How not to do military ...

BRT has posted beaucoup articles about the military fubars this nation has done for the last 50+ years with emphasis on inept equipment procurement, egregious errors in foreign policy and truly excellent  and illegal adventures in Nam and Iraq, not to mention the never ending 17 year lost cause known as Afghanistan, the longest war in US history, events one and all that are truly astounding to think about in terms of cost and suffering save for the department of defense, an entity that needs endless war in order to survive as we move further into the 21st century. 

To whit ...

How to blow $700 billion really fast: A tale of exploding defense budgets and military failure

Step 1: Buy the most expensive weapons in history. 

Step 2: Don’t use them, since they mostly don’t work

Sinjar, the town where the soldiers had been fighting for six weeks, would fall to ISIS control 10 years later. More than 5,000 Yazidi civilians were killed in the ISIS attack and hundreds of Yazidi women were taken as slaves. Tal Afar would be in and out of U.S. control over the next 10 years, until it too was taken by ISIS fighters. Same with Rabihya. Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians would lose their lives. Hundreds of U.S. soldiers would be killed. So much for “posture decisions” and “military effectiveness.”

But that didn’t stop think tanks in Washington like the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute and the American Enterprise Institute from lobbying for higher and higher defense budgets. (Douglas Feith is now “director for national security strategies” for the Hudson Institute.) This year, President Trump signed the largest defense budget in our history: $700 billion. The budget includes $13.7 billion for 90 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, which according to CNN are “in service and mission capable only 26 percent of the time.” Not a single F-35 jet has yet to see combat duty.

The budget will provide $4.5 billion for the construction of a new Ford class aircraft carrier, $450 million for three Littoral Combat Ships, $4 billion for two new guided missile destroyers, $5.5 billion for two new Virginia Class submarines, and tens of billions more for upgrades and repairs on various aircraft and naval vessels. Two of the guided missile destroyers already in service were involved in deadly collisions with cargo ships in the western Pacific last year. A Navy investigation revealed that for all of the hundreds of billions spent on defense, there was apparently not enough in the budget to provide for adequate training in standing watch and driving Navy combat ships.

All of billions spent on defense, and still the United States Army couldn’t interdict smuggling along the Iraq-Syria border. They couldn’t hold onto Sinjar, Tal Afar, Mosul or Rabihya.  

You want to know what those soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division were using for weapons when I was there? The M-16 rifle. The 7.62 mm machine gun. The 81 mm mortar. The 105 mm Howitzer. All weapons the U.S. Army had fought with in Vietnam, 35 years earlier. You want to know what they’re still fighting with overseas? Those same old weapons.

You want to know what wasn’t being used over there near the Iraq-Syria border? Any of the fancy Navy ships or F-22 or F-35 fighters. 

War is a Racket - Smedly Butler 

Always has been, always will be.