NY Times Editorial - "Americans and their military drifting apart"

[Halifax Tar]

Just as a follow on. I'm not necessarily advocating a change to a reserve model army. I think that the jury is out on that and it would require a very detailed study to determine if it can be done, how it should be done and what are the savings.

What I am quite definite on is that IMHO we are caught in the full grip of what Dwight D Eisenhower coined in 1961 as the Military Industrial Complex.

Our military leadership (by which I include the civilian leadership of DND and the civil service in general) has a vested interest to keep to the status quo because their financial compensation and their career paths depend on it.

An example in its simplest form is rank inflation. How many generals, colonels and CWOs and their civilian equivalents does it really take to run the Forces. Or are we just giving jobs people so that they can serve out their time to retirement at what they consider to be a reasonable salary?

At every element within DND their is a colossal waste of resources because we have built structures and policies that demand large amounts of overhead and their consequential costs. Simplification would be difficult even if there was a will to do it.

The trouble is that all anyone is prepared to do is to tweak the system rather than examine it in detail from the ground up.

That said, I also firmly believe that in their minds they honestly believe that the system isn't fundamentally broken and can be enhanced/fixed with tweaking.

Unfortunately, because we have very few civilian leaders with either the knowledge or the courage to question those things that they are told by the existing bureaucrats (civilian or military). Their only way to deal with escalating costs is with across the board budget cuts. This is a blunt tool at best and will only produce a smaller less efficient force that still has the same model and overheads.

Anyway. Just  :deadhorse:

:goodpost: X2

I especially like this point:

An example in its simplest form is rank inflation. How many generals, colonels and CWOs and their civilian equivalents does it really take to run the Forces. Or are we just giving jobs people so that they can serve out their time to retirement at what they consider to be a reasonable salary?

At some point I believe someone in the press will muckle on to this and the venerable feces will hit the fan...

 

[54/102 CEF]

My 2 cents

In days gone by Empires owned what they took from the overseas owners. France / UK / Germany / Austria / Italy / Japan are all handy examples.

Then another Empire had to step in - and the USA captured a lot of the former Axis Empires and kept them because a certain two land based empires - Russia and China got it into their head that two can keep the third engaged in a perpetual motion machine.

When we demobbed in 45 and re-upped everyone still capable of foot slogging for the precursor of CFE Europe and Korea we shattered the mass reserve model.

Why have any standbye force when a trip wire would bring in USAF and hopefully things would settle down as the nuclear glow would die down.

The reserves have been hung out to dry for so long they have the Scare Power of a dried out squirrel on the freeway.

60,000 Reg force have been dried out too - it takes 6 months to get a sausage machine going then its good for a few years until the PMQ patch wives say no more trips for us, and the maintainers say the equipment pool is dry. Happened in Bosnia and it happened in Afghanistan.

These are repeatable occurrences.

To our credit we build non standard infrastructure from coast to coast to keep the mobilization base ready for a long haul. Since 1998 for example - Petawawa went from looking like a suburb of Detroit to a modern base. Ditto for Gagetown and Shilo for example.

But we keep the lid on equipment spending across the board and what we have is good for the short term - out to 3 years max deployments with credible reserve augmentation then the wheels fall off.

There are no more empires to go toe to toe against to quote Major Kong.

Its been 68 years since we had every farm boy who hated the farm in uniform.

The Brits have gone on holiday in LA vs Banff as do we to Phoenix and similar sun spots.

Our Empire link doesn't have a military commitment demand note and probably hasn't had one since the Chanak Crisis of 1922. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanak_Crisis

There have been many Chanak Crises since then and we've been in on few of them.

Yet we have a mass of government pay cheques pumping money into regional economies.

When called we can deploy quite a shock to anyone who we might meet in the next OP. But its always limited by distance - the CNN effect (something about having the troops home before Xmas), then equipment, then about 4 or five ROTOs of Reg Force.

And then the Snakes and Ladders roll of the dice brings us back to where we started.

That's the worst Industrial Military Complex that can be imagined.