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Welcome to the Decade of Concern

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Re: Welcome to the Decade of Concern

#31

Post by leereeves »

BelenusMordred wrote: post #29
dragontamer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If China attacks Taiwan with its newly minted aircraft carriers and large fleets of smaller ships, who will defend them? Now, I'm pretty sure the USA still beats China in a fair fight. But if the USA is playing defense with Taiwan, the picture is very different. China is far closer and therefore has more nearby support: in particular, air support and cruise missiles. In a neutral fight, keeping our fleets outside of…

Nuclear armed countries fighting direct hot wars will be decided in a few hours. It's astounding to think that some people still subscribe to this idea of a gentleman's battle with both sides agreeing to not use their full capability while the other is killing their own.

Nuclear weapons would probably be used in case of invasion of either nation's homeland, but lesser non-nuclear conflicts are possible. For example, both India and Pakistan have had nuclear weapons since at least 1998. Neither used them in the Kargil War in 1999 or any of the skirmishes they've had since.

Re: Welcome to the Decade of Concern

#32

Post by AussieWog93 »

paulz_ wrote: post #17

I have no knowledge of this field. Certainly not enough to know if the article is accurate (haven't ever heard of this blog till now). But many of the claims seem well cited. If this is true...how maddening. How can you spend more than the next 10 countries combined and still mismanage your way into this predicament? Is there anything lumbering bureaucracy cannot destroy?

There's a dead reply to this original comment that reads: "I also liked this article but then remembered the F-35 and have a super hard time thinking we need more investment. Blame the bureaucrats all you want (I'm with you), but I'm no longer sure we even know how make the right things."

I think he makes a fair point. It's not just the bureaucrats. At least in the civilian space, we don't know how to make the right things any more. The ambitiousness of new projects as well as the quality of consumer goods have both been in decline for decades.

In the military space, the deliberate undermining of field serviceability in order to secure more profitable maintenance contracts is a genuine security risk to the entire democratic world.

Given the amount of blatant corruption in the industry (look at the Halliburton contracts in Iraq for a recent example), it is more complex than simply "increase the budget". The fact that private industry in China serves the interest of the government (and not vice-versa) is a massive advantage they hold over us.

Re: Welcome to the Decade of Concern

#33

Post by [deleted] »

BelenusMordred wrote: post #29
dragontamer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If China attacks Taiwan with its newly minted aircraft carriers and large fleets of smaller ships, who will defend them? Now, I'm pretty sure the USA still beats China in a fair fight. But if the USA is playing defense with Taiwan, the picture is very different. China is far closer and therefore has more nearby support: in particular, air support and cruise missiles. In a neutral fight, keeping our fleets outside of…

Nuclear armed countries fighting direct hot wars will be decided in a few hours. It's astounding to think that some people still subscribe to this idea of a gentleman's battle with both sides agreeing to not use their full capability while the other is killing their own.

[deleted]

Re: Welcome to the Decade of Concern

#34

Post by nemothekid »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #32
paulz_ wrote: post #17

I have no knowledge of this field. Certainly not enough to know if the article is accurate (haven't ever heard of this blog till now). But many of the claims seem well cited. If this is true...how maddening. How can you spend more than the next 10 countries combined and still mismanage your way into this predicament? Is there anything lumbering bureaucracy cannot destroy?

There's a dead reply to this original comment that reads: "I also liked this article but then remembered the F-35 and have a super hard time thinking we need more investment. Blame the bureaucrats all you want (I'm with you), but I'm no longer sure we even know how make the right things." I think he makes a fair point. It's not just the bureaucrats. At least in the civilian space, we don't know how to make the right…

> I think he makes a fair point. It's not just the bureaucrats. At least in the civilian space, we don't know how to make the right things any more. The ambitiousness of new projects as well as the quality of consumer goods have both been in decline for decades.

I don’t think it’s something that was lost. Rather, as time went one, more and more focus went into financialization of these firms to the detriment of providing people with actual stable jobs and growth. Every industry other than software is pretty much unattractive for anyone talented. Why would you slave away at Boeing making maybe 75k when you can make almost triple that at Facebook?

I make the comparison to software because even though we, the hacker news reader & software guru, complain about boneheaded product decisions from Google; American software is just a leagues better than the rest of world (even if it’s in ways we don’t like, like Surveillance). This level of quality is driven by motivated individuals with great incentives, respected by peers and somewhat clear career paths driven by launching great products.

Contrast that with the 737MAX, which engineers knew they were building a clown car and felt powerless to do anything about it. Not to say that FAANG doesn’t have internal power struggles, but the 737 is Boeing’s baby at the largest aeronautics company in the world. I doubt you would see similar dysfunction on Google’s AdWords team.

While the CCP is able to completely bend private industry, I don’t think it requires an authoritarian government, but I have no solutions. In the case of Halliburton, it’s unsurprising that when you focus on figuring out how siphon government funds into the pockets of executives while doing the bare minimum to deliver on product you end up with crippled infrastructure 20 years later. It’s not that we forgot how to make things right, we simply never invested the resources to do things right at all

Re: Welcome to the Decade of Concern

#35

Post by torstenvl »

refenestrator wrote: post #27
torstenvl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to claim that everything in the DoD is well-managed, but don't discount the advantages China has in gaining more advantages. The PLA never has to cut its budget due to a lack of political will, and China has no qualms about riskier espionage that may get more agents killed or captured but results in being able to steal more advancements in military tech.

'Lack of political will to shovel money through the DoD' doesn't seem to be an issue in the US.

That is objectively and obviously false. Why would you say something you know (assuming you read the OP) to be untrue?

Military spending has gone from 4.89% of GDP in the first year of the Obama Administration to ~3.3-3.4% of GDP in recent years. That's a huge decrease.

There's also alllll the times that military appropriations have been a political football. A lot of DoD folks have had to report to work unpaid multiple times over the past couple years. Many of them later got backpay when a budget was passed, but not all.

You may not care about the morale and dedication of those people, but this isn't a values-based or tribal-loyalties based discussion. It is an objective fact that China doesn't have to deal with this process and the resulting inefficiencies.

Re: Welcome to the Decade of Concern

#36

Post by AnimalMuppet »

torstenvl wrote: post #35
refenestrator wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Lack of political will to shovel money through the DoD' doesn't seem to be an issue in the US.

That is objectively and obviously false. Why would you say something you know (assuming you read the OP) to be untrue? Military spending has gone from 4.89% of GDP in the first year of the Obama Administration to ~3.3-3.4% of GDP in recent years. That's a huge decrease. There's also alllll the times that military appropriations have been a political football. A lot of DoD folks have had to report to work unpaid multi…

Your point would stand on its own just fine without the accusation. Even if your data is correct, refenestrator may not know that data. Don't make accusations like that unless you know (like, provably) that he knows it.

Re: Welcome to the Decade of Concern

#37

Post by AnimalMuppet »

retrac wrote: post #16
maxrev17 wrote: post #8

Hmm, wish countries would poll their citizens with regards to wanting a war... I wonder how many would happen?

You're downvoted, but it has been postulated that no democracy has ever waged war against another democracy, and that this is a consequence of democratic governance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory As far as I can tell, the observation is historically true. The few possible exceptions are pre-modern, very minor, or are debatable whether the societies involved were in fact democratic -- the first…

Iceland vs. the UK over fishing - how many shots were fired in that? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it might have been a skirmish, but it wasn't a war...

Re: Welcome to the Decade of Concern

#38

Post by dripiv »

sbierwagen wrote: post #18

>How did this happen? It started with a Clinton era decision to focus on upgrading legacy platforms instead of developing or purchasing new ones: >By the end of the Bill Clinton administration, the Pentagon had laid out a strategy to update and replace the Reagan-era fleets... Strange not to mention the USSR collapsed two years before Clinton took office. Hard to justify new weapons systems when you're the global heg…

>Hard to justify new weapons systems when you're the global hegemon

Evidently not.

Re: Welcome to the Decade of Concern

#39

Post by retrac »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #37
retrac wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're downvoted, but it has been postulated that no democracy has ever waged war against another democracy, and that this is a consequence of democratic governance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory As far as I can tell, the observation is historically true. The few possible exceptions are pre-modern, very minor, or are debatable whether the societies involved were in fact democratic -- the first…

Iceland vs. the UK over fishing - how many shots were fired in that? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it might have been a skirmish, but it wasn't a war...

Mostly just coast guard and fishing ships ramming each other, with a decent bit of the British navy tossed in the fray at one point too. The Icelanders did manage to damage multiple British frigates in the last round of conflict.

Probably doesn't count as a war. But it is still one of the more notable examples of direct conflict between democratic states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_Wars

Re: Welcome to the Decade of Concern

#40

Post by [deleted] »

dragontamer wrote: post #19
sbierwagen wrote: post #18

>How did this happen? It started with a Clinton era decision to focus on upgrading legacy platforms instead of developing or purchasing new ones: >By the end of the Bill Clinton administration, the Pentagon had laid out a strategy to update and replace the Reagan-era fleets... Strange not to mention the USSR collapsed two years before Clinton took office. Hard to justify new weapons systems when you're the global heg…

If China attacks Taiwan with its newly minted aircraft carriers and large fleets of smaller ships, who will defend them? Now, I'm pretty sure the USA still beats China in a fair fight. But if the USA is playing defense with Taiwan, the picture is very different. China is far closer and therefore has more nearby support: in particular, air support and cruise missiles. In a neutral fight, keeping our fleets outside of…

[deleted]
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