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viking369:

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viking369:

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wanderer-chronicles:

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habbadax:

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quasi-normalcy:

millennial-review:

Reaping the harvest of 4 decades of privatization and corporate welfare

Worth noting that war is the only thing we appear to be preparing for while also being a thing that we’ve spent the past half-century demonstrating we utterly suck shit at

I mean, yeah

If you’re actually good at waging war, you might risk ending the conflict too early!

How the hell are you supposed to support a military industrial complex that way?

^ that part

We’re fantastic at war, we really suck at peace.

Bomb the shit out of someplace, annihilate their military equipment, knock their army over and their fortifications around their ears, no problem.

Make a functioning state out of what remains and get them to stop shooting at us so we can leave, not since 1949.

You ever heard that old saying about how you can win every battle but the last one and you’ve lost the war?

The US kicks ass at Klausewitzian force-on-force conflicts against mirror-image opponents, AKA a form of warfare that has not existed on any meaningful scale for almost 100 years. What you’re describing as “sucking at peace” is in fact sucking at war when you consider what war actually looks like in the real world in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

You roll in and blow up some regime’s fancy Army man gadgets with all of your fancy Army man gadgets–sure. If you then proceed to spend the next many years getting your shit rocked in the inevitable asymmetrical war of attrition, well, I want you to go try and find the nation of South Vietnam on a map for me.

Actually, Clausewitz was the one classical military theorist who insisted there was a political element to any war and that it had to be addressed or you could not even determine the reason for the war let alone whether you had succeeded. And the US routinely plows into combat without performing that analysis.

I disagree.  The United States does excel at that political element.  Like @habbadax​ said above, war is a racket; we enter into it willfully in the name of such high-minded causes as “primitive extraction” and “opening up new markets” and “preserving existing markets,” and we do a very very good job at accomplishing those goals.

As Clausewitz famously said that “war is but politics by other means,” I’d add on my own twee little truism:  War, like all human endeavors, is a matter of economics.  And we’re bad at winning conflicts on the operational level, god-fucking-awful at commanding and controlling territory, but very, very good at generating revenue for private contractors, which is the ultimate aim of American war.

I think we’re sailing past one another. “We have to send the Marines into Central America to protect US Fruit!” is a campaign slogan, not a political analysis, but it’s about as far as we ever get before we commit to combat. Which means the US civilian command, which Constitutionally is in charge, routinely abdicates its duty to set war policy. Which is the opposite of what Clausewitz was saying, which was essentially that the politicians had to determine the reasons for a war, communicate those reasons to the military, and decide either when the goals had been met or had become unattainable. “We can nation-build in Afghanistan” was as big a load of bullshit as “They’ll welcome us with open arms” and “They hate us for our freedoms”, but that is as far as our “analysis” goes until we’re hip deep. And that’s why we lose. Oh sure, a few 1%er-controlled entities make out like the bandits they are; that’s what the game is rigged to do. But the US as a sovereign entity and its sad-sack citizenry lose every time.

I think the point of departure is that, as a big red commie, I don’t see a meaningful difference between civilian government and private economic interest.  The politicians nominally getting us into messes and nominally setting policy are just capital’s PR firm.