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Doing more with less


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I'm putting this in this forum because I think the Navy is the worst offender but I see it in all branches of the armed forces.

It makes me crazy how many times Leadership expects the troops to make up the difference with extra effort.  They don't have enough ships so lets run the hell out of what we do have.  Same same with planes.  It consumes equipment and personnel.  I get that in a wartime environment that the mission comes first and you have to make do with what is available but we've made a culture of it.

Now you'd say that it is a good thing because it teaches the troops to function under wartime conditions but that isn't all there is to it.  Like an alternator a military unit has a duty cycle.  If you run it at 100% it fails faster than if downtime is built in.  Further, all the "savings" is wasted.  The individual sailor, airman, or soldier gets the job done whilst short handed and gets an attaboy and five more jobs that are in even worse circumstances.  Ultimately they read the tea leaves and move out of the service.  The few who stay out of love for the service are even more overwhelmed.

The current crop of Leadership is just awful.  From USN collisions to planes older than senior airmen the entire military is still coasting on the forces built in the 80's.

How did we get here and can anything be done about it?

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I think that after nearly 20 years of fighting insurgencies around the world since 9/11 that the US military needs some downtime to rest and refit. And then come back stronger. I thought that Trump's idea to pull back from all these mini wars and refocus on China was a good idea but then he goes and escalates actions against Iran and North Korea. So much for focusing on China.

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2 hours ago, TrustMe said:

he goes and escalates actions against Iran and North Korea

Wut?

Precisely, one of the things Mattis criticized about Trump's foreign policy was his lack of hawkiness* regarding Iran, manifested in the withdrawal from Syria.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/us/politics/jim-mattis-defense-secretary-trump.html

*yeah, probably not a word yet.

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Vested interest and careers means that any change from the status quo is going to be resisted. Lots of money being made in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and the ME. Walk away and all those lucrative gigs with minimal oversight go away. In any case the ruling establishment is wedded to the use of Chinese made stuff to placate the sheeple.

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What can be done about it is we go undercover as demagogues and get members of this board voted in key positions of the legislative branch in both parties and executive branch, then get E5M to come in as a consultant, field promote him to 6 star,  declare him "Internal Reform Czar" and unleash him to trim the fat, pour encourager les autres :D

Edited by Burncycle360
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The obvious solution is to just do less and prepare for doing less in the future.

The political leadership keep adding endless tasks that are at best 'nice but nonessential' and at worst actively harmful, and this overwhelms what would be more than ample resources given any sort of reasonable mission.

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It takes someone with both the knowledge of how it all works on the military side and on the contracting / corporate side, combined with a single integrated vision of how things should be, and how to get there.  By the time presidents reach their post, even those with military experience, they seem disinterested in major reformation, and of course the joint chiefs enjoy the status quo, it's what got them there.  There has to be a congress that's willing to be on the same page (to reform Title 10), understand that these will benefit the nation as a whole long term even if it means short term cutting of pork for their constituents,  and then you can get to work.  Extraordinarily unlikely to happen.

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11 hours ago, sunday said:

Wut?

Precisely, one of the things Mattis criticized about Trump's foreign policy was his lack of hawkiness* regarding Iran, manifested in the withdrawal from Syria.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/us/politics/jim-mattis-defense-secretary-trump.html

*yeah, probably not a word yet.

A drone got shot down in if remember rightly in 2019. There was going to be an air raid but Trump called it off whilst the aircraft were in flight. This is surely escalating things. Plus the killing of that Iranian Quds force commander in 2020 were Iran retaliated by firing ballistic missiles at a US base in Iraq.

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31 minutes ago, TrustMe said:

...There was going to be an air raid but Trump called it off whilst the aircraft were in flight. This is surely escalating things.

How does an underlined bit goes with bold one, because I really, really don't see it?

It was Iran that wanted escalation, but for once US did a right thing and went after practically irreplaceable man instead of just bombing some crap. And then had balls enough to stop while ahead, despite Iranians firing at the base. It was good military action with concrete objectives, actually achieving something worthwhile and w/o unneeded escalation "just because we can".

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I'd say that any rational government if attacked would want to hit back, if the air raid had of succeeded the masses in Iran would of demanded revenge. What that would of been I don't know. 

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10 minutes ago, TrustMe said:

I'd say that any rational government if attacked would want to hit back, if the air raid had of succeeded the masses in Iran would of demanded revenge. What that would of been I don't know. 

There is some Countryballs-like syntax here.

Looks like English is not your native language. Where are you really from, if I may ask?

Edited by sunday
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even down to the unit level it's the same crap.  We've got time to do everything but learn how to drive ships.  Shouldn't that be a basic?

We don't have enough people to stand watch?  Really?

Every "leader" wants to get the most out of his people but pushing too far breaks people.  We've worn the B1 fleet out and that's okay, we built them to use but now they're shot and what replacement?  We can't get the Oxygen systems right in our fighters...

It's all crazy

 

 

Trust me's post is the very definition of cognitive dissonance.

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40 minutes ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

even down to the unit level it's the same crap.  We've got time to do everything but learn how to drive ships.  Shouldn't that be a basic?

We don't have enough people to stand watch?  Really?

Every "leader" wants to get the most out of his people but pushing too far breaks people.  We've worn the B1 fleet out and that's okay, we built them to use but now they're shot and what replacement?  We can't get the Oxygen systems right in our fighters...

It's all crazy

 

 

Trust me's post is the very definition of cognitive dissonance.

If you want to fight China, you don't want to have ten's of thousands of troops fighting Islamic fanatics in unnumbered countries around the world, where for each one killed two takes his place. One of the reasons that the US coalition was so successful in Kuwait in 1991 was that after Vietnam, a new generation of US leaders had the time and the money to resuscitate the military to face a Soviet equipped client state. And won a decisive victory against a massive conventional force. 

 Trump knew this (against all the Iranian hawks in the Pentagon), which is why he wanted out of these mini wars, rest the US military for at least a decade and come back stronger.

But I guess you don't.

Edited by TrustMe
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Sorry, that's my fault. In my original post I forgot to say the part about the Iranian / North Korean hawk's in the Pentagon. I must of missed it out, sorry. My above post is what I really meant.

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6 hours ago, sunday said:

You could be from England, but you do not sound English, for sure.

Untrustworthy.

He sounds English to me.  Not every Englishman is a Dickens or Pratchett.

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23 hours ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

I'm putting this in this forum because I think the Navy is the worst offender but I see it in all branches of the armed forces.

It makes me crazy how many times Leadership expects the troops to make up the difference with extra effort.  They don't have enough ships so lets run the hell out of what we do have.  Same same with planes.  It consumes equipment and personnel.  I get that in a wartime environment that the mission comes first and you have to make do with what is available but we've made a culture of it.

Now you'd say that it is a good thing because it teaches the troops to function under wartime conditions but that isn't all there is to it.  Like an alternator a military unit has a duty cycle.  If you run it at 100% it fails faster than if downtime is built in.  Further, all the "savings" is wasted.  The individual sailor, airman, or soldier gets the job done whilst short handed and gets an attaboy and five more jobs that are in even worse circumstances.  Ultimately they read the tea leaves and move out of the service.  The few who stay out of love for the service are even more overwhelmed.

The current crop of Leadership is just awful.  From USN collisions to planes older than senior airmen the entire military is still coasting on the forces built in the 80's.

How did we get here and can anything be done about it?

From the outside, the problem is that, post the Gulf War, the US Armed Forces became enamoured with Tom Clancy, so anything coming up has to be bleeding edge, which means that it's expensive and takes time to get in the service, by which time it needs to be updated, so a win-win for the defence industry and more so when there are only a couple of big providers for wach bit of kit.

In the meantime, the troops need to do with legacy stuff until it falls apart. Since no one likes to do maintenance all the time to then get deployed and see the kit break down again, all on personal effort, the troops vote with their feet, so you lose experience and get into that vicious cycle.

This can only be broken by a realistic appraisal of what is actually required rather than what is cool to have, the submarines being a clear example of a program that evolved right post-Cold War: the last class was the Seawolf, optimised to fight advanced Soviet subs under the ice and to hunt SSBNs. Too expensive and with capabilities that weren't going to be used, it was replaced by the Viriginias, which were modular and could be developped over time, but not so flashy, so the Navy can do it, if they get to it.

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8 hours ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

even down to the unit level it's the same crap.  We've got time to do everything but learn how to drive ships.  Shouldn't that be a basic?

We don't have enough people to stand watch?  Really?

Every "leader" wants to get the most out of his people but pushing too far breaks people.  We've worn the B1 fleet out and that's okay, we built them to use but now they're shot and what replacement?  We can't get the Oxygen systems right in our fighters...

It's all crazy



It's all too easy for people to take intangibles like that for granted since they don't show up on spec sheets of all the cool equipment, but the degradation of them serves as a canary in the coalmine.  Rust starts on the inside, where it isn't noticed by most of the public, so the pressure to decisively intervene and be vigilant to ensure they remain on top of things is absent, or plays second fiddle to maintaining institutional opulence within the ranks, and platitudes from the oblivious civilian representatives featuring nonsense like "we need a 325 ship navy, no we need a 357 ship navy" as if that's the most pressing issue.

People can be forgiven in their younger, more naive years thinking of the state as if it is the special forces of management: smarter than you and on top of things.  That's how I felt about NASA as a kid, for instance. Part of growing up, at least for the intelligent ones, is realizing that it's often quite horrifyingly the opposite, it's a wonder they get anything done at all,  and hoping it doesn't make one too cynical.

Edited by Burncycle360
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the rot is real.  In my opinion the answer from today's "Leadership" is always that you have to complete the mission with the resources available and if that takes more effort then so be it.

The problems with that approach are manifest but it stands out just how old and worn the basic equipment is.  The very last B17's were still being used (for air/sea SAR) when the B52 came in service.  A Tico class cruiser wasn't meant to be a legacy platform.  Look at defense procurement from 1945 to 1988 and compare to what is going on today.

Then you get down to telling young men that there IS enough to do the job when there clearly isn't.  The dishonesty corrodes the respect for the chain of command.  The overt politicization of the officer corps is rewarding yes men who get far enough up the chain that you can't see their moral failures.

Other countries don't have the level of global responsibility that the US does.  In the threads about Taiwan we talk about fighting China.  If that is even in the real of possibility then the Armed Forces need a serious shake up.  Coasting on the 100hours campaign rep will only take you so far...

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