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Essay: Dumb-dumb bullets - July 2009 - Armed Forces Journal
When this is what passes for good analysis of technology by a leader in contemporary military thought...well, let's just say the "dumb-dumb" takes on a whole different meaning.
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Every year, the services spend millions of dollars teaching our people how to think. We invest in everything from war colleges to noncommissioned officer schools. Our senior schools in particular expose our leaders to broad issues and historical insights in an attempt to expose the complex and interactive nature of many of the decisions they will make.
Unfortunately, as soon as they graduate, our people return to a world driven by a tool that is the antithesis of thinking: PowerPoint. Make no mistake, PowerPoint is not a neutral tool — it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them. While this may seem to be a sweeping generalization, I think a brief examination of the impact of PowerPoint will support this statement.
A Balanced Strategy
If by "balanced" you mean completely unbalanced, then yes, this is a balanced strategy.
U.S. Military: The War Within
Like Charles Dunlap, Jr., Mr. Weinberger criticizes SecDef Gate's short-sighted policies of seeing Iraq, Afghanistan, and COIN as the basis upon which to plan future forces, with the result that the Air Force is being systematically ignored, even slowly dismantled. Dunlap cites this piece by Weinberger. Both make very strong arguments about what's wrong with the dominant assumptions that underlay current DoD policies.
Forget the lessons of Iraq
The most recent piece by Charles Dunlap, Jr. He argues that the currently dominant thinking of what he calls the "New Establishment"-i.e. that counterinsurgency will be the main task of U.S. forces in the future--is both wrong and dangerous. Training and equipping our forces under these false assumptions, he says, will leave us unprepared should we find ourselves in a more traditional, high-intensity, state-on-state conflict, a possibility that he sees as far more likely than most in the "New Establishment" would like to admit. A great article, superbly argues and well-reasoned, that should be required reading right now, especially in the face of the "New Establishment's" attempts to eliminate or seriously cut practically every major weapon system currently in development.
Military update: Vice chairman: ‘Exquisite’ weapons are too expensive
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The military must end its quest for “exquisite” weapon systems that are too
costly, take years to design and build, and don’t reach troops fast enough, or
in quantities large enough, to address ever-changing threats.The critic here isn’t a Washington think tank or a beltway consultant but
Marine Corps Gen. James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the
U.S. military’s second highest ranking officer.- This is standard "reformer" rhetoric: Hi-tech weapons are inherently more expensive, less flexiblt, etc.; quantity is more important than quality. It is not suprising to hear this from a Marine. Marines were more influenced by "reformer" rhetoric in the 1980s and 1990s than the other branches. - on 2008-11-22
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Add Sticky Note“Building platforms that can have multiple purposes, that can modify very
quickly with software, that consume minimal amounts of energy for extended
periods of time … are critical,” the vice chairman said.- This, however, is not like "reformer" rhetoric of the 1980s. "Reformers" at that time argued against multi-role technologies, instead advocating highly specialized, single-purpose systems like the F-16 and A-10. - on 2008-11-22
Gates Credits Russian Military Ideas
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Defense Secretary Robert Gates told students at an elite Russian military academy Saturday that much of the inspiration for the U.S. military's modernization in the 1980s came from Moscow.
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He said the seeds of U.S. combat successes in the 1991 Gulf war were sown a decade earlier with an infusion of new ideas on using modern technologies to fundamentally change the nature of warfighting.
"What is less well known _especially in America — is that much of the original thinking on these matters was done by the Soviet military as far back as the 1970s when officers wrote about what was then called a `military technical revolution,'" he said.
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