I get that it's outside of these guys' wheelhouse, but because they can't address the actual problem, the best they can ever offer is bad advice. And so all the USAF can do is to fight for more money and still fall deeper and deeper into the never-ending death spiral. It's sort of poetic that, in the land of free expression, nobody is willing to speak the truth.
US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter tphuang
- Start date
when free speech meets free market, never tell the truth except to sell a lie
remember, reform is a business too
remember, reform is a business too
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Biggest problem is not the amount of money, is that money is absorbed by greedy industry mogul and politicians... sure that they want more money but it will not bring solutions.
They need the military aircraft industry to work for US airforces and not for their CEO wallet.
Now include the combat readiness figure.
If you were the CEO of Lockheed Martin or other defence contractor which would you choose?
A. Build a decent weapon and make a small amount of money.
B. Build a less effective weapon but make a lot more money.
Sure, if everyone were to choose B, then the American military will get worse and worse, but for Mr. CEO, that sure sounds like someone else's problem.
There was a time in the 1950s, if not arguably into the 1960s, when drunken American servicemen were raping South Korean women with impunity.
However, as discipline improved, USFK was effectively able to limit American servicemen to cohorting with professionals in lieu of violating civilians. Then as South Korea became wealthier on a per capita basis, South Koreans became increasingly resentful, if not intolerant of American privates and sergeants using and abusing local women. As a result, imports from the Philippines became the norm around major USFK installations.
Though TBF, South Korean prostitutes have also generally speaking gotten too expensive for the average American soldier or airman, which makes things extra suspicious when American servicemen patronize South Korean prostitutes.
Keep in mind that a disproportionate percentage of South Korean prostitutes, especially those catering to the lower end of the market, are or were originally ethnic Koreans from Jilin Province's Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture (as well as refugees from North Korea) — at least in the 2000s and 2010s — which gave USFK even more reason to be paranoid about such vices.
Disclaimer: Not at all trying to go off topic here. Spies have been honey trapping soldiers for about as long as spying has been a profession.
Spying is the second oldest profession, and intimately connected with the first.
Lethe
Captain
If you take China out of the picture, the American project of "full spectrum dominance" looks to be travelling just about ok. There are significant issues to be sure, but also significant new opportunities to leverage American capital and technology to further extend and entrench American supremacy: chiefly low-cost space launch paradigms and the possibilities offered by the burgeoning "A.I." industry, particularly those that promise to render the firehose of data that is collected from the global connected world (already largely dominated by the United States) more intelligible and actionable. In the medium-term at least, only China presents as a major obstacle to America's pursuit of full spectrum dominance, with Russia and perhaps certain other nations playing far more limited negating roles, mostly within their own borders. But that's a little like saying that only major obstacle to the pursuit of immortality is death. What does the American quest for full spectrum dominance even mean if it doesn't apply to China?
Today's American leaders and thinkers have spent most of their professional careers in the post-Cold War era, where the relative power of the United States was at its peak and messianic visions abounded; the commitment to "full spectrum dominance" emerges from this era. So far as I can tell, the term "air dominance" (as distinct from now quaint notions of "air superiority") comes not out of the Cold War, not even the earlier years of the ATF program, but rather out of Desert Storm and the intoxicated visions for the future exercise of American technologically-infused hyperpower that followed. See the by then-Secretary of Defense William Perry. That level of ambition survives in today's "Next Generation Air Dominance" program.
This post-Cold War vision of leveraging incomparable American technology to create "full spectrum dominance", thereby providing America's undoubtedly wise and virtuous leaders with the prospect of achieving victory anywhere in the world without significant losses, is juxtaposed awkwardly with the increasingly undeniable and uncomfortable realities of China. The capability side of things is a mixed bag: making F-35 the centrepiece of an entire generation of airpower development has clearly not paid off to the extent that was envisioned (which is not to say that it has been a complete failure either); conversely, the B-21 Raider appears to be an unusually astute program that has clearly been tailored to China scenarios and embraced real compromises to deliver on what matters: signatures and range, and cost and therefore inventory numbers. The more fundamental issues are on the requirements side.
Full spectrum dominance relies on maintaining overwhelming qualitative or quantitative advantages (preferably both) across many axes of capability simultaneously, in any given theatre. This is increasingly untenable in relation to China and its near abroad, and no amount of acquisition reform or remaining incremental technological advantages are going to bridge that gap. The prospect of the United States greatly increasing its level of
Today, the entrenched ideas and personages of the past sit awkwardly alongside more sporadic, incremental and begrudged acknowledgements of the present and accommodations to the future. In periods of transition, tension, dissonance and even incoherence are to be expected. The real question, one that confronts all societies, is the extent to which uncomfortable ideas and reforms can be embraced before capital-H History intervenes to force the issue. Recent that the United States may de-prioritise China in favour of reinforcing its dominion over the western hemisphere are therefore quite intriguing.
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Your first sentence is very accurate imo, especially the "if you take China out of the picture" part.
Without the PLA being on the trajectory that it is, the US actually has massive capability and technological overmatch over all of its other adversaries.
If the PLA's capability growth was more in line with some 2000s era unsaid projections of capability growth, then all US programs (despite their current setbacks) today would be roaring unmitigated successes; F-35, F-22, Virginia.
Say, if the PLAAF only ever procured 150x J-20s as their only 5th generation lifetime fleet with only 4th gen and 3rd fighters and a half dozen AEWC, and if the PLAN only had 6x 052Ds as their modern frontline destroyers supported by maybe a dozen 054As as modern frigates and obsolescent older destroyers and frigates... such a composition/baseline force would be easily dealt with by current US air, naval and missile forces.
Essentially, if the PLA's modernization programs all went the way that Russia's programs did, the US would be sitting fairly pretty.
It's basically a double whammy. Outside of China, the American military is so dominant that its numerous failings won't affect their ability to defeat everyone else. But against China, these inabilities are devastating. So there's enough threat out there to expose all of the problems of the American military but not enough to force them to change anything other than their messaging.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to blame the American branches for how things have played out. Most of the problems in the military come from corruption and the encouragement of bad practices. Look at the Navy's inability to design any new ships; you can blame the American government all you want, but at the end of the day, it's the fault of the admirals in charge of the designs. Moreover, the other elephant in the room is that there are plenty of officers in the US military who can see the writing on the wall but who are simply unwilling to say anything about it.