Yes, but the British model, driven in part by the defence-contractor model of military procurement, is still very much “one terribly expensive and capable drone” much more than “a swarm of fairly rubbish drones, but one or two will get through”.
4 Likes
I heard a military historian say that that’s pretty much the case in all wars. You never end them with the armies you start with. WW1 is perhaps the most dramatic and well-known - starting with horses and ending with tanks and submarines - but it happens in all wars. Apparently, but it makes sense.
4 Likes
I dont know why the West are still cheaping out with “one big multipurpose” shit. And the fucking idiot voters still talks about “miltary industrial complex” bullshit, when it’s the opposite.
2 Likes
What is the opposite of a military industrial complex, and what is important about the distinction (I assume it goes beyond semantics)?
2 Likes
Western militaries are direly underfunded affer the Cold War because politicians are milking the “Peace Dividend”. There’s no “forever wars”/“military industrial complex” conspiracy.
2 Likes
I was under the impression that was mostly a term used to describe the US situation, and is reasonable to apply there.
3 Likes
I dunno…. kinda feels that way here in ‘merica.
3 Likes
No where was the US defence spending as high in post-Cold War days (even during the height of GWOT) as it was back in the Cold War. it’s all just vibes and propaganda. And when they misdirect you with “the US spends more in defence than X number of countries combined.” Sure. And the US has the largest economy in the world.
1 Like
That’s not a take I was expecting to read today.
I will just note that nothing about the term military industrial complex requires or even suggests a conspiracy and leave it at that.
5 Likes
One of the things I do is naval wargaming, and that means I need to stay up to date on this stuff.
I note that neither of the “missile-age” wargames (Harpoon and Shipwreck) deals with mine warfare, never mind drone swarms.
But there’s a key point laid out in Shipwreck: enemy capabilities are always overstated. The enemy wants them to look scary; the friendly administrators who’d be responsible for dealing with them talk them up so as to get a bigger share of the budget; the friendly defence contractors talk them up so as to sell their solution to this new terror weapon. The actual number of any given missile fired under actual combat conditions is very low, and may be zero. Any measure of effectiveness is just a well-informed guess.
So when HMS Viper shoots down a “suspected attack drone” with an unspecified Aster, I have to ask: did that “suspected attack drone” cost anything like the £1 million that even an Aster 15 costs to launch and replace? It seems… unlikely.
(Stepson, at the time a Lieutenant RN: “When I press that button it costs a million pounds. Also it launches a missile.”)
5 Likes
I think this is an important part to consider on the idea of “military-industrial complex”. Eisenhower was an experienced military commander and understood how to develop and use forces (of his time).
Unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex includes two risks to my mind. First is the use of military means in place of civilian means because of who it profits.
Second is a hollowed out military. Spending is not capability.
Consider a balance sheet. There can be a lot or revenue and profit on the income statement but at the same time there can be no working capital and no equity. Just depreciable assets that may prove to be impaired when asked to generate future value.
because acquiring those assets provided profits to the contractor’s owners.
2 Likes
I don’t know how the balance sits in the US, but in the UK we have the Ministry of Defence (mostly civilian civil servants who answer first to civilian politicians), and separately from that senior military officers (who have to be able to play a certain amount of politics just to get to that position). Back in the day many of those civil servants and politicians would have had earlier military careers; this is vastly rarer now.
(The previous UK government had a minister in charge of defence procurement who said, on the record, that one of the primary jobs of frigates was to escort ballistic missile submarines. Well, they do do that, on the short run from Gare Loch to the open sea, but…)
Typically the senior officers want something that will work, and the civil servants want something shiny. This is why we have two aircraft carriers which can only operate one specific sort of fixed-wing aircraft, which was obsolete before those carriers were laid down and still doesn’t actually work reliably. The Navy were asking for smaller and cheaper helicopter carriers, but the politicians forced them into a fixed-wing carrier so that they could say “Look, we still have a fixed wing carrier”. So it all costs much more in return for a frankly minimal extra capacity.
What the Navy usually wants is more ships even if they’re smaller, because for a lot of naval jobs simply having a warship on site is what matters, much more than the capability of that ship. Pirates won’t engage in a stand-up battle with even a small warship, they’ll go away.
Stepson again, on patrol in the Gulf: they’d haul up to a merchant, announce they would be doing a customs inspection, then give them a clear five minutes to throw all the dodgy stuff over the far side before going aboard. And that was what always happened. (They picked it up on sonar.)
4 Likes
As a business consultant who’s lived in DC for near 25 years, I’ve had a lot of exposure to all this. But I don’t necessarily have a lot to say about it..
I’ve run into both senators and generals, and apart from the clothes the feel is very similar. That said, I put a lot more trust in a general, on average. There’s a spectrum on both sides.
I always laugh when you get a room of colonels and generals where there is a joint project. The senior army officer is likely overweight. The senior airforce officer is going to be underweight and looks like he’s never been the the gym. The senior navy officer will look like what you would expect a military soldier to look like. And the senior marine corps officer is yoked.
The doctrine of fewer, all purpose technologies does well sometimes. Reducing the navy to destroyers, subs, and aircraft carriers I think makes a lot of sense. The joint strike fighter costs a lot but it does a lot, and the savings on manufacturing and maintenance are huge. But it’s not always the right call.
The theory of replacing manpower with technology is always in vogue, and it always fails. There’s enough people who know that that it won’t completely go through, but there’s enough people who want it that it will remain the conversation. The problem is that military technologies are good at killing things (or blowing up things that kill things), but can’t stabilize or occupy. When the time inevitably comes to de-escalate, you need manpower.
And yeah, you look at any nation’s budget and the defense/military spending is a much lower portion of the pie than you’d expect. But it’s still a lot of money.
5 Likes
I don’t think I stopped laughing all the way through this.
“It looks like doubling the energy had an effect.”
5 Likes
“The target has achieved a high state of division.” 
2 Likes
I’m trying out a Milty Draft for Twilight Imperium for the first time ever.
It got a little screwed up because we were going to play with 5, and then as soon as I sent around the draft and the first two players made their initial picks a 6th player wanted to join.
No big, they just get to pick from the remaining races and pie slices, but I did let them pick to sit anywhere as a “compensation” for having to pick from the leftovers.
I’m “Marc,” and I can’t believe nobody took the Hacan. I can’t believe I didn’t take the Hacan… they’re so good. Maybe our 6th player will nab them… oh, the Council of Keleres took the Mentak as their “founding nation,” so that’ll be interesting.
This is a relatively experienced group of players (none as much as I am, but I’m not a good player, just one who has played a lot and knows the rules pretty dang well).
Game is scheduled for Saturday from 1pm until ???. I can’t wait! The draft system is neat. I like it. For years I’ve tried coming up with ways to make the pre-game cleaner (everyone gets 3 random races… a race draft followed by a ban-phase… pre-gen maps…), and this seems to be an interesting way to do it.
I do want to point out that I randomized a few times to make sure that Terry had access to the Cabal, who he then decided he didn’t want to play. People are weird, yo.
3 Likes
I was looking at the muscular anatomy of the hip, to see what had cramped up so hard it woke me up last night, and ran across this lovely sentence about the adductors “serve to bring your legs together, like when you crush a watermelon between your thighs.” I have never crushed a watermelon between my thighs. It has never even occurred to me to do such a thing. this is why English has a subjunctive case, dammit.
5 Likes
You’ve never crushed a watermelon between your thighs? What kind of freak are you!?
8 Likes
The kind who doesn’t have watermelon juice on his pants.
6 Likes
Pants? You wear pants? What kind of freak are you?
5 Likes