The military industrial complex exists to sell military hardware to the government. The success criteria is selling more of it. Actually accomplishing any specific mission is irrelevant.

I read this this sober assessment of the US military recently:

[An old school, dissident Deep State intel analyst] sees [the US-UK-Australian alliance] as all dressed up with nowhere to go: “As it stands now, China is in command of the Pacific and Australia and Britain mean nothing. Russia can overrun NATO in two weeks, our adversaries’ hypersonic missiles can destroy all NATO airfields within five to ten minutes and the battle for Europe would be over.”

He’s adamant that “the US cannot project power into the Pacific. Chinese submarine missiles would finish off the US fleet in short order. The Australian submarine issue is really irrelevant; if the CIA had an organization that was worth anything they would know that our adversaries already can spot and destroy our nuclear submarines without the slightest difficulty. The entire US Navy is obsolete and defenseless against Russian missiles.”

And it gets worse – at least for the cheerleading Knights: “The F-35 is obsolete. The Air Force is largely worthless, as Russian and Chinese missiles can finish off their airfields or aircraft carriers in short order. The woke US Army is more worthless than the French Army with their Maginot Line. The Joint Chiefs of Staff are paid less than 200k a year, and are second or third rate talent. The US is a sinking ship.”

You can try to ask me some specific questions and I’ll do my best to answer them. I’m a former troop and have been part of post colonial and imperial operations during my 2 deployments. I try to study stuff like this the best I can.

They're really good at spending money. Producing effective weapons is an occasional side benefit, but it does happen occasionally.

when you have nukes you don't really need to be competent

I was gonna post a twenty paragraph long thing, but I don't have time so to quickly summarize:

Without the influence of Congress, the arms companies be subservient to the military. Congress makes it the other way around. A large part of the competence of the high command can be judged by how well they manage this situation. War is a continuation of politics, so the ability of a general to manage political matters is the same thing as their ability to handle war. I don't mean is analogous to, I mean they are literally the same thing. There is no difference between the two.

I think the Navy has serious problems. The Air Force and the Marines seem to mostly have their shit together at the highest levels of command, but the Navy does not. They are routinely in the news for something embarrassing, like killing tons of sailors pretending covid doesn't exist, having an officer run to media to complain about being demoted for cheating in a wargame and wasting everyone's time, getting fucked by tiny European countries during joint exercises, buying warships that don't even function as a ship at a basic level and trying to cover it up and pretend its fine, somehow being caught by surprise by tech that other countries have been openly working on for years, etc.

The Airforce was forced to accept the F-35 against their will, but they have been doing damage control, keeping it in the media to try and turn the public against it, keeping the F-16 ready as their real frontline fighter. The Navy has their own similar projects, but they don't seem to be doing any damage control. They seem to want it even. They flip flop on things, and generally don't seem to have any future plans or direction.

What I think we are more interested in is the inwards facing part of the military. That would be the National Guard, mostly. The National Guard seems mostly competent. They were responsible for a good half of the COIN ops in the middle east these last few decades. That the thing where you terrorize the population into submission, basically. It's worthy of note that the majority of the publicized war crimes were not committed by the National Guard. This doesn't mean they are less evil, just that they are better at their jobs. Being known to have committed war crimes makes it harder to control the population.

During the George Floyd protests they performed extremely well. They were often perceived as the good guys in comparison to the police. Many videos of rioters putting them in difficult situations, and they would somehow find a way to stop things from escalating even when it seemed impossible.

They seem to be one of the only parts of the inwards facing security apparatus that is solid and competent, however. The tapping of everyone's phones and internet is a lot of data they don't seem to know how to analyze. They seem to be storing it with the plans of finding a way to use it later. Like, why would the FBI be dropping bait phones to people they think are terrorists if the NSA data was properly searchable and usable? Why would the CIA be doing these insanely specifically targeted cyber attacks against people to track them if the NSA wiretapping system actually worked?

However, DEA is weirdly competent, and nobody really talks about them here. We have no reason to believe they wouldn't be used in the same way the FBI is currently used if they felt threatened. The DEA and CIA have worked together a lot, and their operation style seems very similar to me. They torture people in the same way, they aquire extra funds in similar ways, they operate in other countries in the same manner, they seem to act like an extension of the CIA. They don't seem to have the same level of political connections, but they still have a lot. They were even founded to serve a similar purpose. The CIA suppresses potentially threatening minorities in other countries before they get too powerful, the DEA does it at home.

The DEA shows it doesn't care about the actual law even in the US, even when it comes to US citizens. They are a decently large organization. I really don't think they would hesitate to do a Jakarta in their home county if they felt it was necessary. I don't think they would wait for legal justification. It would just happen, before you expected it. They might not even have to go that far, the knowledge that they have records of everything you have done on the internet, every text you have sent or received would paralyze any resistance from the more moderate people who would otherwise be radicalized by something like that happening. It doesn't matter if they can actually use that data, the fear that they might be able to is enough.

And if it happened, how do you think the international community would react? They would be shitting themselves in terror, I bet. China is a "threat" because they are powerful enough they would be the only one with clean britches in such a scenario.

Kinda rambling now, but basically, don't make the mistake of thinking there is a limit to what they might do because it's in America. The DEA does CIA style terror stuff and it's accepted by the public because it's to stop drug dealers. What makes you think they wouldn't accept that to stop something perceived as a greater threat?

Sounds doomerish, remember the US is larger than Chile or Indonesia. They would have to be well coordinated enough to pull off three or four Jakarta's at the exact same time in different parts of the country for it to work. Plenty of chance for them to bungle it. But don't forget it's in the playbook.

Idk but the US military itself is considered pretty incompetent and undisciplined from what I hear

What it lacks in honesty, productivity, and good intentions it makes to for in bulk and its fundamental purpose in stoking and then profiting from imperialist wars.

It's massively wasteful but also still produces high-precision drones used on dense civilian targets in a war created through their lobbying 8000 miles away, torturing an entire country. And then they fight hard for that war to continue in perpetuity.

It's pretty bad. The huge amounts of red tape, the mediocre pay, and the drug policies in addition to the political side mean that the most talented STEM people in the US stay away from defense work. Now add in the fact that huge bureaucracies are always lumbering dinosaurs and the Exile's golden rule ("always bet against the American elites"), and yeah, the MIC ain't shit.