Not to paint with too broad a brush
...but I heard this interview with an economist discussing the basic incompetence of the administration. The administration has made huge policy choices with absolutely no idea of their costs or alleged benefits. I'll post it below. It reminded me of my encounter with at a relatively young age with Lawrence Korb. Basically, an economist who had been an assistant Defense Secretary or something like that. He was the guest speaker in a classroom setting. We had to read his defense economics text.
Korb's whole message was analysis of opportunity cost in policy making, decision making and management. Sometime, possibly a decade or so later, I read a book about W. Edwards Deming and his contribution to war production management during WWII, and the subsequent introduction of his production management techniques to the Japanese automotive industry. At the time Detroit wasn't interested in his ideas. Then, they were dominating the US domestic automotive market and didn't see the need. The US economy suffered greatly in the following years as a result.
Currently, the F-35 is cited as the model of corruption in the defense industry. The aircraft is overpriced, too complex, has poor op ready rates, high maintenance costs, short range, low payload, you name it.
There are no doubt, many other examples, our newest aircraft carrier, the littoral combat ship, and the C-46 air refueling plane, just to name a few. All of these programs plagued with cost overruns, failure to meet mission requirements, and burdened with technical problems.
Why is this? Incompetence and greed. Cost-benefit analysis, quality control, technical competence, all basically sacrificed on the altar of greed.
I read a report within the last couple of years about a French NATO combat exercise that was supposed to move a combat brigade to northern Italy or Croatia or something like that. For practical purposes they couldn't do it effectively. The way it was described was embarrassing. The US is in a somewhat similar situation. It's tactical and strategic operational concepts are outdated, inappropriate, and unsustainable.
BAS ran an article more than five years ago, on the shortcomings and vulnerabilities of our strategic nuclear forces command structure and the imminent danger of the concepts of preemptive nuclear strike, tactical nuclear strike, and launch on warning. Has it been fixed? I doubt it. We in more danger than ever because of the incompetence of the individuals in power, who may not recognize the ultimate vulnerability. No risk of nuclear war is acceptable. Bush II, adopted the national defense strategy, of preemptive nuclear war, to compensate elsewhere, if a substantial military threat to US national security emerged, during our second war with Iraq. That policy hasn't been changed as far as I know. Nuclear war is not a viable choice.
Loose cannons: The president and US nuclear posture
The buildout of military bases around the world far exceeds our ability to use them effectively to defend an overextended empire. The logistical means of support, the supply chain, doesn't exist. Oh well. Bombing campaigns alone don't win wars. Any competent strike planner or historian of modern warfare knows this. Gunboat diplomacy is not a viable military strategy. Ostensibly, if the military budget is raised from a trillion to a trillion and a half dollars, that will be addressed. Don't think so.
These shortcomings are compounded by the innate inability of the empire managers to conduct effective diplomacy. I read a critique of the current "negotiations" related to the self inflicted Iran crisis that observed the administration was incapable of a "step by step" negotiating process. No kidding. I wrote extensively about this in relation to the failed US negotiations with North Korea during the first Trump administration. The Biden administration did nothing to remedy this. As a result, North Korea now has an arsenal of nuclear weapons and an ICBM capability believed to be capable of striking the US. Good job!
The important thing is that those materially involved in the continuing corrupt enterprise are getting filthy rich. Who needs to be competent enough to address these problems? I can confidently guess that anyone who pointed out any of the forgoing mistaken policy choices over the last several decades in a professional capacity probably lost their job or suffered the "whistleblowers" fate. If you are on the gravy train, why point out that it's hell bound? There's no money in that.
I think these two video's below are possibly illustrative of the dynamics at work. The first from skritter in human terms. Maybe three mule skinners can do better than one "genius:"
The second, an interesting discussion of a purported critique of the military genius of Zhuge Liang by Mao:
Comments
The terms used in your essay are appropriate
.
and indicative of failed military policy in general.
Perhaps it goes with the territory, but a self described
war economy elevates the grifters while wasting resources.
Incompetence, greed, corruption and ineffectiveness are
bound-in to lacking strategic goals.
Thank you for your analysis.
Zionism is a social disease
Morning Q!
Hope you're doing well! Thanks for your comment.
I'm amused this am, by a meidas touch video, in which Ben Meiselas discusses the incident over the weekend reported by Larry Johnson in which General Kaine failed to cooperate with the President's request for "nuclear codes." In the video, Ben discovers Judging Freedom, and Larry's report on this topic. This exemplifies for me, the stovepipe of liberal commentary on foreign policy issues.
Trump PANICS as Generals HIDE NUCLEAR CODES?!!
Ben presents a series of video clips after showing Larry and Ritter comments on the topic, that demonstrate the president's very fuzzy thinking and inappropriate comments on "nuclear testing." Some of the critical commentary, like that of John Bolton is so hypocritical, it beggars belief that Ben uses a clip of his comments.
How did the meidas touch video fail to cite the president's warning that a "whole civilization will die?" To me this is the threat that lends credence to Larry's report.
己所不欲，勿施于人。
Good morning, Soryang. Some of this was somewhat foretold
by Lasswell:
The Garrison State
Harold D. Lasswell
American Journal of Sociology
Vol. 46, No. 4 (Jan., 1941),
You don't need o observe French NATO exercises involving other nation states. Years back as part of a drill putatively about civil defense or some such but really practice for shutting down protests they ran a drill for sending a chunk of the CA National Guard from Camp Roberts, down in Central CA, up to Sacramento by road. They got lost.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Hi EL!
Yes, I remember a more recent similar incident in CA. I think it was a USMC commemorative event in which artillery was firing over the interstate.
Found it:
己所不欲，勿施于人。
Yes, complete with a defective prematurely exploding
artillerey round raining shrapnel on the freeway and a cop car. Luckily the Governor had closed the highway over the protests of the USMC that absolutely nothing could go wrong and the expected self-investigation wherein the USMC determined that "this should not have happened". Yeah, duh,
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Never read the Lasswell article
I just read the abstract. Seems prophetic. Thanks for the link, EL.
己所不欲，勿施于人。
I read it in high school, no longer really sure what all it
says but recall that one manufactures military hardware in order to destroy or scrap it which keeps the economy churning along. Should probably re-read it someday.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Not to put too fine a point on it
.
.
but military vets are demonstrating their stance
against the senseless policies being enacted.
The video included is powerful. Conscience Objectors unite.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/veterans-protest-iran-war
Zionism is a social disease
Good articles over there
I liked the one on a Carp, too. AI and war, sounds great, right? What could possibly go wrong?
己所不欲，勿施于人。
Yeah, right
.
Unfortunately AI does not 'learn' from its mistakes.
Since war is a mistake in essence and the programmers
are unaware of the failure of logic for the task, failure is a given.
Zionism is a social disease
The Administration appears competently insane to me
Hi Soryang:
I stopped reading and started skimming when I saw this opening:
The problem is not with the logic of this essay, which is impeccable, and well done. The problem is with our common notion that economics is a science. Economics is not a science, not even by the definition of science according to which anthropology is a science. Rather, economics is a mode of authoritarianism, much in the same way in which the Roman class structure of two thousand years ago, or the Indian caste system of until recently, was a mode of authoritarianism.
The economics people, of course, know how to sell their coercion better. The neoliberals rip the mask off of economics in the most effective way. The neoliberals, who call their coercion "freedom," wanted, and want, to force everyone to participate in "markets" for the purpose of acquiring the most basic of necessities.
The idea that economics is based on force is even mentioned in Kees van der Pijl's Survey of Global Political Economy, pages 30 and 31:
No one can AFFORD to ignore it, then, because it's being shoved down our throats. Economics is a science, then, in much the same way in which a military draft is a science. We are inducted into it. The difference, of course, is that since it's "money," and because it pumps us up to think we "have" money, we think of money as "economic freedom," whereas the important fact is that when the bills come due we are in fact economic slaves.
Okay, so, back to the content of this essay. Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner encapsulated our present-day economy as follows:
All of the criticisms of military procurement listed in this essay, all of them correct, can be explained in this short quote of Riley and Brenner. The purpose of the entity we here in the US call "the Federal government," under the current system, is to make rich people happy, to give them what they want (which is mostly "more for me") for the government they purchased. The Zionist billionaires, moreover, have an especially insane item on their wish list: "Greater Israel." The point, then, is not to defend "America," an entity not currently being attacked by any other nation-state. Rather:
"Saying 'The lesser evil is good enough' is how we got to this point in time.” -- Dystopian Daily
Right Cass...
...they know the costs and benefits to themselves. That's the only thing that matters to them. The role of compromised ethics and betrayal of trust are evident.
I still think that outcomes of policies can be quantified. Stiglitz estimated the costs of the last two voluntary wars. Of course, it's theoretical, and it's biased assuming the posture of being able to measure the costs to the "national interest." Power is always a factor in the justification of a decision to expend public resources. Hanke expresses some opinions about the consequences of this administrations policies being indicative of heedless decision making, likely to have bad outcomes, although not so bad as to affect US power to great degree in the future, because of this and that. I don't necessarily agree with his bias there. I have no way to prove he's wrong, except to note that the trend of these elective wars since WWII has been quite negative. This is my subjective viewpoint.
I liked Said's discussion of bias, prejudice, whatever one likes to call one's subjective interest in a particular "science," which in his book, was the so called "field of orientalism." I think it applies to all the humanities. I'm not a scientist, I'm not a philosopher. Most of what I opine is based both on my education and experiences, as limited or narrow as they are.
I still think competence is very much an issue, and that people need to consider the reasonably foreseeable consequences of both their decisions and actions. The problem with the ruling class and their politicians is that they are by and large unaccountable. I think the consequences of policy can be quantified to some extent, although only selectively depending on the observer. They can also be compared to alternative policy decisions; very little of that has been done with respect to military policy for several decades, it is at bottom a reflection of corruption. Nevertheless, a poorly designed aircraft in the end does cost more. Poorly considered policies and decisions by officials and other leadership result in unnecessary loss of life and other costs that should be contemplated in advance with the hope at least of more desirable outcomes.
I've become so pessimistic about matters like this, I hesitate to express myself. It sounds naive. I get the feeling, is this really happening again? I think commentators who allude to the Titanic are on the right track.
Thanks for your comments. I think your discussion is worthwhile and appreciate it.
己所不欲，勿施于人。
Economics is a religion. It is not empirical and often slides
into the anti-empirical. It is, instead, faith based or at least belief based and usually self-fulfilling. Dogmatic faith based self-fulfilling truth systems are, in common parlance, called cults. That's really all there is to it.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
I took a course
in history that focused on the influence of economics. At all times, in all sources, economics is a theory.
A course I took when working on an MBA also devoted a section of the course on the influence of economic theory and its' influence on manufacturing and marketing.
Science? Does this mean I am in a lab when I put together my income tax documents for the scientific bookkeeper?
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
It's presented like baseball
Rule, check, balances. Reality is, politicians give the zillionaires breaks and opportunities to gain wealth, and in return they kick back some of those boons to politicians so they can gain in wealth. see: N. Pelosi, B.Obama.
Traditional tricks of US pitchmen & their trade: about snake oil
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-snake-oil-became-a-symbol-...
The whole field of economics seems like ideological snake oil to me. Economists dump on Trump? Pot calling kettle black.
End Times Theory
Very interesting interview with Hanke and even more interesting note about Trump pitching an oval office fit and wanting access to the nuclear codes -- only to be told, "No!"
How to make sense out of this bizarre state of affairs?
I have put my own conspiracy theory aside during Trump II. But I suddenly remembered it this morning.
I start with Isaac Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy" -- a sci-fi classic that tells the story of a galaxy that has gotten complacent and stagnant after thousands of years of peace and prosperity, to solve the riddle of how to reform the stagnant culture of galactic civilization.
The story starts with a real smart guy named Hari Seldon who comes up with a scheme to reset civilization. Over the course of three books (derived from about a dozen sci-fi magazine stories)
Seldon and his associates and successors manipulate events from their mysterious and invisible base of operation to get rid of the original Galactic Empire so that the Second Empire could replace it with a True Democracy of Peace and Freedom.
It seems to me that if I had a hundred billion dollars in the bank, and some billionaire buddy asked me to join him in a project to save humanity from itself, I would jump in with both feet. In point of fact, I am a retiree who will probably find myself starving when Social Security runs dry. And writing on this board is my own lame and tiny effort to save humanity from itself.
In my purported paradigm, Trump is a poison pill. He kills the American Empire from the inside out. Can you, in your wildest imagination, conceive of a more effective way to bankrupt America than Donald Trump?
Most -- nearly all -- of the opinionating on Trump's War assumes that the effort is, arguably incompetent, but serious, about suppressing Iran.
Trump, himself, may be demented enough to think he is doing something smart, but his enablers know better.
And he will take the blame for the Next Depression as America repositions itself as part of the Third World.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
I enjoyed the Foundation series too
I don't remember the plot very well, but the character I do remember was the Mule.
I posted reason 5 on Q's thread this am. I regard that analysis by Cenk significant as well as Larry's isolated report. Normally, I don't listen to the former, because he, as acknowledged in the video, is a party line liberal (imo). His mea culpa in that respect is similar to Carlson's. Cenk has always ridiculed "conspiracy theories," and let sleeping dogs lie. However in Larry's report, and reason 5, I detect insiders whatever their former posture in the state apparatus, deliberately sourcing these stories, with foundational elements that enhance the believability of the two respective reports, which are not reported to protect the identity of the sources.
Cenk however did some cya at the end imo, by making an unnecessary and prejudicial comparison to theories about aliens, which for purposes of evidential weight would not be allowed in a trial of the matter. I'm not opining on "alien" reports. They're just apples and oranges.
Thanks for your comment FWF.
己所不欲，勿施于人。
From broad brushes to finer points
.
painting a picture.
Build a little warehouse for your soul.
Zionism is a social disease