>>But I think you need to take a step back and ask what the point of a military is.
I completely agree. I think at the heart of the United States is a terrible vagueness and corrupt idea of why we have a military.
They to call it the War Department. While that certainly doesn't sound very nice, it cut to the direct point in having a military: fighting a war. That made it a lot easier to reason about.
So what's a war? A war is when people are doing something you don't like and you want them to stop. You have tried talking and reasoning with them and that didn't work. So you have to figure out other ways of making them stop fighting you.
That's it. You don't need guns, tanks, or even explosives. If you can make those other people over there stop fighting you, they surrender, you win.
At some point, probably around the time of WWI, mission creep started taking us into all kinds of places that either wasn't a war or we didn't like admitting was a war. So we started changing the language, setting up all sorts of units and programs that were only tangentially-related to war, and so forth. I read at some point when Bush was president we had military operations in over 80 countries.
Now most of those operations were peaceful: medic clinics, training, and so forth. You could argue that they were strategically fighting a war -- happy, trained people tend to be happier. But that sure looks like social programs, diplomacy, and police action than war. Don't get me wrong: these may be great things to do. My point is that if you stretch the language so far, then pretty much any damned thing you want to can be considered part of the military. Or a war, for that matter.
Based on this, and the ton of inertia and corruption that's been associated with war fighting since forever, I really don't think we can expect the Department of Defense to act in a sane manner. My gut tells me that we built the F-35 because we thought that's what we were supposed to do: come up with new, expensive tech that's better than the other guys.
We're going to need to get back to funding DoD to fight wars: real, live, in-person conflicts where the other guys need to be convinced to stop fighting us. That's going to take a ton of re-organization and strategic planning that I don't see happening any time soon. (Also, agreed with your statement about tunneling money to contractors, and defending the country. We've come a long, terrible way from the idea of a citizen soldier defending his home.)
I completely agree. I think at the heart of the United States is a terrible vagueness and corrupt idea of why we have a military.
They to call it the War Department. While that certainly doesn't sound very nice, it cut to the direct point in having a military: fighting a war. That made it a lot easier to reason about.
So what's a war? A war is when people are doing something you don't like and you want them to stop. You have tried talking and reasoning with them and that didn't work. So you have to figure out other ways of making them stop fighting you.
That's it. You don't need guns, tanks, or even explosives. If you can make those other people over there stop fighting you, they surrender, you win.
At some point, probably around the time of WWI, mission creep started taking us into all kinds of places that either wasn't a war or we didn't like admitting was a war. So we started changing the language, setting up all sorts of units and programs that were only tangentially-related to war, and so forth. I read at some point when Bush was president we had military operations in over 80 countries.
Now most of those operations were peaceful: medic clinics, training, and so forth. You could argue that they were strategically fighting a war -- happy, trained people tend to be happier. But that sure looks like social programs, diplomacy, and police action than war. Don't get me wrong: these may be great things to do. My point is that if you stretch the language so far, then pretty much any damned thing you want to can be considered part of the military. Or a war, for that matter.
Based on this, and the ton of inertia and corruption that's been associated with war fighting since forever, I really don't think we can expect the Department of Defense to act in a sane manner. My gut tells me that we built the F-35 because we thought that's what we were supposed to do: come up with new, expensive tech that's better than the other guys.
We're going to need to get back to funding DoD to fight wars: real, live, in-person conflicts where the other guys need to be convinced to stop fighting us. That's going to take a ton of re-organization and strategic planning that I don't see happening any time soon. (Also, agreed with your statement about tunneling money to contractors, and defending the country. We've come a long, terrible way from the idea of a citizen soldier defending his home.)