RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
War is about politics. If you win on all levels except the political, that's called a loss!
If you control the urban centres of a rural mountainous shithole, what good is that? If this control is bought by just paying everyone off, what are you getting in return? Where is the return on investment? When were we supposed to start getting tribute from Afghanistan, or have their troops come and fight in other wars for us?
What is the purpose of controlling Afghanistan, what was the goal? To make it a liberal democracy? Well no that obviously failed. To make the girls go to school? Well that wasn't going too great when we were there (consider the bullets shot at Malala Yousafzai) and sank like a stone later on. To retain Bagram air base for use against China? Lost. To secure minerals? They're probably going to China now. To encircle Iran? The Taliban are doing their own thing occasionally attacking Iran or Pakistan. To fight terrorism? ISIS and Al-Qaeda have training cadres there again, as before.
The Coalition/US could enjoy complete nominal control over Afghanistan for 100 years and it'd be worse than losing, if all we're doing is acting as a pinata for corrupt pedophile drug addicts to extract money from while they export heroin everywhere.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
22hr ago
That's true, I meant 'scale up production enough to counter' but if you interpret it literally, then sure.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
22hr ago
If you find this surprising or disqualifying, you don’t understand corporate structure.
Yeah, US corporate structure is not optimal. Better engineers running engineering projects than finance tricksters. It's not that hard to learn the mathematics, they could pick it up.
Ahahahahahahahahahaa! Every one of these fields is also full of grifters and incompetents
Aerospace is actually hard. Shells are not hard. Why is there any need for high-risk acquisition processes? This should be really easy. It's not low-rate production of a guided missile with rocketry and guidance, it's boring high explosive shells.
The US is supposed to be a serious industrial power, this is a simple industrial task.
I get the impression you’re envisioning a sort of Randian nationalism
I think people working in high-ranking, decisionmaking parts of the military-industrial complex should be patriotic and love their country more than money. There should be selection processes in that direction, instead it's 'how smarmy and snake-like can your monopolistic business tactics and contractual manipulation possibly be'.
Excessive greed is why the 'discipline' that the US MIC seems to obsess over consists of cutting costs and production output, producing a tiny quantity of high-end weapons. They should've been more responsible and retained production. In Iraq in the 2000s the US had to import small arms ammunition because they somehow lost the capacity to supply a relatively small war, even with a huge civilian arms sector.
Somehow Russia managed to keep more shell production than America, despite going through a complete political, economic and societal collapse in the 90s. Somehow they managed to avoid selling off all those shell factories and tools in the 1990s. Corruption-ridden Russia had a law mandating that enterprise directors retain in full volume the mobilization capacities decreed for the USSR. Otherwise 5-10 years in prison. They actually had some semblance of the discipline I'm calling for, while the US lacks it.
Jesus Christ. How would that have helped at all? More importantly, how do you distinguish between the patriotic, the misled, the stupid?
- Generals actually do their jobs and admit the truth instead of lying to the public and the military about how the war is going to avoid embarassment
- Given more accurate information, political decisionmakers and the public move to exit the war more quickly, saving billions of dollars and some number of Coalition lives
It's pretty simple as an idea.
Hindsight doesn't come into it. There were secret reports showing that the war was lost early on. Senior officers knew that it was lost. It was pretty obviously lost, ordinary people could discern that by the mid-2010s provided they were independent thinkers and didn't watch too much television. The 'lessons learned' report showed a litany of damning farce and that got published in 2019 only by FOI requests.
There was no shortage of information earlier on about how shoddy, treacherous, corrupt and drug-addled the ANA was, only a shortage of honesty.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
23hr ago
I don't see how Trump can be blamed for a project that began (badly) under the Biden administration and proceeded (badly) under the Trump administration. This is a genuinely bipartisan problem.
My general point is that in terms of deep meaning, the Iranian air force and navy haven't been destroyed. There are Iranian forces in the sky and sea that are contesting the US. Whatever organization they're part of, in tangible terms they're still fighting.
And there are fixed-wing aircraft left in hardened airfields too. Some were escorting a Pakistani delegation arriving in Tehran in April. Their military strategy is probably to wait in bases, try and shoot down incoming missiles/drones in the Iranian interior, furthest from US air cover or launch occasional attacks of opportunity like the low-level bombing run against US bases in Kuwait on day one. Not smart to contest the US head on in the air, fighter for fighter.
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