One common thread linking all of the history of warfare, which is to say all of human history, is that the methods of fighting a war are constantly changing and when you don’t adapt you end up losing a lot of men and usually losing the war. One of my favorite scenes from The Last Of The Mohicans is the ambush in the forest…..
The British soldiers are marching along in nice lines when they are attacked. They line-up as they are trained to do and prepare to fire, while the Indians knowing what is coming hide behind trees as the command to fire is given, and then charge knowing that it will take the Brits too long to reload.
The British are fighting in the way they had been trained to fight back in Europe where two armies would line up and shoot at each other. It relied on massed firepower, discipline and training to shoot and then reload while under heavy fire. I guess it worked OK in Europe but in a forest against an opponent that wasn’t politely standing in a line to be shot at? Not so much.
We see this much later in World War I. Trench warfare was one thing but when you started to add in things like machine guns, massed artillery barrages, poison gas and tanks? It sucked to be an infantryman. I can’t imagine what was going through their minds when the whistle blew and the order came to go over the top, only to charge into barbed wire and withering machine gun fire. While I am not an expert on military tactics, it is my understanding that by the end of the war the Germans were starting to experiment with maneuver warfare rather than charging machine guns and it might have worked if they hadn’t simply run out of food and reached the limits of human endurance. Had they started earlier, who knows how history might have changed?
During the Interwar Period, the French decided to prepare for the next war with Germany by building the impenetrable Maginot Line, a series of heavily armed fortifications that would blunt the German advance. Only it didn’t quite work out that way…
Give credit to Germany, they somehow sleuthed out that charging headlong into a fixed fortification might be a bad idea.
World War II saw lots of new innovations like massive air assaults by paratroopers, the rise of air power and enormous tank v tank battles like the Battle of Kursk with over 5,000 tanks slugging it out. In the Pacific Theater the name of the game was aircraft carriers with naval engagements like the Battle of the Coral Sea which marked the first naval engagement between aircraft carriers and also notably the first naval battle where neither fleet was in visual contact with each other, followed by the Battle of Midway where the Jap’s naval power was broken and the end of the Pacific Theater began. In just 26 years naval warfare went from the Battle of Jutland where German and British ships slugged it out with 25 surface vessels sunk to Coral Sea where the two navies didn’t even see their opponents except via planes.
Of course nothing changed warfare quite like “Little Boy” and “Fat Man”, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, all through my childhood, we lived under what we thought was the constant threat of nuclear war, something reflected in the pop culture of the day with movies like Wargames.
That is where we find ourselves yet again.
In one theater the U.S. has been trying to defeat Iran by dropping massed bombs on missile and drone sites. The Iranians shift to different launch sites and then once the latest “ceasefire” takes hold they simply dig out the tunnels and operate again. This has obviously not worked.
Meanwhile in Ukraine the observant have watched a whole new kind of warfare taking place driven by drones. Make no mistake, Ukraine is losing badly despite launching Morale Drones at Russian targets. Hitting some refineries hurts Russia but does nothing to roll back the Russian forces occupying Ukrainian territory and slowly grinding away. Still, the reason Russia hasn’t completely rolled up the much smaller Ukrainian forces is mostly due to direct Western support but also because drones have changed, and continue to change, the face of modern warfare. The Tactical Hermit shared this clip the other day about the new “pistol” launched “Yolka”Interceptor: Russian Drone Warfare 3.0
It is all move and counter-move. With drones dominating the battlefield the question then becomes how do you counter drones? They tried electronic warfare jamming so then they moved to fiber optic lines and now the answer, at least in part, is with anti-drone drones.
Back to Iran. How does Iran, a nation that spends around $7.4 billion on her military, less than powerhouses like Finland and Romania, stymie a nation that spends close to one trillion dollars on her military? The USS Gerald R. Ford, the lead ship of the new aircraft carrier class that includes a carrier named after Bill Clinton of all people, cost nearly $13 billion in direct construction costs, almost as much as two years of Iranian military spending combined.
For a trillion bucks we should be able to smash any other nation on earth, much less a nation that spends a small percentage of what we spend on our military. If we can’t really defeat Iran, how would we fare against China who spends $336 billion, 45 times what Iran spends, or Russia with a budget 25 times that of Iran at $190 billion?
I have to say, given that one out of every three dollars spent on the military across the world is spent by the U.S., we don’t seem to be getting our money’s worth.
Why is that?
The only plausible explanation in my less than humble opinion is that the military budget is so rife with fraud and graft that war-fighting isn’t a priority at all for most of the leadership. Kurt Schlichter, who I generally agree with even if he is a solid normiecon and his books are dog vomit (see my review of his book “The Attack” here….Book Review: The Attack) wrote this the other day on Twitter:
We have come a long way from men like Patton. Kurt still frames this in a “capitalist v socialist” framework, echoing what I said in my review….
Kurt is what I would classify as a normiecon, people that have a conservative to libertarian political framework that is still mostly stuck in the 1980s and have never really caught up with political reality. He is still pretty rah-rah ‘Murica and thinks that most Americans are still the same sort of people that lived here last century.
No one who has spent time in corporate America should think that being a corporate executive is effective preparation for leading the military. However I think he is correct about the horrific state of senior leadership in the military, as an outsider with absolutely zero first hand experience.
It isn’t news to anyone paying attention that the military is riddled with fraud but the sheer extent of the rot has been exposed by the war with Iran. There is so much fraud in the Federal government in every single program that it appears like the entire purpose of the FedGov is to extract as much wealth from actual Americans as possible before the whole thing collapses, and it appears that way because that is actually what it is doing. Having said that, all of the fraud that was exposed by DOGE and that keeps popping up in Medicare, food stamps, Covid relief, on and on, pales in comparison to the military with a trillion dollar budget that just was fought to a standstill by Iran.
If Iran is not scared of us, and they aren’t, then do you think China is? The only reason China hasn’t gone after what they want militarily is that we are so busy destroying ourselves that they don’t need to bother. They just keep enriching themselves while we kill our nation.
All of the DOGE work and talk about fraud in food stamps, while valid, is just window dressing because no one will even talk about waste and fraud in the military. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the military with the largest chunk of the “discretionary” budget and a near absolute shield against criticism (What, you don’t Support The Troops™? What are you, some kinda commie or sumtin’?!) is awash in fraud.
What is worse, thousands of Americans have been killed or maimed in wars that were started for a foreign nation and prolonged just to keep the graft flowing. The same is true in Ukraine where Ukrainians keep dying so the military-industrial complex and the connected in America and Ukraine alike can keep lining their pockets while delaying the inevitable end.
At least under Trump we changed the name from “Defense” back to “War” because none of the spending has been about defending America for a very long time but war is a business and business is good.
I think that China will just wait until Taiwan just drops into their lap. It’s already close to doing so.
Why fight for something you can have for free?
Perfesser,
Contrarian here.
.
The xenophobes of West Taiwan built a wall to ‘protect’ their people from the influence of foreigners, an open-air concentration-camp.
At the opposite end of the speculum[sic], Taiwan entrepreneurs are inherently worldly, dutifully ignoring West Taiwan inbred ‘tards while successfully engaging in vigorous global trade.
.
* Short-term, the people of Taiwan win.
* Short-term, West Taiwan build another wall, electronic this time instead of the bones of slaves like the old version, and their residents continue losing.
.
Speaking to today’s Sido Subject, West Taiwan — identical to the American military — is stuck in 1938, prepping for the Great War of 1913, big planes and big ships and big militaries squaring-off for prolonged attrition.
Unsustainable and delusional.
.
The only way that makes sense is if the whole mess is a scam.
Well, shucks, any time those whacky fraudsters [‘chosed’] are involved, some things are automatically a given.
.
Meanwhile, mohammadans take the direct route… trashing our civilization through rape-gangs, fraud, daylight street decapitations of White folk, and other low-cost diversions.
.
However, none of this happens without the direct direction of keezer-pretend-xionists (spit), that mob of borderless criminals masquerading as a religion… formerly known as BOLSHEVIKS (spit spittedly spit spit).
.
Some might say “I still have no opinion about irseal, that crummy little country, turned into a glass desert”.
Irrelevant.
The borderless criminals are nearing the end of sucking-dry everything they could from their goofy “IRSEALÈÈS ARE CHOSED!” scam, and are already ensconced in dozens of other nations, predatoring and parasiting away until they too locust those places into barren dust-bowls, natural resources looted and the residents disgusted by their own naive generosity.
.
Keyword : “TheHolocast!™”, “because three thousand years ago!”, “109 countries hate us because we are jew!”, and all the rest of their propagandized nincompoopery
.
Anyhoo, that is my opinion.
In closing, I offer the ramblings of the prolific Apostle Paul:
* “Fxck them idjits with a rusty shekel.”
Yeah, well, maybe he didn’t say that in so many words, but you know he thought it.
I get the feeling the GAE wants China to invade Taiwan more than China wants to invade Taiwan.
China isn’t exactly known for military adventurism. It’s not in their cultural dna.
When Trump hit Syria in his first term with Tomahawks, 30% of the missiles failed to hit their targets. For the amount of money these cost a failure rate of maybe 1% is acceptable. All of these whiz bang wonder weapons are high cost, low accuracy, low production which means we run out in a high intensity protracted fight. There is a case here for criminal neglect of our nation’s defense. But that’s just how left leaning generals would act. Not giving a shit about anything but their inflated self importance. The history books will not be kind to how our military was neglected for the sake of greed.
The Pentagon does a masterful job of suppressing and censoring bad news
Especially the body count in the current FU$A-Zionland vs.Iran fka Persia war. Has to be 500+ Muricans since February 28th when the clusterfuck began
As the US approaches the 250th anniversary, I would like to drop this fairly short, yet insightful document into the thread for y’all’s consideration, The Fate of Empires, by Sir John Glubb, a widely experienced man who, concluded from his historical knowledge, and the insights so imparted, that the average age of past empires was about 200-250 years, at least in the main, without a substantial reinvention of themselves.
His analysis suggested that there was a remarkably consistent arc from inception to collapse of imperial powers, and that common trends were shared between the respective arcs of, first ascendant, and then within that general time frame in these imperial powers, secondly to their senescence and collapse. I first was introduced to this work by Colonel Patrick Lang at his then blog, Sic Semper Tyrannis some time prior to his passing. See what you think.
https://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf
The US certainly seems to be on track to be another example illustrative of his hypothesis. This work is succinct, and not all that long, carve out the time to acquaint yourselves with it, if you will.
Regards,
JJ
“Let it fall down, let it fall down, let it all fall down.” – H/T to James Taylor.
>The only reason China hasn’t gone after what they want militarily is that we are so busy destroying ourselves that they don’t need to bother.
There’s that. But there’s also the issue that China likely has similar levels of corruption, waste, and fraud. The precise forms of corruption may differ, but China’s also bleeding internally and shitting out concerningly tarry, black stools.
Black stools aren’t a negro thing, by the way (you beady-eyed rayciss). It’s a sign that you’re bleeding into your own digestive tract.
China does a better job of censoring bad news than we do, I don’t trust anything coming out of the ChiComs but their lack of diversity seems to be overcoming their latent communism
I hate to say this, but our country richly deserves what terrible fate is coming to us.
The USA has become the greatest source of evil in the world today – culturally, militarily, economically, morally.
We used to make things of value, now we just borrow with abandon on the declining strength of a once-great currrency. Our economy is based on increasing debts, frauds, and fictions that it will all be paid back one day.
The degeneracy of our culture is infamous around the world. We rejected greatness for a full throated embrace of Blackness and trailer trash.
We meddle in the affairs of every other country which we have no business doing.
And the American people have implicitly endorsed all of it by allowing it to happen, in their infinity idiocy.
So if this country collapses into some mad max hellhole, no tears will be shed. Perhaps the Chinese can do someithng useful with the remaining scraps.
No doubt, we are getting what we asked for, good and hard
Word. The legalized murder of over 62 million unborn American citizens is reason enough for this depraved country to suffer a terrible fate. God will not be mocked, and HE hates the shedding of innocent blood. The Good Book is quite specific.
Many of those were niggers, so no loss there.
While I agree with that sentiment for purely pragmatic reasons, I suspect The Almighty takes a dim view of wholesale slaughter of the unborn in any case. And if he ascribes collective responsibility to the citizens of a country for such a grim statistic (I don’t know that he does, nor do I know he doesn’t) then the FUSA is surely under harsh judgement for allowing the practice.
back in 1978 , I was part of a team to test out the Carl Gustaf 84mm recoilless rocket launcher.
it was hands down way better than anything we had. come “show day” there where 3 army generals and 2 Marine ones in the stands. the army guys, didn’t care a bit. but the Marine generals ? they got down and fired it in their dress greens. asked us a lot of questions about.
they even took out notepads and wrote down WHAT WE THOUGHT OF IT. compared to the 90mm stove pipe we had now. we didn’t get it. although it was way better and had many more different rounds you could fire/use with it. it was in one word, GRUNT proof. iron sights to back up the optic one. you could re cock it to if the round didn’t fire the first time (never saw that happen) no. we got the worthless Dragon system. that cost 10-20 times more than the carl G.
in ten years after that system was standard issue, I never met anyone who was a ‘gunner” fire a live round thru it. so, image how I felt in 2004/5 when on CNN, they where showing some SF outfit using the carl G and saying how great the weapon was.
and back then i when I realized that the MIC didn’t care about getting the job done, only making as much as possible off the troops. so, maybe you understand why I hate the MIC and the 5 sided assholes who think only about the money and not troops who have to use the junk they buy for us.
It sure seems as an outsider that not only does the brass not care about the grunts, they appear to despise them
Arthur,
.
Despite their word-salad Mission Statements and highly-touted four-color propaganda, one point is consistent:
* The purpose of a group is their accomplishments.
.
American government agents at all levels — including military and LawEnforcementOfficials — actively work to destroy Northern European Heritage folk.
That is their purpose.
Mom gave me a book years ago in paperback. the arms of Krupp. after reading that did I understand it all about the money. the Krupps had more money than you could think of. WW2 was the thing that made the MIC. and they have made money hand over fist ever since. I not so sure about despising Grunts as a rule. but I did run into a lot of “officers” that had a very low view of Grunts. funny part was I had better talks waiting around LZs and PZs than I ever heard or had in hospitals. not everyone talked about “sports ball” all the time.
then too there was a few that really seem to care about us and used to hang out and shoot the shit. not many, but a few in 15 years.
Ukraine is on third army with 2.5 million KIA and wounded.
Video shows they are not well trained.
Cope cages on tanks look like something out of Star Wars.
Some of the biggest Eastern Front WWII battles took place in Ukraine with some having more than one battle.
I disagree with one of your statements regarding WWI.
You see, when Russia and Japan went at each others throat in 1904/1905 – before WWI- the Russians used barbed wire and machine guns and the japanese infantry was stacked three (dead) bodies high on the barbed wire. I think I read that the commanding japanese General even lost his only son to the barbed wire / machine gun combination.
And yes, supply. In WWI the Generals had to plan their offensives one year in advance because thats how long it took to produce the needed ammunition.
And today is no different. Germany has enough ammunition for two days of fighting and then they need six months to produce this amount of ammunition. That is being said for the last two years and the situation hasnt improved, because otherwise they would yell it from the top of their lungs.
And to Generals: I dont know where I read it but it said that a soldier is trained to fight in a certain way by the Academy (when he is young) and this is so hammered into his skull that by the time he becomes a General he cannot think of fighting any way different than what he was trained.
And free spirited Generals or officers are removed. Remember General retired Riper, who sank the US Navy in the Exercise Millenium Challenge 2002? He should have been put in charge of the Navy because he thought outside the box.
Or think of William S Lind.
( This reminds me of the Top Gun movie Maverick. I know it is a movie but I think – in the Top Gun universe – Iceman protected Maverick because he wanted someone to challenge the way the Navy thinks. The reason for the Top Gun programme was that the Navy no longer taught air-to-air gun combat because of the invention of the missile. That was wrong so they had to relearn air-to-air gun combat. And that was paid for in blood of pilots who werent taught air-to-air gun combat. And Iceman was looking beyond the corner, e.g. the future.) .
@Alex Lund
Re: “Germany has enough ammunition for two days of fighting and then they need six months to produce this amount of ammunition. That is being said for the last two years and the situation hasnt improved, because otherwise they would yell it from the top of their lungs.”
Germany used to be one of the industrial powerhouses of the world. Now, it struggles to make artillery shells sufficient for its army. The stat I saw was that stocks are adequate for a week of operational use/combat, at which time 155mm shells would have to be replenished.
The Russians, Chinese, Iranians, et al. are cranking out munitions and other industrial products in quantities that stagger the mind. They can fight a war of attrition, we cannot. “We” being the western alliance. All around NATO, the proverbial cupboard is bare. On the continent proper, France is probably in the best shape, but even she is short of where she ought to be.
Re: “And free spirited Generals or officers are removed. Remember General retired Riper, who sank the US Navy in the Exercise Millenium Challenge 2002? He should have been put in charge of the Navy because he thought outside the box. Or think of William S Lind.”
One cannot rise to flag/general officer rank without the approval of the U.S. Congress. This means that becoming a flag officer is an inherently political process. Hence, those selected tend to be politicians first, and military leaders second – if at all. You are entirely correct that initiative and creativity are selected-against in the winnowing out process as junior officers advance into the mid-grades and then higher. The old saying applies, that warriors dispute the smoothing functioning of the military-industrial-Congressional complex.
Lind was part of the military reform movement beginning in the 1970s and onward, which was led and coalesced around Colonel John Boyd, a.k.a. “The Ghetto Colonel,” or “Genghis John” as he was sometimes called. Boyd was brilliant, and famously blunt spoken; he was heard on more than one occasion to profanely dress down a general.
That is probably why when it came to becoming a general himself, Boyd couldn’t muster the support.
The reformers scored some successes, such as Boyd’s behind-the-scenes brilliance in designing the winning formula for Desert Storm for which Schwarzkopf and Powell got credit, or the group’s support of such successful airframe as the A-10 Thunderbolt II, a.k.a. the Warhog ground attack aircraft, and the F-15 fighter.
But in due course, as the members of the military reform movement aged into retirement or died off, the Pentagon/DOD resumed business as usual.
When you understand that the actual function of the Pentagon isn’t providing the troops with the best weapons and equipment at the best price, but perpetuating the gravy-train that is the defense appropriations and spending process, everything starts to make sense. The best and most-cost effective solutions rarely provide enough opportunities for grift and fattening of the bottom line for the quarterly earnings report.
Spot on. Colonel Boyd contributed his OODA Loop strategy; i.e., getting and staying one step ahead of your opponent through observation, orientation, deciding, and acting.
Colonel Macgregor also antagonized the status quo with his book, Breaking the Phalanx, a reference to the Thracian tactics that overturned the Greek Phalanx, the long standing mode of conducting land warfare, advocating similar thinking on innovative tactics and strategies. Be, like Boyd, paid the price for antagonizing the Olde Boys Club. Both of these men could not – and would not – rise above Colonel, as they were
perceived (rightly so) as threats to the Established Order. Add to this company Colonel Patrick Lang, who rose to head the DIA in Western Asia, but topped out at Colonel for similar reasons. They refused to play the role of Colonel Blimp, becoming feckless yes men on their way to positions in the MIC. And so it goes…
One more comment on the same topic…
The current situation in the Gulf and the Middle East plus the Ukraine War, provides a window into the relative effectiveness of the defense/military R&D and force structuring of the U.S.-Israeli alliance & the West on one hand, versus the opposing alliance.
Russia, Iran and China spend a fraction of what the U.S. does on the military – including R&D costs – but they have now gained clear superiority in several classes of weapons. Russia’s hypersonic missiles are one example, and Iran’s arsenal of missiles, UAVs and other high-tech weapons is giving the IDF fits. Iran’s anti-shipping missiles and anti-ship drones and UAVs are placing a number of parts of the Gulf off-limits to the U.S. Navy.
Many of these weapons cost a fraction of what their U.S. counterparts do, yet perform at a clearly higher level.
The underlying message is that our defense procurement process at the Pentagon/DOD is irreparably broken, and must be replaced by something that actually delivers results.
Yes, the U.S. military is still respected and feared, but it is no longer alone at the top of the heap – other nations have closed the gap and now have parity or even superiority in select areas.