 |
| (Source) |
We need to stop fighting multiple undeclared wars all over the world without the full participation of the American People. If there was a Draft Lottery that meant the rich and well connected would be fighting, being injured, and dying overseas this situation would soon be rectified. This state of affairs is wasteful of valuable national treasure and additionally often places the burden of service on those who receive the least from our society.So off to the depth and breadth of the Internet I went, refining my search terms, reading here, rejecting there, until I arrived at one of the Smithsonian's websites where the opening graphic was found, examined, and found to be just what I was looking for.
The article (click on the link under the map above) was rather interesting, it's short, just a few paragraphs, but well worth your time. Pay special heed to the last paragraph. Go, read it, I'll wait right here.
While the Middle East and Afghanistan gets most of the press, did you notice that our troops are also engaged in combat of one sort or another on the African continent? While I did know that, I didn't know how widespread that involvement was.
Is our military overextended?
I think so.
What say you?
* Also known as the air boss, the air officer (along with his assistant, the miniboss) is responsible for all aspects of operations involving aircraft including the hangar deck, the flight deck, and airborne aircraft out to 5 nautical miles from the carrier. From his perch in Primary Flight Control (PriFly, or the "tower"), his assistant and he maintain visual control of all aircraft operating in the carrier control zone (surface to and including 2,500 feet, within a circular limit defined by 5 nautical miles horizontal radius from the carrier), and aircraft desiring to operate within the control zone must obtain his approval prior to entry. (Source)
Maybe that’s just what war is, now. Global small-scale operations, training allies, drone strikes, proxies...
ReplyDeleteYou can also argue (as the DoD tends to do when called on it, 40+ times and counting) that these “wars” are covered under the auspices of the 2001 AUMF. Congress seems reluctant to take the war powers back, maybe because then they’d be forced to think about and do uncomfortable things.
Yup, I think you're right. Congress needs to revisit that. Of course they won't, they have abrogated most of their responsibilities for quite some time.
DeleteAs to what war is, the things we're seeing now are skirmishes, not war. As long as the big bad wolves stay in their lair we're okay. But they seem to be waking up to the scent of possible weakness in the West. The rot is spreading from Europe outwards. Not good, not good at all.
Who was the Secretary of State who said " What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Twenty years of a global war on terrorism borne by a military drawn down after the fall of European Communism, hollowed out by eight years of SJW aided by over-priced weapon systems, poor maintenance, repeated deployments, need I go on? Not an isolationist but too many parts of this globe are tar pits and we need to stay out of them unless our national interests are at stake, not political considerations for a politician or industrial interests. Well, off my soapbox........ah... 34F out the backdoor. Enjoy the day Sarge.
ReplyDeleteMadeleine Albright - Not a fan.
DeleteI concur with all of your points Nylon12. (34F? Brrrrrrr!)
Gonna be 29 here, tonight, chance of snow on Friday night.
DeleteAh, October in Wisconsin.
DeleteA week of mid to low 80's as a high, and mid to low 60's at night. Dangit. Still too warm to not run the AC, but cool enough the AC doesn't run continuously.
DeleteWe're promised 70's and 50's next week. By the same people who said we'd all be dead by several hurricanes that never made it to shore (well, here, sucks to be the Bahamas.) So, well, I'll believe it when I feel it.
As to Mad Albright, not the brightest socialist in the bunch, wasn't she?
No, she was not.
DeleteThe counter for all those yellow Training/Assistance tags is that if the local guy is supposed to carry the fight, how else do you at least try to ensure he is, other than through face to face contact via T/A? And having been the Joint Exercise director for 3 years at the military advisory office in one of the country's on the chart, some of those T/A efforts morphed from counter-drug to counter-terror just to follow the budget money. Actual on-ground activities didn't really change.
ReplyDelete/
L.J.
Far too often the local guy's head isn't in the game, so if we want things handled, we have to be there.
DeleteIt's a mess L.J., I don't have an answer. But we're still over-extended.
Yeah, I'd rather train the local folks and have them do most of the fighting. The map also doesn't show some of the activities of covert spec ops, well, because they're covert! But the point is that a large portion of today's conflicts are best fought by small spec ops teams. Iraq would have been done and over with sooner if that had been tried before it was widely employed. And then of course the LightBringer pulled everyone out and let ISIS recover.
ReplyDeleteI'd rather not have to teach other people how to fight our wars. If it isn't a vital American interest, we shouldn't be there. Period. Full stop. Just my opinion.
DeleteI don't mind cutting the DoD (the F35 is the most wasteful program I've ever seen, although it does employ my Son-In-Law who's deploying). But we have the worst of both today - budget cuts (under Obama, at least) without mission cuts. I'd love to see the mission scaled back to only where we have a vital national interest. That's not Afghanistan, and almost certainly not Africa.
ReplyDeleteWe need to be a lot more focused on China and stop spreading ourselves so thin chasing "terrorist" wil-o-the-whisps.
Hear, hear!
DeletePersonally, I would like to see a firm definition of what EXACTLY our "national interests" mean. Seems to be one of those flexible terms that can be bent to mean whatever whoever wants it to mean to justify whatever action (typically military) whomever wants to go do.
ReplyDeleteWhy when we are asked to help, does it always seem to involve the US sending troops, money, and selling equipment ranging from airplanes down to pistols. ARE we being asked for help?? Or are WE (the State Dept, or others) going to the leaders of the country and saying you need to do things THIS way!! Are we looking at places all around the world, and say we could do that better? Even if we do do it better, isn't it better to let each country figure out things on their own? Our culture doesn't necessarily translate well to other countries around the world. Then we wind up fighting that country's armed forces a few years down the line, they don't have access to not only our equipment, but also our SOP's, making it easier for them to inflect major damage on us.
Not against helping out folks who have asked for help. But, just some things I wonder about at times. Just because you can do something, doesn't mean ya should. We need to be sure we are teaching folks how to fish, not doing the fishing for them when we do help.
A lot of the time we wind up doing the fishing.
DeleteWell, in defense of the map above, this isn't anything new. We've had military advisers spread out all over God's green acres, brown acres, yellow acres, snow covered acres, since WWII.
ReplyDeleteTo play Devil's Advocate... would you rather have all those people from all those crappy, corrupt, kleptocracies here in the US of A training on our turf or in their own crappy, corrupt kleptocracies? I thought so. Now, should we be charging them for training and for equipment? That's the real question. And the answer is very Trumpian, which is - Yes. We should be, if they are capable of it, charging them for our goods and services.
I see it as payback to what Royalist France, and even Royalist Spain, did for us during our Revolution. Both kingdoms, mosthly France, but some aid from Spain (food, a huge cattle drive from Mexico provided lots of beef and leather for our starving troops and nation) kept us in the fight. Without aid from both kingdoms we'd have had a much more difficult time of losing, which we eventually probably would have. France's fleet helped close English-controlled ports. France's Charleville muskets equipped many of our troops. And, as noted above, Spain provided other aid.
So, yeah, I can see using military advisers and material aid in protection of our allies and friends.
Now do our now 70+ years in Germany. Do we really need to be in that hellish country that sees us as their protector at the same time they actively work against us?
As to Endless War in Iraq, well, if Congress had gotten off their duffs and done their job, that poopshow should have looked like WWII, total war on all the bad guys, then rebuild, then get the fruck out, except, well, we're still there, like in Germany...
Trashcanistan coulda just been a spec-ops, then a stern warning that next time we'd get really frisky. Blow some mountain passes shut just to prove the point - like seriously cut them off from Pakistan - who, by the way, is NOT OUR FRIEND so quit treating them like they are. Come on, you can't convince me that higher ups in Pakiland didn't know Osamalamadingdong was't copping a squat for 10 friggin years on their turf? Yeah, no, I don't believe it either. What should have happened after we slabbed that dirtbag and most of his family was immediate withdraw of all US assets from Pakistan and completely cut them off from any aid. Fruck them. They knew and supported the Taliban at the same time they got rich off our people. Screw them and the Indian Elephant they rode in on.
Actually this is fairly new, at least since the mid-60s, not WWII.
DeleteKeep those people out, period. We don't need to train them anywhere unless there is a vital national interest involved. (Which, like Suz says, needs to be codified.)
Countries don't have friends, they have interests. We help allies according to the terms of a treaty, which if it isn't written down, isn't a treaty.
Iraq would have never looked like WWII,. no matter how we fought it. An alien culture, they might as well be from a different planet.
Afghanistan was a mistake since Billy Jeff flung Tomahawks at freaking tents. As for Pakistan? Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.
Everyone needs to get off the SPECOPS bandwagon, they are NOT a panacea to solve all the ills of the world. Not even close. They're good for Bin Laden-type raids, period.
My opinion, I could be wrong, but history says otherwise.
At the same time, we need to clean up all the spying and passing of technical data to the RedChinese. People need to hang, or ride the lightning, publicly, openly for selling out our nation to the ChiComs. From Bowie Bergdahlesque little people all the way up the chain to as high as it gets. Burn out the rot, seize their assets, kill, maim, destroy, and stop the endless spying by foreign powers upon us.
ReplyDeleteBurn. Crush. Mutilate.
There should be NO US Citizen working, secretly or directly, for those commie bastards. Screw everyone. How long has it been known that that Red Menace has been openly stealing our tech, our secrets, our everything? Since at least the Clintons, those commie-loving pair from Hell itself. All thanks to Carter normalizing trade with them (tough luck on the broken pelvis, you piece of carp!) Nixon did us no favors either. Sorry, the only 'China' we should have ever recognized is Taiwan.
Look around any defense contractor, guess how many American citizens of Chinese descent still have relatives on the mainland? A lot.
DeleteChina is not our friend, no matter how much money the NBA makes off of them.
As to our own military. Sigh. So much damage. Too much reliance on 'pie-in-the-sky' tech fostered on us by military officers who suspiciously leave service and get hired by the companies that the PITS Tech is coming from. Something wrong there.
ReplyDeleteToo much reliance on 'feelings' and rainbowing our military forces, not enough emphasis on 'killing people, breaking things, walking away.' (The true American Way. Stomp it, stomp it hard, curb stomp what's left, clean your shoe from all the stomping, give the wide-eyed kid who watched it some candy, move to next curb-stomp, repeat. That, and only that, should be the answer once the awesome American steps on foreign shores... Curb Stomp, Candy, Move On.)
Fix our stuff, now. Ford? Fix it, now! F-35, which is actually becoming a reasonably nice plane, Fix it NOW! Next-gen IFV? Quit hoping for PITS. Base platform, build it more powerful NOW, and add stuff When It Actually Works. Next-gen MBT or Light Tank? Base now, funny stuff later. But NOW!
HMMMMMMMMMV replacement? NOW!!!!
Cheaper, Better, Faster, it's What America Does Best, so let loose the leash of American minds and GET IT DONE!!!! NOW!!!!!.
And put a real gun on the Zumwalt. Geeze, you had plenty of chances to fix that piece of carp...
The real problem is building that PITS tech and only then trying to find a mission for it. I'd fire everyone above the rank of O-6. Today.
DeleteAnd any of our feckless 'allies' who don't want to hold their weight? Toss them to the curb. Screw it. Don't want to protect yourself while living in the lap of luxury? We're not supposed to be mercenaries, but if you want to treat us that way, fine, then pay for it. Paying you to protect you? Nu-huh. Nut up, cough up the dough, or we're out of here(or there, or everywhere.)
ReplyDeleteIt's called Quid Pro Quo. Either we get something, or you don't get something. Something may be money, oil, other natural resources or basing privileges. But Grow Up, and Pay up!!! (Looking furiously at Germany...)
If our "allies" don't abide by the terms of the relevant treaty, tear it up. Not just Germany, most of NATO is guilty of not pulling their weight.
Deleteagree that China is not our friend - and countering them is in our national interest - and I think if you look closely at several of those places we are deployed (Africa, e.g.), at least where some of our spec ops folks are deployed (again Africa, e.g.), you'll find that China is very much behind the scenes there. And there are many places where a spec ops team can have a tremendous effect (as in Executive Outcomes and Nigeria) but very much agree they are not a panacea and must be used for things in their wheelhouse.
ReplyDeleteChina is trying to make inroads into Africa, and yeah, that's a problem. I think China is trying to get us to overextend ourselves, they have the numbers, that's for sure.
DeleteGreat post yesterday and great post today. I think I've detected a multi-year trend!
ReplyDeleteMuch here to comment on but I'm late to the game today. Might take a stab over at my place, there's fodder enough here for several stabs. Yes, I'll wear kevlar gloves and eye pro. :)
Can't wait to see your thoughts on this!
Delete