it always sends the bathtub toys.

1 comment:

  1. It really isn't about protecting our safety, our rights, or our freedoms. It's really about enriching the politically-connected at the expense of everyone else. On this score, they've succeeded brilliantly.

    It's also about power and control. When the Soviet Union folded its tent, the New World Order psychopaths were desperate to concoct a new bogeyman. Thus the ridiculous and absurd "war on terror" - a war which cannot be defined and has no end. Perfect!

    The key from their perspective is to continually scare Boobus Americanus into ceding their liberties for a completely false "security."

    The opposite is true. The US government's aggressive foreign policy is creating blowback as a rationale for more and bigger spending on the military and the surveillance state. It's the national security state's version of a self-licking ice cream cone.

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