What A Time To Be Alive!
While I don’t fully understand the details of the Reserve/IRR call-ups in a time of “peace”, I do know enough to recognize that it sounds like a Bad Thing™. Big Country Expat has a couple of posts that help explain: Der Schwerpunkt und Unser Arsch ist Gras… Wir sind SOOOOOOOOO tot… and 3D Printed Claymores, The IRR and Improvised Mortars plus a funny Angry Meme Review from Angry Cops….
Like I said, from what I can figure out on my own this is a weird and pretty concerning development. I also know this, my sons will get drafted to go die in Ukraine so some little Jewish comedian playing soldier dress-up can pocket a few more shekels quite literally over my dead body.
What seems more concerning is that they are calling up all of these guys who by most accounts are close to my age and many out of shape when we already have a standing armed forces of over 1.3 million personnel.
That brings up the other Big Point™. The U.S. famously spends upwards of a trillion dollars per year on “defense” and that ain’t peanuts as you can see.
That is more than the next ten countries combined, and the last one of those next ten is Ukraine and they are mostly spending money we gave them to pay for their military (and Zelenskyy’s summer homes and wardrobe of ladies undergarments). The question is, where the hell is all of that money going?
For my entire life I have heard endlessly that the U.S. has the best equipped and most technologically advanced military the world has ever seen. This has been especially true since the end of the Cold War, bolstered by our double mauling of the Iraqi army. It was a new experience back in 1991 during Desert Storm with 24-7 news on CNN. Live or nearly live footage of the combat, correspondents on the ground in the Middle East, briefings with General “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf. No more of this reading a letter from Ike to the boys before they hit Normandy, now the top brass was giving live pressers at the top of the hour. With the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact in shambles and China a non-entity militarily at the time, beating up Iraq reinforced that we were invincible.
After creating a new “crisis” on September 11th and the amorphous and unending “War On Terror”, the U.S. military-industrial complex had a new excuse for spending so much money but as Iraq was pretty much over and after the disastrous pull-out from Afghanistan, there didn’t seem to be as much call for outspending the rest of the industrialized world on our military. Like magic here comes a territorial dispute in Eastern Europe and suddenly low IQ people were posting “Slava Ukraini!” and adding the Ukrainian flag to their profile pictures. I would say conveniently forgetting that a year earlier Ukraine was still being criticized for corruption and for having “lItErAl nAzIs!” in the Azoz Battalion, but none of these idiots knew Ukraine was a country, much less where it was, until the media told them Ukraine was The Most Important Thing Ever.
Like magic we have a new Evil Empire, same as the old Evil Empire. From out with the Soviet and in with the Islamist terrorist to out with Muzzies and back in with Russia.
But Houston, we have a problem. It seems the vaunted American hardware isn’t faring so well against people that can shoot back. Big Country talks a bit about this in the links above. In World War II, our G.I.s went to war with M-1 Garand rifles and Sherman tanks. We had technologically advanced, for the time, weaponry but it was mostly geared at being functional. Today our armaments seem to be technological whizz-bang doodads for the sake of being cool and function is a secondary concern. An account on Twitter, Idaho Respecter 40K, has been posting about the V-22 Osprey and what a shitshow that has been.
I am not sure I agree with everything they say but this was interesting:
The U.S. could easily spend a fraction of what we do and still defend the homeland plus have a presence on the high seas but the cost of running a global empire, as well as being prepared to go overseas to Europe and/or Asia to fight a near-peer adversary? Their argument is that we would need to spend a LOT more to maintain that. The other side of that is the Osprey, the gee whiz cool tiltrotors craft that apparently costs almost $80,000 per hour to fly the damn things, when it actually runs and doesn’t kill soldiers in crashes. More…
He keeps using the word “sustainable” and offered this chart:
As an non-expert the story these tweets and the above chart tell can be summed up:
The U.S. military relies on high tech superiority but not only is our vaunted high tech weaponry not performing as sold but it also requires unsustainable levels of spending to maintain.
Again, I am not a military expert but that seems like a problem and I am morbidly fascinated to think about what will happen when the stuff we have been spending trillions on is put to the test in a real fight and…..fails spectacularly.
Maybe it won’t happen, hell it probably won’t happen, but we are on a trajectory that puts us on a collision course with the Russians and/or Chinese and if that happens, it will be total war like we haven’t experienced since the Civil War. Maybe not in actual combat on the mainland but if this thing pops off and the ChiComs stop the container ships and the Russians start hacking power plants and government servers? The resulting chaos might be even worse. Sure China relies on American consumers to buy their stuff but I think in a trade embargo we would blink a lot faster when the anti-psychosis meds and other pharmaceuticals that keep Americans functioning suddenly stopped.
Bad times are a’coming.