[fjorder]

One thing that always amazes me about the U.S.'s defense spending is how little they seem to be able to buy with it.

Yes, they have all sorts of cool gadgets, but the U.S. military can't even establish order in a primitive backwater like Afghanistan, and that's with help from a dozen other nations! The "shock and awe" campaign in Iraq (a.k.a. terror bombing, as it would have been called in WWII) was a tremendous display of military might, but what did it accomplish besides ensuring that there would be lots of rebuilding work for contractors and royally pissing off the populace? Any hope for U.S. forces to be greeted as liberators went up in Tritonal-fueled fire with that campaign. Old-fashioned boots on the ground with constant close contact with civilians might have helped with damage-control, but that's not the U.S. military's way. The U.S. military's way is to bunker down and send out choppers and mechanized patrols that shoot up anything that looks remotely suspicious, only to be blown to bits by an IED the locals would have told soldiers about if they had walked through instead. Iraq is still in the grasp of terrorism (5 killed today: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=8545451) and is more anti-American than ever.

The latest technology to be abused is drones. They're deadly. They're sexy. They're completely safe (for Americans)! It must seem like a coup to military brass to be able to blow terrorists into a hot mess of crispy giblets without sending a single human being within a hundred kilometers of the target. Meanwhile, civilians are killed, sovereignty of allies is violated, and enough anti-American sentiment is sown to more than make up for the deaths of a few terrorists in the long run. Then some American pundit asks, "Why do they hate us?".

This is just the latest chapter in the U.S. military's long obsession with technology. The Vietnam war didn't turn out the way the U.S. wanted for a host of reasons. Just one was that the military thought they could control territory by flying from hotspot to hotspot without bothering with permanent forces on the ground. A site would be labelled as a hotbed of enemy activity so the military would fly in several choppers full of troops and airlift in some artillery. Those forces would typically not stray from the safe radius of artillery coverage, so all the NVA had to do was get outside that radius if they didn't want to engage. The U.S.'s obsession with technology functionally handed complete initiative to their enemy.

The U.S. military needs to stop viewing wars as a proving ground for the latest high-tech killing devices and start focusing on results. Put the toys away and focus on what works. Get out of the humvees and apaches and walk through those contested regions, talking to people. Yes, some will get sniped, but this is the only way to establish order, and that will save more lives in the long run. Instead of spending billions on drones to kill terrorists in Pakistan, spend a few millions to make Pakistan want to hunt them down themselves. In short, stop trying to solve everything with new hardware and use some brains!

[holograham]

I am a bit confused at your statement..."little they can buy for it". Your post highlights lots of technology that is being used, just perhaps it is either not necessary or the wrong use of force. Two very different statements.

I think your comment was meant to say and back up two different opinions...that defense spending is not efficient due to lack of market forces, corruption among procurement and military personnel, and overall government overhead costs and regulations. The second point is that our military directions and missions are misguided. We are not making the correct trade off analysis for our wars and methods of warfare (e.g. trading precision of human operations and saving US soldiers lives vs. the inaccuracies of drone missions while saving US lives OR should we even do the missions in the first place).

[fjorder]

I meant for "little" to refer to practical results. I wasn't trying to bring up corruption or inefficiencies in procurement. I was trying to highlight the U.S. military's obsession with tech to the point of neglecting low-tech solutions that actually work. e.g. How much has the F-22 Raptor program really helped in Iraq in Afghanistan, and how much better off would the situation in both countries be now if that money had simply been spent on more troops?

The U.S. relationship with war is evolving in a difficult to predict fashion. Most nations operate on the premise that the best way to win a war is not to get into it in the first place. However, war serves a useful purpose for the U.S.. It gives them a chance to test out the latest tech, make their contractors some money, reduce unemployment, and give the latest batch of west-point kids their manhood rights. The U.S. will likely keep getting involved in wars periodically no matter how flimsy the pretext for them is. What nature those wars will take is what is really interesting.

Obama's "we can kill anyone we want, anywhere we want, anytime we want" policy really does put an interesting spin on things. If extraterritorial strikes had been commonplace ten years ago the Afghanistan war might never have happened. Assuming bin Laden hadn't gone to ground by that point, they might simply have executed him without the Taliban state's permission, just as he was eventually killed without Pakistan's knowledge or permission. Avoiding a war might have been worth the dubious legality of such an action, but it would have let a truly nasty genie out of its bottle (one that the U.S. later released anyways without stopping a war!). What will happen when other nations inevitably follow the U.S.'s example? Also, it's one thing to execute terrorists in this manner, but could the U.S. eventually pursue "regime change" this way? How many pentagon generals are currently chomping at the bit to send drones out after Ali Khamenei?

In the end , the root of the problem really is that war is good for business and the U.S. political system is a thrall to business interests. Fix that and everything changes!