I think the big lesson of the Millennium Challenge is that a smart, motivated adversary will always go for the weak link in your victory conditions. And that is usually your blind spots, by definition. They won't attack you where you've prepared; they'll look for the areas where you are not expecting vulnerability and attack there.
All stuff Sun Tzu wrote 2500 years ago, but very hard for a bureaucracy to internalize, because by definition bureaucracies are formed to solve known problems and are blind to their blind spots.
jcranmer 2 hours ago [-]
There is a bigger underlying point, which is there is no trump weapon that defeats everything in war [1]. Everything has a counter, and if you're basing your entire strategy on saying that this weapon doesn't have a counter that we know of yet, well, you'll find that counters quickly get developed (see, e.g., the evolution of drone warfare in the Russo-Ukrainian War).
Ripper's argument that his tactics "won" the Millennium Challenge strike me as rather similar to the thoughts behind the Jeune École school of naval warfare, which argued for the use of massed small ships (torpedo boats) to counter battleships... except that had an easy counter in the form of the (torpedo boat) destroyer, and most naval theorists generally agree that the French Navy's embrace of Jeune École ended up doing more harm than good to their navy.
[1] The closest thing to a counterexample here is nuclear bombs, for which there isn't really a meaningful defense. Except that the use of nuclear bombs is predicated on the theory of strategic air bombing, which has been promising an easy-win button for wars for a century now, has been tried in every major conflict since then, and whose could-even-be-argued-as-maybe-a-successes in that timeframe can be counted on one hand, with some fingers missing. I'm galled that you still have military personnel and advisors today who advocate for its success, given its track record of the complete opposite.
theptip 41 minutes ago [-]
> Except that the use of nuclear bombs is predicated on the theory of strategic air bombing
Aren’t ICBMs and submarine-launched warheads the other two parts of the US’s triad?
jcranmer 14 minutes ago [-]
Missiles are functionally the same things as bombs in this scenario, since the thesis of strategic air bombing is that destroying civilian infrastructure will demoralize the populace and press them to end war, and the various kinds of cruise missiles are essentially just different kinetic means of deploying that same big boom to civilians.
wizardforhire 1 hours ago [-]
I would add:
… and generally antagonistic towards the identification of them.
poplarsol 2 hours ago [-]
The reason you "refloat" ships and continue the exercise is that determining the winner is only one part of the exercise. Training is the other component, and if you have multiple carriers out of commission immediately you lose that opportunity at vast expense.
weslleyskah 2 hours ago [-]
The US military always seems so focused on projecting a strong image. In these times of impending threats from the East, are there enough incentives for young people to choose the military, even after their studies are finished, over the traditional academic path of college and graduate school?
Also, this reminded me of the WWI documentary from Peter Jackson, "They Shall Not Grow Old", and the british comic "Charley's War" by Pat Mills.
Footnote7341 51 minutes ago [-]
Creating a strong image to adversaries, aka deterrent, is a key function of all nations militaries. But the US conducts tough rigorous exercises against impossible odds constantly. All ground forces are rotated through NTC and JRTC where expert opfor units are given all the toys, home-field advantage, and usually win.
chb 54 minutes ago [-]
There are many young, economically disenfranchised Americans that see the military as a way out of poverty. The military understands this and positions recruitment centers in poorer neighborhoods.
nozzlegear 1 hours ago [-]
Anecdotally, yes: I have two young cousins who both joined the US military this year.
Yes, it can do enough damage to make other countries adopt DMCA anti-circumvention law out of fear, but it always manages to snatch ultimate defeat.
collinmcnulty 3 hours ago [-]
The USA-led coalition conclusively won the Gulf War. We don’t think about it as much precisely because it wasn’t a boondoggle that lasted years and years.
nl 1 hours ago [-]
Since the Vietnam war the US has successfully (defined by "achieved the stated goals") invaded a country as part of the following conflicts:
Grenada (1983)
Panama to arrest General Noriega (1989)
Iraq in Gulf War 1 (1991)
Haiti (1994)
There have been other conflicts the US was involved with that they won too, but the others didn't involve invasions (eg NATO in Bosnia
lostlogin 2 hours ago [-]
> The USA-led coalition conclusively won the Gulf War.
That was a weird win with another invasion required for some reason and a toxic legacy of Gulf War Syndrome and no fly zones.
Military the US crushed it but it didn’t seem to solve anything.
jcranmer 2 hours ago [-]
The goal of the First Gulf War was, expressly, to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi control and (to a much smaller degree) to remove Iraq as a possible regional hegemon for the next decade or so. Which it succeeded at. Once you've succeeded at your objectives, and the enemy has capitulated, what value is there to prosecuting the war further?
actionfromafar 2 hours ago [-]
The USA-led coalition finally managed to overcome ISIS insurrectionists and helped Iran install Iranian sponsored militias in the Iraqi parliament and government.
lostlogin 2 hours ago [-]
I think OP was referring to the first crack at Iraq by the first Bush.
actionfromafar 1 hours ago [-]
Well, in that case, I agree. It was efficient and not immoral either.
nutjob2 2 hours ago [-]
They won the war and lost the peace.
Rendered at 04:22:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
All stuff Sun Tzu wrote 2500 years ago, but very hard for a bureaucracy to internalize, because by definition bureaucracies are formed to solve known problems and are blind to their blind spots.
Ripper's argument that his tactics "won" the Millennium Challenge strike me as rather similar to the thoughts behind the Jeune École school of naval warfare, which argued for the use of massed small ships (torpedo boats) to counter battleships... except that had an easy counter in the form of the (torpedo boat) destroyer, and most naval theorists generally agree that the French Navy's embrace of Jeune École ended up doing more harm than good to their navy.
[1] The closest thing to a counterexample here is nuclear bombs, for which there isn't really a meaningful defense. Except that the use of nuclear bombs is predicated on the theory of strategic air bombing, which has been promising an easy-win button for wars for a century now, has been tried in every major conflict since then, and whose could-even-be-argued-as-maybe-a-successes in that timeframe can be counted on one hand, with some fingers missing. I'm galled that you still have military personnel and advisors today who advocate for its success, given its track record of the complete opposite.
Aren’t ICBMs and submarine-launched warheads the other two parts of the US’s triad?
… and generally antagonistic towards the identification of them.
Also, this reminded me of the WWI documentary from Peter Jackson, "They Shall Not Grow Old", and the british comic "Charley's War" by Pat Mills.
Yes, it can do enough damage to make other countries adopt DMCA anti-circumvention law out of fear, but it always manages to snatch ultimate defeat.
That was a weird win with another invasion required for some reason and a toxic legacy of Gulf War Syndrome and no fly zones.
Military the US crushed it but it didn’t seem to solve anything.