ALL THE SNAKES ARE DEAD

 Has anyone worked out why we are constantly bombarded with reasons and rationals for treating China as an existential enemy against whom we must build vast new fleets of ships and killer aircraft and push every kind of trade sanction and embargo against them because..... ? I see it all the time at various former naval/army person blogs and it is always in the alt media but I have never seen any justification for it or any sign that even a remarkably stupid idiot would ever think that China would gain any economic or military advantage by attacking its neighbors. The whole Taiwan flap is just a hook to hang sending hundreds of billions of dollars to the big 3 arms dealers Defense Contractors. It's all a scam.

Aren't you getting tired of it? We have entered the Snake Free Age and we should lean into it and enjoy it and build some better stuff now that we know that all the current stuff is so much junk. I say that advisedly because there will always be some twit who leaps to his feet and shouts Iran War, yeeeeehaaaaaa!  He doesn't even realize that he's making the point. No vast armies clashed and no great naval battles happened and no great air armada destroyed everything beneath them. It's the 21st Century and we didn't have to do any of that old 20th century crap.

We really should know that the brightest men are working on the nuts and bolts of waging combat operations in the age of the fully sacrificial drone fleet that numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Somebody needs to understand that trying to spoof an infinite resource is just a waste of time, money and effort and that the real work is in finding ways to defend against drones in all their shapes and guises and what that impact will be on how we lay out defensive measures against an expendable attacker that can carry a high explosive, shaped charge, explosively formed penetrator, a chemical warhead or fun bioligicals.* 

In other words, the perimeter is nearly infinite, the scope unbelievable and there is no rear area and never will be again. How does that affect logistics and little things like defending ammo plants, railroad switches, power generation and distribution networks, communications, mass food storage, POL facilities, concentrations of supply, force and men?

The sad thing is that we KNOW that it is being studied, analyzed and planned by the same people behind our NASA moon mission which fully justifies crappy $4,000,000,000 single use rocket using 50 year old engines to launch dicey hardware 250,000 miles using the very best DEI culture money can buy. It is the same people that sold the DOD on the idea of Just-in-Time logistical support and resource allocation for a war fighting force that is in the process of waging war. The expectation was that, like all the satellites, the weapons and ammo would show up on time no matter what.

I'm gonna join that French idiot Georges Clemenceau from long ago and simply state,  "War is too important to be left to the generals." Just about everybody who is anybody in the Pentagon and at every single Combatant Command is welded to the weapons and tactics and strategy that we have today. This is not a Billy Mitchell or Douhet moment, this is 100x worse.

This is the revolution in military affairs that we started talking about 40 years ago and got all wrong. This is a moment as fundamental to future warfare as the moment we started building and prioritizing aircraft carriers over battleships. What people forget though is that we didn't just prioritize the carrier we revolutionized our naval tactics and strategy and we never ever forgot that the ONLY way it would work was if it was applied en masse. That had been the goal of the battleship admirals from the Age of Sail but with the carriers it took one more new turn, it required a lot of them right now and it turns out, done properly, carriers were very easy and cheap to build, man and equip, at least compared to battleships.

I used to play the opposition to the SEALs back in the 90s when we started fielding our mobile units with an incredible Thermal Imaging System. Everyone now knows that there is really nothing scary at all about truly dangerous heavily armed men in the night if you can see them clearly a mile away and they don't know it, because with TIS, every human stands out from the background like he's waving a magnesium flare and screaming Banzai! 

And that is the most important and most undone thing as I see it. Our planners keep acting as if our enemies are stone age savages and they all believe to the bottom of their black little souls that once they've identified shortfalls in personnel, equipment and tactics that 'somebody' else is addressing it and buying the solutions and fielding them with the requisite training and you know what? That doesn't happen. There are existing contracts and it takes years to go through the DoD 5000 Acquisition Process and get a new contract on the street and even then, you are dead lucky to get a Program Manager who understands what the end product must be and how to get there in meaningful time. A perfect weapon 22 years late is of zero value.

People have got to understand that Perfect is the Enemy of Good Enough and that sometimes, all the snakes are dead and it's time to put down the snake killer and move on to the next thing. 

It is time for our Department of War to announce a series of X prizes and the first one of those has to be $1,000,000,000 for the first infinite repeater or drone killer laser that works in the field using standard generators for mobile applications. It is time to do what America does best and put some money in play for independents to shoot for and get our garage entrepreneurs busy making stuff that reliably kills drones at extended ranges. Obviously, it needs an acquisition and targeting system to pair with the weapon. 

And can we please stop beating up on poor China? Other than stealing 100% of our IP and flooding us with the results of their biowarfare experiments in labs paid for by US, what have they ever done to anybody that matters? OK, and forgetting that they keep smuggling extremely deadly and destructive biologicals into the USA, what have they ever done to US?   

 *Remember all the fatheads in academe that postured and piffled about our inability to sort the nuclear bomb carrying reentry vehicles from the decoys and how we could never build a missile defense that could ever work because the 'decoy' problem was too tough to solve? Yeah, they all went on to root for LCS and scrapped 100% of our MCM capability. Those guys never quite wrapped their heads around the fact that back then both sides had over 70,000 nuclear warheads and there was no need to postulate that somebody would save a buck or two by substituting decoys for nukes, but those losers carried on like they killed Star Wars with the "Decoy Problem" of their own invention. If you have the room for 'decoys, just stuff some more warheads in there. The targeting issue remains but the end result for any failed intercepts is going to be a nuclear explosion.