US ‘Gets Its Ass Handed to It’ in Wargames: Here’s a $24B Fix

When I was in the US Army, I wondered how anything got done at all. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate that something can be inefficient and still work. And you don’t need to be a well oiled machine to achieve results; you just need to be less screwed up than everyone else.

Well, for what it&#x27;s worth the US is already &#x27;getting its ass handed to it’ in real modern warfare.<p>The US has been playing defense with the misinformation campaigns and fake narratives created by adversary totalitarian states that salivate over the idea of dethroning the US from its implicit world leader status.<p>Sometimes it really feels like we are doing exactly what they want. To create a self-inflicted societal fracture and to blame it on America&#x27;s favorite scape goat, Big Tech. Like if that was our real problem. The very same thing that is giving the US an edge right now (technology) is the very same thing that gets attacked by right and left politicians alike. How convenient for Russia and China, isn&#x27;t it?

To me the F-35 illustrates what happens when <i>too much</i> money is thrown at something, with too many vested interests serving themselves and spending the budget. It&#x27;s a bit like a hot startup that raises a huge round, more that they actually know what to do with, and that spends the money on swanky offices, fancy benefits, and a hiring spree.<p>The US already spend $700+ billion a year on the military, vastly more than any other country on Earth (although China&#x27;s spending is increasing rapidly). Whatever problems they might have, I don&#x27;t think that even more money is the solution.

In the past, both my brother and I worked in military intelligence. Specifically, he spent a long time working for ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence) doing war game simulations.<p>He routinely would get shouted at by various Admirals, for fairly obvious reasons.<p>Wars aren&#x27;t won by the nation who is best prepared when they start, but by the nations which respond with the most honesty to their own failures after they start.

This is from 2019. (2019) should be appended.

&gt;Pentagon leaders should challenge the armed services to solve very hard, very specific problems, Work said: Sink 350 Chinese navy and coast guard vessels in the first 72 hours of a war, or destroy 2,400 Russian armored vehicles. Whoever has the best solution gets the most money. Those are hardly easy goals, Work said, but they’re also doable with technology now in development.<p>I don&#x27;t know, this seems like the wrong thing to do. I mean, it seems worth considering but it also sounds like &quot;if we don&#x27;t sink N+1 battleships we lose the war&quot;, which doesn&#x27;t seem any more right today than it was in the 20th century.<p>IMO a smarter, and probably cheaper, approach would be to force things to operate in a more decentralized fashion. Maybe at scale lots of smaller, distributed infantry and fire&#x2F;air support units would be just as expensive but it seems more survivable for a longer term grind. My bias though is that, yeah, I was an infantryman and most of us (at least in my circles) expect the next one to be a long grind like WWI than a flash pan mass-extinction event like a lot of planners do today.<p>&gt;The Chinese call this “system destruction warfare,” Work said: They plan to “attack the American battle network at all levels, relentlessly, and they practice it all the time.”<p>Okay, then maybe &quot;whoever can figure out how to continue operations during an extended comms blackout gets the most money.&quot; I know field craft isn&#x27;t as &quot;cool&quot; anymore as the newest gadget, but maybe teach the boys how to make those Vietnam era claymore-wire antennas again (half joking). Cutting some massive check for another decades long R&amp;D project is suspect to me.

Any Americans here know the reason why the military is excluded from the usual argument for small government?

This all works on the assumption the US armed forces exist to defend the US and allies. They don&#x27;t.<p>Partly they&#x27;re a jobs program both for &quot;jarheads&quot; and engineers and scientists. Partly they&#x27;re for bullying small nations that happen to get into political cross hairs (Iraqx2, Afghanistan, Iran soon). Partly they are an export industry that let&#x27;s the US maintain trade balances with places like Saudi Arabia (and effectively charge them for protecting their regimes).<p>That&#x27;s why the US even has aircraft carriers: they&#x27;ve been useless against China or Russia for decades. But they create jobs and let you bomb nations with no real defenses.<p>No one wants to give up 28bn from their part of the Knot of self service or risk 50 more casualties the next time we invade Iraq. So we keep prepping for that war.

I’ve heard on JRE podcast recently that war games are always rigged to be lost so that generals can work harder at winning next time. Also probably to get more budgets.

Article should have a &quot;2019&quot; tag.

The USA as well as the Western allies have a beurocracy 6 deep in old fossils who have optimised how to win the last war. The buying rules require enormous rules of procurement and parts verification that a chip resistor that costs 1&#x2F;10th of a penny acquires a bought cost of many dollars - it has been tested and x-rayed and heat cycled etc. The net result is a procurement sysyem gone mad with rings of empires, each with go&#x2F;nogo approval decisions that interfere with test&#x2F;approval&#x2F;production at every level. Then the old fossils of the general staff - also 5 deep in decisions. Why are we still building long range missile targets (which the general stall call a carrier attack group) We know China will toss 1000 missiles at them and when their magazines go empty after downing a few hundred - the 600+ left will sink them all. Then the USA will toss nukes at China. China shrugs - we have no voters to kill, so who cares and the communist party is in a safe hole.<p>What the USA needs to do is revamp the whole thing top to bottom, get some gamer minds in there, buth students and experiences. Sweep out the guys that won the last war - we will not be fighting that again as this time it will lose - we do not want that. Get new missiles, get new radars - all designed my military colleg grad students. I could go on... What the war games reveal is what Churchill saw when WW2 started - dead wood, so he trimmed it. He had his flaws though.

This is asinine - why do we need to spend billions and billions of dollars for more missiles for theoretical hot wars with Russia and China? Isn&#x27;t a hot war what nuclear deterrence is supposed to prevent?<p>The tone of the article is &quot;we&#x27;ve got a missile gap! but don&#x27;t worry, only 24 billion dollars will fix it&quot;. Yet we already spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the military and don&#x27;t seem to balance that against other things we could do with the money (pandemic preparations, anyone?).

The US needs to learn about missile defense from Israel (after all, that type of sharing is why the US spends so much on aid). Israel&#x27;s low tech neighbors spend most of their military power on rockets. Other countries will do exactly the same to the US.<p>Israel responded with high tech missile defense, the technology exists, the US just needs to start implementing it in huge numbers.<p>Instead US strategy is to promise to obliterate any country that messes with it. The trouble with that is that the enemy will hide amongst civilians.