There’s a ton of waste surrounding who receives certain welfare benefits. People abusing disability. People abusing the food stamps system. You see them every day if you look.
I know a girl (with three kids) who brought in more in state benefits than I did working 60 hours a week. I was friends with her live in boyfriend. Granted I was horrifically underpaid, but it happened.
That kind of crap grinds my gears. I didn’t qualify for crap. Single dude with no children. I just busted my ass to make end’s meet.
But looking back, I don’t hate her. She was a nice person. She was just smarter than me.
The Russians are facing this as they have seen so many injured or killed, men that will take long decades to replace.
Consider and marvel for a moment how their general staff apparently had forgotten about Ukrainian mud so that they got bogged down in it in the first place?
And that was not their only misstep.
Every bumble comes at human prices they cannot afford. It reminds me of something some used to claim a Mexican officer said after the Alamo when Santa Anna was to be crowing about his great victory. He was supposed to have said a few more victories like this and we will lose it all.
King Pyrrhus of Epirus is believed to have said it originally. He defeated the Romans in an absolutely brutal battle where he lost the majority of his forces, thus ending his offensive campaign.
We are going to end up having to spend more on our defense for a short period of time before we can really cut it.
The US Air Force and US Navy have a ton of legacy air assets that have to be replaced. Which is what is going on right now. The F-15EX was ordered specifically to replace the F-15Cs that were, in most cases, over their lifetime air frame hours.
Unfortunately the reason the US had to order around 80 or so F-15EXs at roughly 90 million dollar each was because of the expected shortfall in air dominance fighters for homeland defense and expeditionary counter air.
We didn’t build enough F-22s to replace the F-15C; that was the original plan back in the 1990s. But production numbers were lowered from 380 in around 2003 down to just 187 back in the late Bush/early Obama era. And because of the War on Terror and it’s enormous cost, it was decided to invest a relatively small amount of money on keeping the Raptor modernized (relative to the fighter’s value; most other US fighters received far more enhancement programs during their lifetimes) and deferred airframe strengthening programs.
Also, the F-35s are going to need modernizing programs and airframe strengthening sooner rather than later so they can remain a credible fighter into the 2050s, which is when they will start to be retired.
Basically some bad decisions were made over the past twenty years in regards to our Cold War legacy assets and now the chickens have been coming home to roost. It’ll be more expensive before it can get cheaper. We are replacing the B-2 and B-1 with the B-21, the Navy has got to get at least the first two Columbia class submarines underway before the Ohios start retiring in 2032. Those are two huge elements in the US nuclear deterrence.
Fact is once we were over there numerable thousands of jihadis (I used to call the foreign death squads), easily tens of thousands, poured into the region and died in droves fighting on a battlefield where they did us minuscule damage compared to what a few heathens did on 9/11.
Killing them was a public good and kept them focused on a theatre of operations where it could only cost them dear. Never stop an enemy from being stupid. They were being very stupid.
Frankly, our army, the job of armies to stand between their civilians and infrastructure and those who who would harm them, was arguably right where they needed to be.
Looking back, there some serious serious fundamental flaws with the strategic planning long term.
Tactically speaking the invasion was brilliant. Probably the best textbook example of a combined arms offensive while leveraging network centric warfare planning in the history of mankind. It will be studied by military academies around the world for the next century. Russia even attempted to repeat it in Ukraine and royally ■■■■■■ it up from the get go.
Strategically speaking… it ended up being a very, VERY expensive boondoggle. That history will not be kind to in the long run.
That was one of the positives. It’s much easier to fight an unconventional opposing force in Iraq’s terrain over Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are an insurgency’s wet dream.
The political aspect of Iraq itself, which as Clausewitz pointed out was just as important as the tactical and operational aspects, was mishandled badly though.
The long term strategic thinking just wasn’t there. Iraq’s collapse and drift into Iranian (and by extension Chinese) orbit was inevitable.
Iraq wasn’t a country. It was three nations (Shia, Sunni, and Kurd) held together in an unnatural state by a psychopathic mass murderer. We came in and got rid of the psychopath but still kept the assumption that Iraq was a unified country. No one considered doing the unthinkable; splitting the country up. There wasn’t the political will.
Then picking sides in a religious civil war (essentially shafting the Western minority Sunnis, previously the privileged class, for the Eastern majority Shiites who definitely wanted revenge) and once again shafting the Kurds.
And in that regard, what was the long term strategic point of the war? A stable Iraq in the US orbit was the goal right? That certainly hasn’t been accomplished.
It should have been split up into three countries. Shiite Iraq would have naturally drifted into Iranian orbit. But we could have built inroads with Sunni Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan.
Actually, I think W and the generals dropped the ball by not realizing that all those foreign death squads would flood into the country. They obviously thought they were only gonna be dealing with locals afterwards so they didn’t have enough folks on hand.
