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The military's job is to make people we fight want to stop fighting. That's it. If you keep strategy simple and easy-to-understand, you can stay on mission. U

The military's job is to make people we fight want to stop fighting. That's it. If you keep strategy simple and easy-to-understand, you can stay on mission. Unfortunately, that's not where we're at. The military is used for all sorts of things -- famine relief, nation-building, geo-political force projection, and so on. This is the problem with aircraft carriers. They might be lead weights in the event of an actual shooting war with a major superpower, but right now we're using them for mobile airports. And mobile airports are useful for all kinds of things. If you get rid of the mobile airport, then what's going to take their place? Who's going to show the flag in the Taiwan Strait or the Persian Gulf? Who's going to support some U.N. humanitarian mission that's urgent, remote, and requires CAPs? The more capability you develop, the more you can't imagine doing without that capability. So our floating airports are here to stay -- until somebody sinks them. Which means we have to support both those and figure out how to do our actual job, which is making people we fight want to stop fighting. We see this same pattern of behavior in platform after platform. When you get to a certain rank at the Pentagon, you feel it's "your time" to bring a big change to the services. And that means big bucks, big capabilities, and so forth. Nobody wants to be -- or gets rewarded for being -- a wise and crafty caretaker of an ever-shrinking pile of money. (Yes, I'm sure there's lip service paid to all of this. I'm simply making an observation as an outsider watching DoD for several decades.) Quick tempo lethal aerial force projection is going to have to be submersible. Otherwise hypersonic missiles make mincemeat out of your task force. No matter what kind of radar-controlled gun you have, you ain't stopping something coming in from directly overhead at Mach 10. The kinetic energy alone is sufficient here. Got a lot of other thoughts on this, but on some topics on the net I've learned to keep my mouth shut :) ADD: No matter what, Congress needs to re-sort out DoD. We need one service for police force work, nation-building, and humanitarian aid. Another force for space. One for cyber. Then leave the other ones alone. I might would peel off strategic missiles from the Air Force because strategic missiles have nothing directly to do with flying around. Re-split the money. Then reduce senior staff by 20-40%.

thaumasiotes 10y ago
> The military's job is to make people we fight want to stop fighting. That's it. > Unfortunately, that's not where we're at. The military is used for all sorts of things -- famine relief, nation-building, geo-political force projection, and so on. I'll give you famine relief, but geo-political force projection is the same thing you said was the entire goal of the military. A military that can make people who fight you regret it is the same military that sends the message "if you fight us, you'll regret it". It's not logically necessary that we use the military for nation-building the way it is for force projection, but if we're going to do nation-building the military is the appropriate group to do it.
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  I'll give you famine relief, but geo-political force projection is the same thing you said was the entire goal of the military. A military that can make people who fight you regret it is the same military that sends the message "if you fight us, you'll regret it". I do not agree with this, and it's important to understand why I do not think it's the case. "You're going to regret it" does not the end of a war make. We have already reached the point where, for cases of conflict involving all but a few nations, we can make them regret it. Fairly easily. Yet we see the use of actual force happen more and more. Why? Because my proposed definition of the military was not to hurt people or make them regret picking a fight It was to make them stop fighting. I used to think the military was for blowing up things and killing people. As it turns out, you can do a helluva lot of blowing stuff up and killing people and you've got just as much of a conflict as when you started. War is not an equation to be solved by some new McNamara. It is also not a spectacle meant for some foreign national command authority. Yes, it might work that way in a very few large cases, but we know that in every case the goal is to get them to stop fighting. We are buying very expensive hardware for edge cases. These edge cases might occur. But even then, we should look at other ways of winning instead of out-spending and out-producing the other guy. We're trying to build too many expensive systems that do too many things. I don't even want to think of what force readiness looks like in some areas. As one general put it many years ago in a similar situation, we're destroying the artillery in order to have troops able to do civilian police work. What if we need the artillery? The USMC D2D ratio is heading south. F-35 is a Charlie Foxtrot. I could go on. If you stand back and look at it objectively? It ain't good.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > we see the use of actual force happen more and more. Why? False premise; this is the opposite of what we see. https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/ https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/... You can only make people stop fighting by (a) killing them; or (b) convincing them that fighting you is a mistake. There are no other ways.
    - 10y ago

thaumasiotes 10y ago

> The military's job is to make people we fight want to stop fighting. That's it. > Unfortunately, that's not where we're at. The military is used for all sorts of things -- famine relief, nation-building, geo-political force projection, and so on. I'll give you famine relief, but geo-political force projection is the same thing you said was the entire goal of the military. A military that can make people who fight you regret it is the same military that sends the message "if you fight us, you'll regret it". It's not logically necessary that we use the military for nation-building the way it is for force projection, but if we're going to do nation-building the military is the appropriate group to do it.

DanielBMarkham 10y ago
I'll give you famine relief, but geo-political force projection is the same thing you said was the entire goal of the military. A military that can make people who fight you regret it is the same military that sends the message "if you fight us, you'll regret it". I do not agree with this, and it's important to understand why I do not think it's the case. "You're going to regret it" does not the end of a war make. We have already reached the point where, for cases of conflict involving all but a few nations, we can make them regret it. Fairly easily. Yet we see the use of actual force happen more and more. Why? Because my proposed definition of the military was not to hurt people or make them regret picking a fight It was to make them stop fighting. I used to think the military was for blowing up things and killing people. As it turns out, you can do a helluva lot of blowing stuff up and killing people and you've got just as much of a conflict as when you started. War is not an equation to be solved by some new McNamara. It is also not a spectacle meant for some foreign national command authority. Yes, it might work that way in a very few large cases, but we know that in every case the goal is to get them to stop fighting. We are buying very expensive hardware for edge cases. These edge cases might occur. But even then, we should look at other ways of winning instead of out-spending and out-producing the other guy. We're trying to build too many expensive systems that do too many things. I don't even want to think of what force readiness looks like in some areas. As one general put it many years ago in a similar situation, we're destroying the artillery in order to have troops able to do civilian police work. What if we need the artillery? The USMC D2D ratio is heading south. F-35 is a Charlie Foxtrot. I could go on. If you stand back and look at it objectively? It ain't good.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > we see the use of actual force happen more and more. Why? False premise; this is the opposite of what we see. https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/ https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/... You can only make people stop fighting by (a) killing them; or (b) convincing them that fighting you is a mistake. There are no other ways.
  - 10y ago