Our Military Fails Worse Than our Schools

[Twangbanger]

There is no accountability. Why?

And then it hit me...it's just like our schools. It's a sacred cow. Anybody want to do without education and national defense?

1) There are tremendous resources flowing into it, and
2) Those resources continue to flow whether it succeeds or not.

Anyway, discuss, INGO. We just lost a 20-year war, and we should be able to face this question intelligently. Do not get your panties in a bunch. This is not disparaging our men and women in uniform (most of them, anyway). Yes, we know it's "The Brass."

Here's a good article to get things started:

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/fire-blob-foreign-policy-pundits-afghanistan/

 

[Tombs]

The only constitutional branch is the navy.

I firmly believe unless we are being attacked by another nation state, only the navy should be given any funding. Just as the constitution prescribes.

 

[JeepHammer]

Why?

I posit that:

1) There are tremendous resources flowing into it, and
2) Those resources continue to flow whether it succeeds or not.

And then it hit me...it's just like our schools. It's a sacred cow. Anybody want to do without education and national defense?

Anyway, discuss, INGO. We just lost a 20-year war, and we should be able to face this question intelligently. Do not get your panties in a bunch. This is not disparaging our men and women in uniform (most of them, anyway). Yes, we know it's "The Brass."

Here's a good article to get things started:

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/fire-blob-foreign-policy-pundits-afghanistan/

Depends on which side of the green weenie you served on...
Or if you didn't serve at all.

With something like SAC,

(If you don't immediately know what SAC stands for you probably don't have a place in this conversation)

Which had more golf courses & resort postings than defense bases...
And a fleet of private jets to shuttle the top brass around to those facilities.
There is a reason that SAC for sacked.

The amount of 'Entertainment' facilities, that enlisted men will never visit,
Museums that are prestige duty stations instead of anything functional for defense...
How about the park service gets the money, runs the museums (if they are worth keeping)...

The military wonders why it can't keep quality people...
When they pay enlisted like crap and you have to put up with rules/regs that some idiot dreamed up...

I did 16 years, I'm out of it.
From what I hear not much has changed except for the oceans of money dumped into the military over the last 20 years,
Which made things even worse, all that crap has to be maintained even though the military forces are shrinking in size...

 

[BehindBlueI's]

No accountability? Did you serve? The problem is there's a frigging overload of accountability, often for things you have no control over and for things that are not the mission. There's a huge zero defect mentality, and it's even more prevalent for commissioned officers who want to get promoted. No, accountability isn't remotely the problem.

The problem is similar to one that faces modern policing. Mission creep. You must be up for all things that civilian leadership decides to task you with. You're a hammer, so you can drive nails. If you're a sledge hammer, framing hammer, chipping hammer, that's irrelevant. You are a hammer and people who either don't know (or don't care) that there is more than one kind of hammer *or who have no other tools* will use you for things you aren't really designed to be used for. So the sledge hammer drives finishing nails...and a hammer is a tool and people use tools to turn screws, so the sledgehammer must be able to turn screws as well, right?

Here's an interesting take:

The Distress Cycle of American Military Conflicts

Like me, perhaps you’ve been watching the news from Afghanistan wondering how we got to this point. This piece is absolutely not an analysis of our twenty-year conflict there as I am neither …

angrystaffofficer.com

"
While the military has a plethora of missions – really, whatever the civil government tells it to do – it has one, single no-fail mission: do not lose a major conflict that would place the sovereignty of the U.S. in jeopardy. That’s the one war that it cannot lose, otherwise, well, you get the picture. Therefore, the vast majority of time, money, training, and modernization is directed towards this one single end. Whether it be the massive infantry divisions of 1918, the atomic-focused military of the 1950s, or the movement towards total-force/joint operations in the late 20th/early 21st century, this is the one thing that everyone in all branches of the U.S. military can agree on.

And yet, the nation still asks for small wars. Those don’t go away. And so the massive behemoth of the U.S. military, built for the big fight with the USSR or China or whatever international bogeyman looms large at that moment, swings away in places like Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia, or Afghanistan, to name a few. And while there are some concessions made to this kind of war – the expansion of the role of special operations forces during Vietnam, for example – by and large, the military’s force structure and overarching doctrine did not and have not changed from that geared towards the near-peer or peer competitor. To do so, would be to reduce readiness for that no-fail mission."

(more at link)

 

[Twangbanger]

Does anybody think any brass should be fired over Afghanistan?

That is the kind of accountability I'm talking about.

Or is it totally the politicians' fault?

 

[Twangbanger]

Here is a sort of inside-baseball account which places blame at the feet of the State Department:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2...d_up_biden_admins_afghan_strategy_550774.html

 

[phylodog]

No panties in a bunch here but I just gotta say it.

Just like Vietnam, had the military leaders in Afghanistan been allowed to fight to win, both conflicts would have been over in well under two years. You cannot win a war and the hearts and minds of the Feelings focused population of United States simultaneously.

 

[Tombs]

Does anybody think any brass should be fired over Afghanistan?

That is the kind of accountability I'm talking about.

Or is it totally the politicians' fault?

There's political and brass issues here. But brass are, to all intents and purposes, a political affair.

Politicians and brass should be out job hunting.

 

[Tombs]

No panties in a bunch here but I just gotta say it.

Just like Vietnam, had the military leaders in Afghanistan been allowed to fight to win, both conflicts would have been over in well under two years. You cannot win a war and the hearts and minds of the Feelings focused population of United States simultaneously.

There wasn't a winning condition for afghanistan. We didn't seek to conquer and take it over.
Unless you are taking over territory and colonizing it to your values and culture, you will lose every single time.

 

[GIJEW]

There wasn't a winning condition for afghanistan. We didn't seek to conquer and take it over.
Unless you are taking over territory and colonizing it to your values and culture, you will lose every single time.

^^^THIS^^^

As was said up thread, winning needs to be defined in terms of realistic objectives and mission creep kept out of the picture.

"Nation building" and establishing a Jeffersonian republic in a place with no experience in democracy beyond a village shura, was bound to fail. The british colonized India for over 100 years and British culture is a very thin veneer on India.

 

[rob63]

I sort of know the answer to the question I am about to ask, mission creep, but I don't know anything more specific than that vague slogan.

I remember when we first went into Afghanistan it involved special forces embedded with the Northern Alliance coordinating air strikes. They won, and I thought the mission had been accomplished at minimal cost to us.

I guess I quit paying attention at that point, because suddenly I was seeing articles about casualties among regular forces and I was scratching my head wondering what happened?

Can anybody tell me what happened to get us from special forces helping the Northern Alliance to defeat the Taliban to us being responsible for building a nation?

 

[KLB]

The only constitutional branch is the navy.

I firmly believe unless we are being attacked by another nation state, only the navy should be given any funding. Just as the constitution prescribes.

The problem with this is in today's world you cannot just call up the militia to fight a war. You need the equipment and the training to use it.

 

[BehindBlueI's]

Can anybody tell me what happened to get us from special forces helping the Northern Alliance to defeat the Taliban to us being responsible for building a nation?

Bush's notion we could establish democracies around the world, those democracies would be self sufficient, and they would then be US allies in perpetuity. Same thing in Iraq. We'll be greeted as liberators. We'll get the oil fields up and running and it'll pay for the whole war. Look at the names. Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and "Enduring Freedom". I think Bush believed his own marketing campaign. I fell for it as well. I'm not nearly as ignorant today as I was twenty years ago, though.

As far as the war effort goes, the purpose of a guerilla war is historically to transition to a conventional war. We had not accomplished our stated goals, most noticeably to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden.

The Russians tried the "we'll just kill enough to win" strategy and it obviously didn't pay out for them, either. We tried the "we'll kill some of them and make the rest think like we do" which didn't work any better. We had a better shot at it in Iraq, where at least they were literate and had a history of a central government.

 

[Mongo59]

Look at our history. We haven't had anyone who understood occupation since MacArthur.

Since then we have only been able to pull defeat from the jaws of victory...

 

[BugI02]

Bush's notion we could establish democracies around the world, those democracies would be self sufficient, and they would then be US allies in perpetuity. Same thing in Iraq. We'll be greeted as liberators. We'll get the oil fields up and running and it'll pay for the whole war. Look at the names. Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and "Enduring Freedom". I think Bush believed his own marketing campaign. I fell for it as well. I'm not nearly as ignorant today as I was twenty years ago, though.

As far as the war effort goes, the purpose of a guerilla war is historically to transition to a conventional war. We had not accomplished our stated goals, most noticeably to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden.

The Russians tried the "we'll just kill enough to win" strategy and it obviously didn't pay out for them, either. We tried the "we'll kill some of them and make the rest think like we do" which didn't work any better. We had a better shot at it in Iraq, where at least they were literate and had a history of a central government.

I always thought that in Iraq Bush got sold the bill of goods that setting up a democracy there would not only be wildly successful, but that that success would in turn spread democracy throughout the region as others saw those successes achieved in Iraq and wanted to emulate that in their own countries

Kind of like Cubans comparing Florida to life in Cuba

 

[Tombs]

The problem with this is in today's world you cannot just call up the militia to fight a war. You need the equipment and the training to use it.

Sure you can.

In fact you don't need a standing army at all. If we were invaded tomorrow by China, and the US organized with local well armed groups around the country to maintain strategic dominance of the land, we'd have no issues repelling an invader.

The only use for a standing army is if you want to meddle in foreign affairs and get involved in foreign entanglements.

Which was pretty much prohibited by our founders, anyway.

 

[Leadeye]

George 1 and the "New World Order" pushed this country into the role of world policeman. That's a tough job and in the end I think like most policemen, you don't get much gratitude for it.

 

[Brad69]

I remember a dude recently that talked about America 1st.

Wonder if he is still around?

 

[KLB]

Sure you can.

In fact you don't need a standing army at all. If we were invaded tomorrow by China, and the US organized with local well armed groups around the country to maintain strategic dominance of the land, we'd have no issues repelling an invader.

The only use for a standing army is if you want to meddle in foreign affairs and get involved in foreign entanglements.

Which was pretty much prohibited by our founders, anyway.

I think you would find that hard without armor and air support.

 

[BehindBlueI's]

I think you would find that hard without armor and air support.

You're wasting your time.

If you find yourself in Paris, though, check out there Army Museum. It has a great section on how the French military went from being a premier force to a complete disaster to a premier force again. Equipment was partly the issue, but institutional knowledge and a professional NCO corps was paramount. It's not particularly hard to drill someone on some basic infantry tactics but learning to run the logistics that keeps a fighting force able to fight a conventional war. Then add in the extremely technical jobs on today's battlefield, how long does it take to train a Combat Controller?

So, yes, you can still fight. You end up limited to guerilla tactics, which only win wars if the other side gets tired of killing you and goes home. Anyone who wants to seize territory and doesn't care if they play nice will just steamroll you.