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I dread to think people in the army actually think this is a switch that can be turned on and off at will. Today we're at shit efficiency, tomorrow China invades Taiwan and - click! - we're at 100% efficiency. Hopefully the US will never get into a war with some real hungry and aggressive state anymore - because it would take a lot of losses to dig out of "shit efficiency" standards. I mean, losing to Taliban is shameful, but ultimately inconsequential by itself. The fact that China and Russia stop fearing the army of drag queens would be much worse. It very well could be the US army is so powerful it can beat China and Russia with one hand tied behind their back and while in drag and on high heels. But having to actually prove it would already be a huge loss - both politically and literally, in lives and economic consequences. And I am concerned operating at shit efficiency would lead to exactly that.
Every military is like this to some extent. Few enough major wars are fought that nobody really knows whether Taiwan, China, Korea etc. will hold up in a hot war. Just look at Russia's performance and how one of the most feared military machines turned out to be mostly hollow due to decades of rot.
People think of the Chinese government as being hyper-efficient and centralized. It's not. The central political committees have limited power to set policy for the rest of the government - because there is just too much of the latter to efficiently control. That's why China builds huge ghost cities or spaffs billions on totally unfeasible BRI initiatives. This is not to say that the PLA suffers from the same dysfunction. It might do, or it might not - just as in January of 2022, nobody knew, even in Russia, that the Russia military was so severely unready for war.
Anybody who has been in Russian army or knows somebody who has (which is about 100% of Russian-speaking or adjacent world) knows Russian army is a huge pile of dung, mostly dangerous by having tons of bodies to throw into the fire and gigatons of explosives accumulated over the Soviet years, which even with heroic efforts of all praporshiks combined could not be completely sold off or wasted. There's just too many of them. Well, this and also nukes. Organizationally, morally, technologically - Russian army is more a horde than a modern army. But it is a huge horde, controlling the huge pile of weaponry. And the huge pile of hydrocarbons, which the West is glad to buy, giving them the money to buy even more weaponry. It's not the efficiency of the horde that is feared, it is the size of it. And also its almost complete insensitivity to losses. Russians already lost almost 200k people - and there's next to zero unrest. In fact, as long as they have money, their recruiting ability is only limited by the organizational factors (which are complete shit) rather than the lack of human resources. Imagine the US losing comparable number of troops in a war - like half a million? That's like Civil War and WW2 combined. Vietnam losses were 1/10th of that, and is still seen as national trauma of generational proportions. For Russia, it's meh. That's what is so hard to deal with there.
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Disagree, it was obvious the russian army wasn’t up to snuff, based on technology and budget alone . I said before the war: “ We should buy an exact replica of the russian army and store it in poland somewhere, just in case it’s as amazing as american cold warriors think it is.“
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That hypothetical was pretty much what happened in Korea. The US Army was pretty much written off at the end of the 1940's, since it was believed the Air Force would simply nuke any rival into submission, and ground forces were outdated for any offensive war (the Navy had to fight tooth and nail to stay relevant and keep its air branch). As a result, with the Army being such a low priority, they were vastly unprepared for a conventional ground war whose doctrine forbade the use of nuclear weapons in Korea, with many lessons learned in WWII having to be relearned, and most ground units being unequipped relative to what you'd expect of a superpower.
If we were to get into a war tomorrow we'd definitely be looking at a degree of unreadiness. We've been solving most of our problems with minimal commitment since the war on terror wound down, with the name of the game being "no boots on the ground," which really means "special operations and aviation assets only." (Although right now there's very little even of that going on.)
That error seems to come up again and again for the last 100 years. Strategic bombing proved to be useless, "just nuking the enemy" proved to be a fallacy, the ideas about "we don't need tanks and artillery, we will just destroy the enemy from afar" have been thoroughly debunked in Ukraine... And yet, somehow the galaxy brains of strategy still don't learn the lesson.
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I don't think we've been in "off war mode" for long enough to be a significant degree of unreadiness. In the grand scheme of things we pretty much just wrapped up a 2-decade long war. It wasn't against a conventional army by any means but frankly, a lot of that looks easier than the desert fighting of Iraq and Afganistan.
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