This is what startled me most. It’s right up there with “Now just one damned minute, Drill Sergeant!” It’s something you say immediately before you wish you’d never been borne. This guy’s got rocks the size of churchbells…whether in his pants or in his head is less clear.
Except that our industrial might isn’t what it once was. The very folks who’re needed right now are the ones who had their jobs outsourced to other countries since the Reagan Administration. Add to that, the fact that the “combat” portions of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have lasted a couple of months at best, thanks to the “videogame” nature of modern warfare, and people don’t see the reason to invest in starting up companies to take advantage of the war effort. Nevermind that folks are still dying in both those places and that the gear is needed desperately, when the war’s off the front pages after a couple of months, people don’t care anymore. Besides, if we do manage to beat the terrorists and the insurgents, the first thing the US will do is cut back on it’s defense spending. Which means all those people will be out of work, and those companies which investors poured billions of dollars into will be out of business.
Then there’s the fact that a lot of schools have been cutting out their vocational training programs, so the workforce with the necessary skills are getting older, and the number of folks filling the ranks is growing smaller (and the number of available jobs is even smaller still, since no one wants to hire extra employees for a short period of time, especially if the training costs are high [which they can be]).
Talk all you want about defense contracts being a gravy train, but as an employee for a military subcontractor, I can tell you that we’re nearly bankrupt, alot of our competitors are gone, and those that are left, like us, are begging for work from anybody they can get it.
Once again, goes back to the well-publicized and totally anticipated falilure to secure the Iraqi weapons depots, such as the one where we lost, what was it, 300 tons of high explosives? Once again, bad planning on Rumsfeld’s part, bad planning that was totally anticipated. Going to war with Iraq was a stupid idea, doing it the way Rumsfeld did it was FUCKING MORONIC!!!
:mad:
[QUOTE=Reeder]
[quote]
The IDF only seems more entrenched since then. Armored Humvees and tanks lined the roads…
What the hell is this supposed to imply, Reeder? That the evil Jews are controlling where the armor goes?
Armour of America was recently acquired by Arotech, which has extensive armoring operations of its own. One of these is an Israeli subsidiary, MDT Protective Industries.
Israel has its own military budget and its own need for armored Humvees. It’s hardly surprising that they’d use a domestic contractor to provide this service. And there’s little the U.S. can do about that, except to perhaps make use of the same firm.
http://www.homelanddefensestocks.com/Companies/HomelandDefense/Stock_News/Acquire_Armour.asp
What Mr. Moto says is true. But to be clear, Armour Holdings, the tiny company which might be able to do a few HMMWVs for Israel != Armor Holdings, the bigger company which can do 450/month for the U.S. Also, some of Armor Holdings’ production does indeed go to some foreign companies. I don’t know if they’ve re-directed current production or stopped taking foreign orders during the current production rampup.
For Christ’s sake. They’re BOMBS or MINES. Simple, clear, honest language.
I’m just glad that the left has a newly rediscovered desire to strengthen the military and buy them all the equipment they need.
Because lord knows, after every conflict ended in the past, they wasted no more than a week or so before wailing that the military was too big and that all these expensive armored vehicles and such just weren’t necessary…
The U.S. military goes into every conflict on a shoestring, because it’s always getting its budgets cut like mad as soon as a war is over. The U.S. had the largest military on the planet after WWII, and occupied half the freakin’ globe. Six years later, it could barely field enough troops for the Korean War. During the cold war it was a constant fight with Democrats to get the military funded properly. And of course, as soon as the cold war ended the Democrats had a feeding frenzy over how to spend the ‘peace dividend’, with some Democrats wanting to absolutely gut the military. After all, who’s left to fight? Ain’t gonna study war no more! Peace in our time!
To be fair, some on the right were doing the same thing after the cold war, including one Donald Rumsfeld. I remember bitching about his idiotic plan to abandon the ‘two front war’ doctrine right here on this board before 9/11 happened.
Maybe this time the lesson will stick. You don’t equip an army just for the threats you face today. You equip it for the threats you may face tomorrow. And use the worst-case scenario in your planning, because it usually turns out that way. And as we’re finding out in Iraq, it can take a long time to get an army up to speed.
Imagine how much easier it would be to manage this war with the army of 1992 - when there were 800,000 more Americans in uniform, including almost 300,000 more Army soldiers.
Cite, please.
I would like to see objective evidence that, during the Cold War (which I will assume was from the end of World War II to 1989) Democrats did a disproportionate amount of the cutting of defence budgets.
As I understand, the threats of tommorow was part of the problem. Maybe as far back as the Clinton administration, the military has wanted to go light and fast instead of entrenched and armored. I remember some projects being cut from the budget (armored vehicles, a tank or two) being cut because they weren’t the sort of rapid response items the military was looking for.
It’s not just a matter of funding, but of putting the money into the right projects. We seem to be putting all of our eggs in one strategic basket. One quick but fragile lil basket.
I’m not sure how to ‘cite’ a general trend. I can point to lots of individual Democrats that advocated serious cuts in funding (including John Kerry’s desire to cut 6 billion from the intel budget after 9/11), but you can always find someone who disagrees. I could point to the large amount of support in the Democratic party for things like nuclear freezes, opposition to the Bradley fighting vehicle, the cruise missile, the MX missile, the Pershing missile, various ballistic subs, the M1 Abrams tank, and all kinds of other weapons systems. But you can always find someone who disagrees and cites that.
So I offer as evidence my experience fighting these cuts in the U.S. and Canada. And of course, Canada did elect Liberals, and look at our military.
Harborwolf said:
This is all true, and valid points. An example of a system like this was the Crusader, which was too big to be carried by anything but heavy airlift, and which wasn’t needed for the kinds of wars that are being fought today.
But if anything, there is a need for MORE personnel. The type of threats the U.S. faces in the future will probably involve easy military victories, but very, very difficult occupations. So the army needs to be different. Lighter, more agile, rapid response…sure. But that doesn’t mean smaller.
To their credit, the Democrats are pushing for this, from what I can tell. And for some reason, the Bush administration is opposing it. They’re wrong, the Dems are right. Glad to see the Democrats coming on board. I just hope they have the stomach to stay for the long haul, and don’t start calling for major cuts the minute the current conflict ends.
During WWII, the founder of Halliburton Oil turned his company over to Roosevelt to be used in whatever way was necessary for the good of the country. Citizens were also asked to save scrap metal for the war effort. More could have been done if our leaders had set their minds to it or asked the country to sacrifice a little.
Why haven’t the women and men had all of the personal protective gear they’ve needed? It has certainly been available. Private families have bought it. I’ve heard it was even available on eBay.
Meanwhile, how many millions has the Defense Department wasted on unused airline tickets, etc.?
The young guardsman from Tennessee is bound for Iraq.
Shit, sweetheart, today I was forced to sit listening to O’Reilly while trapped in a car with my boss. Even Bill Fucking O’Reilly blames basically everything that has happened in Iraq from the moment the invasion started on “bad planning”.
-Joe fucking Joe
Well, Zoe, at least my employer does care. Since 9/11 he’s given a discount to our military customers and shifted their orders to a priority status.
Umm…Moto?
Admittedly, you’re dealing with reeder here, but I think you’re reading into what he said what you wanted to hear from that loon, and not what he was saying.
Israel is involved in a…let’s say “contested occupation operation” and has been since before I was born. They, apparently, have decided that it’s smart to armor all their vehicles because in a COO your troops are in danger at all times from anti-occupation forces.
And now you have the USA involved in its very own COO. Instead of learning from the lessons of one of their closest strategic partners, they instead send a bunch of underarmored vehicles, something their allies learned a long time ago.
So, basically, why is it that the Israelis have their vehicles armored? Because what the USA has been involved in for a year and a half the Israelis have been involved in for thirty.
I suppose, though, that armoring your vehicles messes up Rummie’s “fast, light, cheap” style of fighting a war.
-Joe
Sam Stone:
Coming on board? Sounds to me like they’ve had it right the whole time.
How many nuclear submarines did you need for the action in Afghanistan? How many were used in Iraq? How many multi-million dollar fighter jets were needed? On the one hand you agree with the idea of a revised army to face today’s challenges. Yet you suggest the means for that to be equipment that wasn’t used once in any recent military action.
To suggest that the U.S. should have kept the enormous military of 1992 “just in case of days like today…” is ludicrous. How about using the military for what it was meant for (“choke it off and kill it”) and let the nation builders do the occupying.
I wonder why that is.
I would love a cite of any country, any time in the history of the world, that continued to maintain an army at wartime levels in times of peace. That just doesn’t make economic sense.
I don’t think you understand the concept. It called for using vehicles like armored HMMWVs and Strykers more rather than less. The “fast and light” refered to relying less on heavy armored vehicles like the Abrams and Crusader. The plan is to have a force that is less reliant on Armor (with a capital A, as in tanks), CONUS based, more deployable and more flexible.Getting more M1114s into the inventory will allow the planned restructuring to happen quicker. The restructuring was planned before 911 and was actually derailed for a time by the GWOT. I understand and agree with the basic concept of the restructuring but I disagree with a lot of the implementation.
It called for scaling down the big armor in favor of more of the little armor. Any monkey can understand that. And it’s probably even a good idea of you’re going to, say, rush into a nation, demolish the enemy military, and force a surrender from their leaders.
It’s not such a good idea if your military is going to spend a good chunk of their time driving in convoys (though “safe areas”) from a fixed starting point to a fixed destination that the enemy can predict.
Rumsfeld designed and is implementing the wrong kind of army for the wrong kind of war. And now troops are dying because he and his boss were so convinced that the Iraqis would be throwing flowers instead of bombs. Then, when bombs did get thrown it was obviously nothing but displaced Baathists and foreign fighters. Because they couldn’t possibly have been wrong!
But, hey, why should he suffer for it? It looks like in this cabinet the two biggest fuckups are on the list to stay…and one of them even got a promotion.
-Joe
Nietsche, you might be interested in this account. Some of the first Tomahawk cruise missiles fired into Afghanistan were from Los Angeles class nuclear powered subs just like the USS Providence.
Sub launched cruise missiles were used in the Iraq war as well.
From this site, we learn that a single carrier-based squadron equipped with the F/A-18E/F strike fighter dropped 380,000 pounds of ordinance on Iraqi targets. This was just one of several Navy squadrons involved, and doesn’t include Air Force participation, which I’m too lazy to look up right now.
You’re obviously not well informed in this particular topic, so I wonder how you can make your assertions with such confidence.