AM64
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Feb 11, 2016
- Messages
- 28,662
- Likes
- 42,665
No apology required. I was trying to make a point that didn't come across well. We are looking at the same thing but across a great divide; yours is the academic view, and mine is more a personal and maybe more applied perspective. You view power and conflict more from the political/theoretical application; mine is more from having had family in the cockpit of a fighter, knowing people who didn't come home, and walking through Walter Reed past way too many young men in wheelchairs with stumps where there should have been limbs. I have a profound prejudice when it comes to theories of projecting power by people who have never been part of the military because I am of the Vietnam War era, and I'm really uncertain that the political/theoretical side learned anything - the reason for the "Best and Brightest" reference. That's not well said, but you can get the gist.
If you look at a couple of examples - Japan especially and Germany to an extent, you see countries that started wars but didn't in the end have the resources to carry through. My concern is that we are paying too much attention to pre-positioning and technology and too little to infrastructure to support extended combat needs. Once we went down the path of globalization we cut our own throats. If we are cut off from sources of goods that we need, I don't see any easy or timely means to become self sufficient. Can we retrain lost generations who might on a good day be able to assemble a hamburger and manage a cash register? I have a real hard time seeing most millennials making it through basic training much less functioning in the military. And what of the machinery needed to be self sufficient? I don't think there's much excess capacity in the power grid, and with environmental concerns carrying the day over everything else, it will probably get tighter. War industry runs round the clock and requires power - solar and wind can't cut it - and neither do dismantled fossil plants. Unless things have changed recently we can no longer even build a reactor in this county. I'm afraid that it's too easy to see that we are ready to go to war (false sense of security), and that there is no real path to sustainability - we might overheat one of the poles.
In the end my concern is whether any of our half-witted politicians have a clue regarding national security. Certainly Obama doesn't; Clinton can't even fathom the concept of confidentiality; Bernie apparently sees no difference between us and Mexico; and all the Republican candidates are about as appealing as moldy green ham on stale bread. My hope is that the Republican party can be shocked into ending this bender and by the next go around have figured out how to find a real candidate. Probably, the only real Republican strategy would be to find a veteran with the sanity and stature to end the perpetual clown parade - unless we decide to outsource the job of Commander in Chief.
