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.