Oh look at that. End of the fiscal year and time to remind everyone that the only thing propping up our economy is the military-industrial-congressional complex.
It's a problem in the sense that the children aren't in the mines. /s
The capitalist will sell themselves their own undoing, but the profit margins will be amazing.
Indeed, and if you look back at the start of the war in Ukraine it's pretty clear that's what US thought of Russia. Now they're realizing they're fighting a peer competitor and it's not going well.
more charitably to US planning you could also conclude that America wanted to make the war costly for Russia but doesn't actually care about Ukrainian ownership of the Crimea or what happens to Ukraine
For sure, but even with that in mind I would argue that things have gone catastrophically wrong for US.
I'm not so sure of that. The war definitely proved that America shouldn't fight a direct war against Russia but everyone already knew that because of nuclear weapons.
The war was definitely more costly to the Russians than the gain is worth to them and America can recoup their losses by asset stripping what is left of Ukraine
You have to look at this in a greater context because Ukraine is only a small piece of the puzzle.
Geopolitical damage to US has been enormous already. US sanctions on Russia resulted in a whole new economic system developing outside the dollar. Russia now openly trades with countries like Cuba, Iran, and DPRK because they no longer worry about secondary sanctions. US has spent decades trying to isolate these countries and freeze them out of the global economy. US is being openly defied by majority of the world now, and has been unable to strong arm countries outside the west into following its sanctions on Russia. This has exposed the limits of US power globally. The BRICS is growing rapidly, and it's now a bigger economic bloc than the G7. Meanwhile, US and its allies are going into economic recession. The freezing of Russian assets by the west has shown countries that dollar based financial system is not safe. We're now even seeing US allies such as the Saudis and India turn away from US.
Militarily, US has been exposed as the emperor with no clothes. All the NATO wonder weapons are burning in Ukraine, and everyone can now see that there is nothing special about western technology or tactics.
Until the war started, it was taken as a given by majority of the world that US was an unchallenged hegemon and that nobody could stand up to it. If the war was avoided, then this myth could've been perpetuated for years to come. The war heralds the end of the unipolar moment that arose when USSR dissolved, and that's what makes it such a monumental blunder. The processes that have been started as a result of the war cannot be reversed.
that is a good point while this was bad for Russia. Russia have responded with closer ties to China which is definitely not what the US wanted and the way they so openly exposed US financial systems as potentially weaponisable really shook faith in them
Exactly, and it looks like Russia was far better prepared for this than US was.
I think America tried to do a repeat of supporting anti-soviet forces in afghanistan and likely forgot to account for China
I get the impression that US misread the moment in every way. They misjudged Russia, they misunderstood their own abilities, and failed to take Global South into account. It's hands down the biggest debacle US has suffered in living memory.
I dunno about that, the US did murder a million people in Iraq and occupy Afghanistan for two decades only for the Taliban to take over in like 3 days when they left. Give it a few more years to develop and then maybe it'll overshadow those two.
Sure, but those were localized debacles that didn't affect overall geopolitical position of US. Proxy war in Ukraine has done more to erode US geopolitical position than anything else US managed to do.
the doctrine assuming control of airspace should tell us something about what the military is for and does in practice
I highly doubt this. This is just an excuse to demand more funding for arms manufacturers.
The fact that making a profit is the main objective of arms manufactures is precisely why US military is ill equipped for high intensity combat. US arms manufacturers have incentive to produce expensive weapons that take a long time to manufacture and repair because that results in more funds being allocated to them. They also have an incentive to produce weapons in small volumes because the less they actually produce the lower their costs are.
Meanwhile, high intensity combat the kind of which we're seeing in Ukraine requires cheap weapons that are simple and reliable, and the ability to produce these weapons rapidly. This is basically the opposite of what US military industrial complex focuses on.
didn't the wehrmacht suffer from overly-engineered equipment that required maintenance and expertise to keep running?
They sure did, and then these same people went to US to design their weapons.
Their "indestructible" Tiger tank was famous for breaking the transmission all the time and being a pain to repair.
Soviet tanks were easy to fix.
USA itself also had that lesson once in the WW2, notice how (for famous example) submachine guns in the USA came from the original chicago piano to much simpler M1 and even that was too complicated so M3 was made. And even for the things that get more complicated like ships or planes, design and especially production was streamlined greatly, like building the 2700 liberty class vessels of which single ship took a month to build or 175 fletcher class destroyers. And note neither of those examples were really crap all served for decades after war.
USA weapon industry now is like gutter corner of Ferdinand Porsche brain, but greedier.
Arguably, it is more difficult to design and make a weapon system that would be cheap and reliable, as opposed to gimmick gizmo that costs like an apartment in Moscow and does a subpar job trying to replace some already existing system
In Starcraft 1 terms:
Ukraine is playing protoss but for some reason is only using very few scouts for air combat
Russia is playing terran more or less in a balanced attack force but is using siege tanks alot because they know they'll be able to outrange them in ground combat.
to make matters more interesting, the terran Russia already built an army and has all of the resoureces they need before the war started. The protoss Ukrainians don't have enough resources and the way that they build units are expensive as it is.
iirc there is a black panther pamphlet talking about ar15 and ak47, they point out that ar15 is excellent on paper and sell well, it is lighter, more rate of fire, and smaller caliber than the ak, but in practice doesn't work, the gun light weight and rate of fire makes it hard to control, and they couldn't stand the elements ans malfunctioned constantly while ak worked in the russian tundra to caribbean heat
I've always heard that AKs were basically the most reliable gun ever made in its class, but is the black panther AR-15 description out of date now? I've heard that after many iterations it's on par. I mean, it took them decades to reach parity if so, but regardeless, are they roughly equal now? Or is there major differences in quality or durability now?
idk, the pamphlet said that us soldiers would often carry aks from vietnamese soldiers they killed because m16 sucked ass, so probably wrote in the 60's.
as of today idk, ak did change a lot to and i don't see much "scientific" testing, most guntubers are american so they stand for their rifle, and since russia turned capitalist the profit motive is in the equation too.
so yeah, no ideia how is the best considering all factors
DOD cheaped out on ammo or some shit, the m16 could have done better for the imperialists at the time without changing the gun, but they fucked up.
today the ar-15 derivatives are probably better for most purposes because they take optics better and polymer is good and light, which you want because you're carrying your gun way more often than you're shooting it. If you're a nation-state fielding an army there might be supply chain considerations that would put you on AK derivatives instead.
for civilians you probably don't need a gun, and if you do need a gun you either need ten friends with guns too and matching your friends for spare parts and sharing ammo matters more than the platform, or you're hunting and you aren't terribly likely to want an ar-15 or ak at all.
bombs are probably better than guns but leftist violence would just be used as an excuse to crack down on everything so, you know, probably don't do any of that.
Newer versions of AK are still good. I seen video of AK104 test where it shoot something like 1000 bullets non stop, get so hot that the polymer front grip literally burned and it still worked.
The description is going to be out of date. The AR rifles were designed with bleeding edge materials, which bit it in the ass initially because the materials didn't match up to the intended specs. Things have gotten a lot better since then and ARs are just as reliable and usable as AKs.
tl;dr weapons made to sell instead of working will be their undoing
Half the military budget is from feds getting their kidneys grifted out of them by contractors (remember those 50k dollar trashbins?)
I fucking hate the term "warfighter". Fucking cult behavior, the Marines are the worst military branch for that.
