Despite spending several times more on its military than anyone else, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel believes the US military advantage is not nearly overwhelming enough, and warns Russia and/or China are both gaining on them.
Hagel insists that what the US really needs is some sort of new game-changing military technology that will ensure that the Pentagon “overmatches” the other nations for decades to come.
That, like most of Hagel’s policies, means a push for dramatically more funding, just in this case that the money will be thrown at “innovation” in general, long term spending plans for speculative technologies.
In the past few years, such spending had actually been cut back in favor of more direct funding for the military in general, as many of the “innovation” programs had turned into bottomless sinkholes that just ate money and produced nothing.
Hagel is keen to return to those days, with the hope that sooner or later they’ll come up with something really powerful. In his press release, he expressed hopes that this would involve either 3D printing or robots, or potentially some combination thereof.
How is that new money going to gain any traction? "Be innovative" is never an order that will be followed by much success. Also reminds me of "SDI" (which apparently the "Russians already had" back in the 80s and which is now at the stage of could-maybe-work-against-a-single-missile "missile shield" on the US side) and "Strategic Computing Initiative" which set as goal to get full General Artificial Intelligence in 10 years but which quickly (and by the necessity of exploiting the possibilities that were reachable and had been in the pipeline of ideas) morphed into assistive technology for military devices and building of far-more-powerful-than-previously supercomputers to run numeric calculations on (not useful for AI, those). It helped that SCI could be sold because Congress could be scared into action by the Japanese 5th Generation Computer Project, which also was overambitious and went nowhere fast, but delivered some good research in logic programming.
It sounds like a business for the industry rather than wanting to fight ISIS, the strategy needs to be directed to the Iranian and Syrian government, that is to say if USG truly wants to fight the barbarians without paying tge people's money to corporations where the end is what us going to be left in Afghanistan, billions of dollars for nothing.
Hint hint… Just in time for Xmas, sorry, tschannukkahhahh.
Oh, who will be rewarded with another multi-billion dollar to produce useless junk. Will it be Northrop? Lockheed? Boeing? Chertoff? Raytheon? Get your lobbyists ready! The new edition of Corruptcongress needs money to lease that new foreign luxury car.
A modest proposal:
Instead of game changing technological change to extend the military edge, why don't we just send everyone in potentially hostile regions of the world a 200 hundred pound pallet loaded with 20 dollar bills?
It will save lives, make friends and cost us far less than a bloated and increasingly inefficient Pentagon.
I've thought the same. It'd be even cheaper. But I suspect killing is part of the strategy, for the greater israel, you know.
Generals in the time of Alexander the Great hoped for the same thing. For centuries, military leaders and war loving politicians have promised that new technologies would bring an end to war. The Maxim machine gun was touted as such a device, so were poison gas and the atomic bomb. New technologies bring nothing but higher casualty counts, mostly civilians. The problem is that no high tech weaponry is a solution to stone age thinking.
To do only good — Who needs a gun?
China just released a communication stating that they would never use force against another nation, a position that both Russia and Iran share completely.
So, why is it that Empire USA has to have over 90% of the killing power over all earth? Exactly what is it were trying to accomplish that requires us to so terrorize the world?
My thought is, it must have something to do with dictators such as Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan and all the drug pushing nations we keep afloat. For most always when our military kicks into action it is to back up such corruption with deadly force.