Table of Contents
A hot take
There's never enough ammo lying around where and when you really need it
Me. But you can ask Ukraine, too.
I'm all in favor of universal peace
Really. It's pretty clear, though, that I'm not going to live long enough to see it.
War is coming, can't we just sit this one out?
Sure, and when that becomes obvious open season on Americans abroad, including military, civilian property and imports. Might happen might not? Feeling lucky?
OK, so what, we have the best military in the world
We have a very large, expensive, well-trained military force with recent combat experience. Each one of our 11 aircraft carriers has a larger air force that all be a handful of countries. That's not the problem.
What is the problem?
First problem: we've drawn down our inventory to keep the Russians busy fending off Ukraine instead of attacking our NATO allies. Keeping up with that demand and keeping our ammo bunkers topped off isn't something that we have the industrial capacity to supply. We've gone from being the arsenal of democracy in WWII to being somewhat at a loss.
Really? It's that hard?
By ammo, I mean more than just bullets and artillery shells (even though those are in quite short supply). It's armored personnel carriers, tanks, transports of various kind, surface-to-air missile and drones of all types.
What's the second problem?
A lot of our kit is designed to fight obsolete wars. We keep being unable to unmount the tiger of mutual strategic deterrence
You can't wipe out all life on Earth! That's my job.
Then the problem is conventional warfare?
Right. Conventional war changed this century from the wars of the 20th century. We started with shock and awe destroying a third-rate Iraqi army twice. Then it was beating down the irregular, but well-established militia forces of the Taliban and the impromptu militias of occupied Iraq and the vicious ISIS. The idea was that we would equip and train friendly forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. That sort of worked in Iraq but came a cropper in Afghanistan and we gave that up as a bad deal.
Then, Russia invades Ukraine and it's supposed to be a walkover in the conventional wisdom, but it wasn't. The Russian Way of War wasn't up to the task and the smaller, more poorly equipped Ukraine forces pushed them back and has been punching above its weight on counterattack. With a navy consisting of glorified jetskis and speedboats, it has crippled the Russian Navy. With air defense equipment designed for protecting cities from missiles and rocket, it has recently destroyed one AWAC-type aircraft and disabled a flying command center. They did this by springing a clever trap by luring their targets to fly into the ambush.
And?
Ukraine has performed this well with a mixed kit of weapons, shortages of all kinds of war materièl, and personnel mainly trained on the ground under fire. They are maintaining, and may win, through brilliant improvisation, doing more with less. As I explain in My First Bold AI Prediction of 2024™️ they will continue to survive by accelerating their invention of modern improv war.
They can do that in real time, but we can't. Ukraine is a start-up and we are decidedly not.
Mascots of the Day
