Our political leadership — at least the portion with the intellectual and moral capability — needs to ramp it up where it concerns foreign policy/military engagement.
Watching the hearings today and coupling it with the mess that is LA, NYC, Chicago, etc., make me doubt the capabilities of large swaths of our political class.
If we are leaving key parts of the decision making to the likes of Mazie Hirono, Tim Kaine, Adam Schiff, etc., we are screwed.
The examination of Hegseth showed the contemptible lack of seriousness of the Democrats. Frankly, he has a lot of vulnerabilities. His CV does not align with the job or its demands. But the Democrats chose not to talk about substance at all. Pathetic. I hope Hegseth has good deputies to run the Department. He seems like a good guy, and well-meaning, but that is not enough in the snakepit of the Pentagon.
What scares me. Even before the battle starts, find the enemy combatants that are crucial for moving a ships(s) or a fleet of aircraft. Use social media, geo location, etc. Take them out using drones. Battle over before it begins.
I graduated from VMI during the VN War Era and served in the combat engineers and went to Airborne and Ranger Schools. I like to think my 20-something self was a badass, and I met a million guys like Pete Hegseth. Good guys.
He was probably a competent platoon leader and as an Ivy League grad, I would expect him to be smarter than the aveage lieutenant.
I could not care less that he liked to drink and get laid. It was part of the culture in my day. I would be suspicious were he not.
The problem with Hegseth, honestly, that's very small potatoes when it comes to command experience. I commanded a combat engineer company as the war was winding down and had a bayonet strength of 800 men (TOE was 186) because I was assigned every combat engineer getting out and a bunch of other troops. It was a wild challenge.
I never commanded a battalion (4-5 companies), brigade (3-6 battalions), division (3-5 brigades), or corps (3-5 divisions). Some of my classmates did. The cream rose to the top with the commanders.
It's a huge jump in experience from platoon leader to company commander (best job in the Army like a feudal Chinese war lord). Only about half the officers are actually good at it. It's a damn hard job, but very fulfilling.
I worry about Hegseth's management capabilities because -- as he notes -- his experience is at the dirt on the boots troop level.
Can he rise to the challenge? You bet.
Here's a clear symptom of the challenge:
1. At the end of WWII, we had a military of 12-33MM men and women (my mother was in the Army in WWII as was my father who made it a career).
2. On VJ Day, we had 13 4-stars and 5-stars. That's right 13 total.
3. Today the military is about 1MM men and women. Disregarding the National Guard and Reserves to make the comparison straight.
4. Today, we have 44 4-stars.
That's right -- VJ Day military was 12-13MM men/women - 13 4/5-stars.
Military today 1MM - 44 4-stars.
How could that possibly happen?
I can give you micro example. I grew up on Army posts and the Post Commander was always a full Colonel, typically a Colonel with no prospect of pinning on a star and with about 35 years service. These were the most experienced officers in the Army. They had seen it all.
Today, Army posts are commanded by Major Generals (2-stars) and some 3-stars.
How does this happen? You let the Army design its own force structure. Same is true of school commanders and training centers.
This is a very dicey time in the history of our military forces.
I watched that interview with Andreessen. Well worth the time. I've never heard a man talk so fast and have so much to say. He's right, Ukraine has demonstrated that the face of war has changed dramatically. And, of course, we have prepared to fight the last war.
Peter Robinson covered Andreessen's political bona fides, what they didn't get around to his political conversion. I think I'll go back and watch his discussion with Joe Rogan.
The incoming appointees are far less blinkered than the entrenched institutionalists of Biden's regime.
Hegseth, for example, has actually served in battle multiple times and is more concerned for the fighting warriors than the lobbyists. Seems like he will, perforce, be more cognizant of the risks of new weapon "classes" such as drones.
In any case, Pres Trump has promised to reveal what is going on with the drones above many of our nation's military bases and population centers, once he is in office.
Most think it will be their drones against our drones. No. During WW II the only leader not under serious threat was FDR. Everyone else on both sides was vulnerable. Drones can be autonomous only to a certain extent. They still have to be repaired refitted programmed, etc. Still need humans in the mix, just higher up the chain. The use of the A-Bomb in WW II is misunderstood. The most destructive raid in the war was the firebombing of Tokyo. Killed more people than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
It took over 500 B-29's, each with a 10 man crew. So 5000+ people. Some didn't make it back. By the end of the war the US was flying missions over Germany of over 1000 planes . Ditto Japan. Not over one city but several at a time. Each carrying maybe 5-10 men plus fighter escorts. We had the planes and we had the manpower.
Hiroshima took one B-29 with one 10 man crew.
You still needed the 1000's of people to make the bombs and the planes but they were 1000's of miles away and out of harm. The ICBM changed that.
What Drones may do is bring the real risk not just at the battle front but to the home front as well. Stalin didn't run, Hitler didn't, Churchill didn't and FDR didn't have to. No one in DC thought they were in any danger. Drones may change all of that.
Drones still need fuel (this includes the battery's electric charge), so they are either short range or large.
They can be more accurate than throwing a bunch of stuff at a target and hoping you hit. But for this to happen they either need a human driving, or pretty good target acquisition software. Both can be spoofed, at which point you're back to throwing stuff.
For FDR to have been in danger, the drones would have to have started from a point much closer than they got in anything other than a submarine.
agree on fuel, but battery tech is getting better and better and better--and remember battery powered stuff is quiet. What if they were spider like things that could crawl and enter a body cavity and blow up?
But those are still short range. How far can something battery-powered that will fit in a body orifice crawl without running out of energy?
This isn't a horror film. Drones can't teleport. They still need to get from deployment point to the target.
Quiet only helps in that the one deploying the drones close in might have a better chance to get away afterwards.
This is also why anti-ship drones are rather larger than you think they are - unless they're deployed from land in a confined area like the Gulf of Aden.
Your assumptions are that the drones would have to launched from far away. Drones are fairly easy to build the tech can be added. So a sleeper cell in the US or several of them could order them as toys, modify them add navigation (google maps anyone ) and we are off to the races. The border is still rather porous. They could probably build them in their basement. You could send them off from 25 or so miles away. You don't need a big drone. Lots of little ones would do
As I said upthread, close in assumes sneaking in. Would FDR have been in danger with drones in WW2? Probably not; getting a team in place assumes deep cover, or a transatlantic voyage.
Small drones you can buy as toys have very limited cargo capacity. Think grenade at most. Maybe not even with the shrapnel jacket, which is about half the mass of a hand grenade and actually does most of the damage.
A hand grenade appears to be roughly 1 pound, maybe two.
Yes there are very small drones that can lift that much. Lift it and carry it for 25 miles? And possibly have to chase someone down at the end of that? No. That's a rather larger one.
Larger drones mean larger clear workshop to create, larger place to store them until use, larger area for takeoff, and more visibility.
More visibility you can fix by having them fly higher, but then you need more fuel.
Etc.
I'm not saying it's not a problem; it is. But they're not magic; they can't pull a Freddy and come in from off screen to stab you.
The big problem you have identified - the border is extremely porous. Not to mention there are homegrown threats. If a cloud of drones takes off and heads towards a place the President is speaking, will there be enough concerned citizens to get an actual alert? Will the security be competent to respond appropriately? Don't know.
Unfortunately, IMHO most of our politicians today do not have the mental fortitude to consider calculating costs or know the difference between positive and normative economics, they are simply more interested in the narrative du jour and/or using their position for control and wealth.
Every war injects a huge change into the science of warfighting.
Cavalry, machine guns, airpower, armor, long range artillery, aircraft carriers, GPS, missiles and now -- from the Ukraine - Russia War -- shoulder fired weapons, drones and intelligence.
The shoulder fired weapons/kamikaze drone is the most cost effective way to fight an armored, heavy artillery force like the Russians. These weapons have essentially eliminated almost every tank owned or built by the Russians since the end of WWII.
Know why the Russians didn't drive down that highway from Belarus to Kyiv and hang Zelenskyy? Because the Ukrainians immediately deployed anti-vehicle shoulder fired weapons on 4-wheelers to destroy the fuel trucks essential to resupply the Russian tanks. Clever fuckers. They killed all the fuel tankers.
Drones are effective as intel gatherers and weapons platforms and as weapons themselves. Their weakness is electronic jamming.
The cost v benefit equation of trading a $3000 kamikaze drone carrying a 100 lbs warhead and flying down the hatch of a $10MM tank or a $50MM artillery piece/missile launcher is good business. Optical targeting systems today offer finer resolution than the human eye.
The Russians had a good EW jamming tech and so what happened? The Ukrainians went back to wire guided drones -- a technology from the 1960s and the TOW -- Tube launched, Optically tracked, Wire guided. A TOW or a similarly designed drone cannot be defeated by Russian EW.
As to intel, the battlefield intel is now acted upon in real time. High resolution satellites can find the enemy, drones can track movements, same drones can give us infrared sensing to pinpoint personnel, analysis can measure the depth of mud, HUMINT can be folded in, and software like Planatir (good stock) can drive this info back to the battlefield in seconds.
With that info in hand, a HIMARS driving down a road can pull into a field and be immediatley tasked to fire 1-4 missiles at the enemy with literally pinpoint accuracy within 5 minutes. Two minutes later, the HIMARS unit is headed down the road foiling counterbattery fire.
The biggest consideration is not having the tech, but having the weapons systems. The Allies won WWII because we could produce 10,000 planes a month in the last month of the war. The Krauts had fabulous jet tech in the Me-262, but couldn't produce enough to have an impact.
Amateurs study tactics whilst pros study logistics and industry.
We need to quicken up our step on this stuff. Right now.
Great post. Yep, not ONE question about robotic war and our countermeasures to Pete...
Vanity supersedes practicality when it comes to politicians and it is very dangerous to us all.
When Trump announced "Space Force" in 2018 he was ridiculed by Sodom on Potomac, but every veteran I know(I am one) was saluting him for it; finally, we had a serious CINC.
It's great learning your insights. Regarding your AI and drone discussion. In the bush in VN, the truth was that the only "pacified" and secure ground was that which a Marine was standing on. As soon as he moved, it was considered to be in play again. When a drone can do that, we will have to be worried.
Our political leadership — at least the portion with the intellectual and moral capability — needs to ramp it up where it concerns foreign policy/military engagement.
Watching the hearings today and coupling it with the mess that is LA, NYC, Chicago, etc., make me doubt the capabilities of large swaths of our political class.
If we are leaving key parts of the decision making to the likes of Mazie Hirono, Tim Kaine, Adam Schiff, etc., we are screwed.
Schiff fell asleep in the hearing today
I did not know that.
No wonder he’s tired: it must be tough keeping track of all the lies he tells.
The examination of Hegseth showed the contemptible lack of seriousness of the Democrats. Frankly, he has a lot of vulnerabilities. His CV does not align with the job or its demands. But the Democrats chose not to talk about substance at all. Pathetic. I hope Hegseth has good deputies to run the Department. He seems like a good guy, and well-meaning, but that is not enough in the snakepit of the Pentagon.
What scares me. Even before the battle starts, find the enemy combatants that are crucial for moving a ships(s) or a fleet of aircraft. Use social media, geo location, etc. Take them out using drones. Battle over before it begins.
I graduated from VMI during the VN War Era and served in the combat engineers and went to Airborne and Ranger Schools. I like to think my 20-something self was a badass, and I met a million guys like Pete Hegseth. Good guys.
He was probably a competent platoon leader and as an Ivy League grad, I would expect him to be smarter than the aveage lieutenant.
I could not care less that he liked to drink and get laid. It was part of the culture in my day. I would be suspicious were he not.
The problem with Hegseth, honestly, that's very small potatoes when it comes to command experience. I commanded a combat engineer company as the war was winding down and had a bayonet strength of 800 men (TOE was 186) because I was assigned every combat engineer getting out and a bunch of other troops. It was a wild challenge.
I never commanded a battalion (4-5 companies), brigade (3-6 battalions), division (3-5 brigades), or corps (3-5 divisions). Some of my classmates did. The cream rose to the top with the commanders.
It's a huge jump in experience from platoon leader to company commander (best job in the Army like a feudal Chinese war lord). Only about half the officers are actually good at it. It's a damn hard job, but very fulfilling.
I worry about Hegseth's management capabilities because -- as he notes -- his experience is at the dirt on the boots troop level.
Can he rise to the challenge? You bet.
Here's a clear symptom of the challenge:
1. At the end of WWII, we had a military of 12-33MM men and women (my mother was in the Army in WWII as was my father who made it a career).
2. On VJ Day, we had 13 4-stars and 5-stars. That's right 13 total.
3. Today the military is about 1MM men and women. Disregarding the National Guard and Reserves to make the comparison straight.
4. Today, we have 44 4-stars.
That's right -- VJ Day military was 12-13MM men/women - 13 4/5-stars.
Military today 1MM - 44 4-stars.
How could that possibly happen?
I can give you micro example. I grew up on Army posts and the Post Commander was always a full Colonel, typically a Colonel with no prospect of pinning on a star and with about 35 years service. These were the most experienced officers in the Army. They had seen it all.
Today, Army posts are commanded by Major Generals (2-stars) and some 3-stars.
How does this happen? You let the Army design its own force structure. Same is true of school commanders and training centers.
This is a very dicey time in the history of our military forces.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
Retired General I know is very suspicious of Pete's ability. We will see
I watched that interview with Andreessen. Well worth the time. I've never heard a man talk so fast and have so much to say. He's right, Ukraine has demonstrated that the face of war has changed dramatically. And, of course, we have prepared to fight the last war.
Peter Robinson covered Andreessen's political bona fides, what they didn't get around to his political conversion. I think I'll go back and watch his discussion with Joe Rogan.
The incoming appointees are far less blinkered than the entrenched institutionalists of Biden's regime.
Hegseth, for example, has actually served in battle multiple times and is more concerned for the fighting warriors than the lobbyists. Seems like he will, perforce, be more cognizant of the risks of new weapon "classes" such as drones.
In any case, Pres Trump has promised to reveal what is going on with the drones above many of our nation's military bases and population centers, once he is in office.
Wellcome to SkyNet. The solution is obvious.
Most think it will be their drones against our drones. No. During WW II the only leader not under serious threat was FDR. Everyone else on both sides was vulnerable. Drones can be autonomous only to a certain extent. They still have to be repaired refitted programmed, etc. Still need humans in the mix, just higher up the chain. The use of the A-Bomb in WW II is misunderstood. The most destructive raid in the war was the firebombing of Tokyo. Killed more people than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
It took over 500 B-29's, each with a 10 man crew. So 5000+ people. Some didn't make it back. By the end of the war the US was flying missions over Germany of over 1000 planes . Ditto Japan. Not over one city but several at a time. Each carrying maybe 5-10 men plus fighter escorts. We had the planes and we had the manpower.
Hiroshima took one B-29 with one 10 man crew.
You still needed the 1000's of people to make the bombs and the planes but they were 1000's of miles away and out of harm. The ICBM changed that.
What Drones may do is bring the real risk not just at the battle front but to the home front as well. Stalin didn't run, Hitler didn't, Churchill didn't and FDR didn't have to. No one in DC thought they were in any danger. Drones may change all of that.
Drones still need fuel (this includes the battery's electric charge), so they are either short range or large.
They can be more accurate than throwing a bunch of stuff at a target and hoping you hit. But for this to happen they either need a human driving, or pretty good target acquisition software. Both can be spoofed, at which point you're back to throwing stuff.
For FDR to have been in danger, the drones would have to have started from a point much closer than they got in anything other than a submarine.
agree on fuel, but battery tech is getting better and better and better--and remember battery powered stuff is quiet. What if they were spider like things that could crawl and enter a body cavity and blow up?
But those are still short range. How far can something battery-powered that will fit in a body orifice crawl without running out of energy?
This isn't a horror film. Drones can't teleport. They still need to get from deployment point to the target.
Quiet only helps in that the one deploying the drones close in might have a better chance to get away afterwards.
This is also why anti-ship drones are rather larger than you think they are - unless they're deployed from land in a confined area like the Gulf of Aden.
Your assumptions are that the drones would have to launched from far away. Drones are fairly easy to build the tech can be added. So a sleeper cell in the US or several of them could order them as toys, modify them add navigation (google maps anyone ) and we are off to the races. The border is still rather porous. They could probably build them in their basement. You could send them off from 25 or so miles away. You don't need a big drone. Lots of little ones would do
As I said upthread, close in assumes sneaking in. Would FDR have been in danger with drones in WW2? Probably not; getting a team in place assumes deep cover, or a transatlantic voyage.
Small drones you can buy as toys have very limited cargo capacity. Think grenade at most. Maybe not even with the shrapnel jacket, which is about half the mass of a hand grenade and actually does most of the damage.
A hand grenade appears to be roughly 1 pound, maybe two.
Yes there are very small drones that can lift that much. Lift it and carry it for 25 miles? And possibly have to chase someone down at the end of that? No. That's a rather larger one.
Larger drones mean larger clear workshop to create, larger place to store them until use, larger area for takeoff, and more visibility.
More visibility you can fix by having them fly higher, but then you need more fuel.
Etc.
I'm not saying it's not a problem; it is. But they're not magic; they can't pull a Freddy and come in from off screen to stab you.
The big problem you have identified - the border is extremely porous. Not to mention there are homegrown threats. If a cloud of drones takes off and heads towards a place the President is speaking, will there be enough concerned citizens to get an actual alert? Will the security be competent to respond appropriately? Don't know.
Unfortunately, IMHO most of our politicians today do not have the mental fortitude to consider calculating costs or know the difference between positive and normative economics, they are simply more interested in the narrative du jour and/or using their position for control and wealth.
Every war injects a huge change into the science of warfighting.
Cavalry, machine guns, airpower, armor, long range artillery, aircraft carriers, GPS, missiles and now -- from the Ukraine - Russia War -- shoulder fired weapons, drones and intelligence.
The shoulder fired weapons/kamikaze drone is the most cost effective way to fight an armored, heavy artillery force like the Russians. These weapons have essentially eliminated almost every tank owned or built by the Russians since the end of WWII.
Know why the Russians didn't drive down that highway from Belarus to Kyiv and hang Zelenskyy? Because the Ukrainians immediately deployed anti-vehicle shoulder fired weapons on 4-wheelers to destroy the fuel trucks essential to resupply the Russian tanks. Clever fuckers. They killed all the fuel tankers.
Drones are effective as intel gatherers and weapons platforms and as weapons themselves. Their weakness is electronic jamming.
The cost v benefit equation of trading a $3000 kamikaze drone carrying a 100 lbs warhead and flying down the hatch of a $10MM tank or a $50MM artillery piece/missile launcher is good business. Optical targeting systems today offer finer resolution than the human eye.
The Russians had a good EW jamming tech and so what happened? The Ukrainians went back to wire guided drones -- a technology from the 1960s and the TOW -- Tube launched, Optically tracked, Wire guided. A TOW or a similarly designed drone cannot be defeated by Russian EW.
As to intel, the battlefield intel is now acted upon in real time. High resolution satellites can find the enemy, drones can track movements, same drones can give us infrared sensing to pinpoint personnel, analysis can measure the depth of mud, HUMINT can be folded in, and software like Planatir (good stock) can drive this info back to the battlefield in seconds.
With that info in hand, a HIMARS driving down a road can pull into a field and be immediatley tasked to fire 1-4 missiles at the enemy with literally pinpoint accuracy within 5 minutes. Two minutes later, the HIMARS unit is headed down the road foiling counterbattery fire.
The biggest consideration is not having the tech, but having the weapons systems. The Allies won WWII because we could produce 10,000 planes a month in the last month of the war. The Krauts had fabulous jet tech in the Me-262, but couldn't produce enough to have an impact.
Amateurs study tactics whilst pros study logistics and industry.
We need to quicken up our step on this stuff. Right now.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
Great post. Yep, not ONE question about robotic war and our countermeasures to Pete...
Vanity supersedes practicality when it comes to politicians and it is very dangerous to us all.
When Trump announced "Space Force" in 2018 he was ridiculed by Sodom on Potomac, but every veteran I know(I am one) was saluting him for it; finally, we had a serious CINC.
Electronic Disruption Weaponry.
Also, EMP.
Directed Energy Weapons.
Much more.
It's great learning your insights. Regarding your AI and drone discussion. In the bush in VN, the truth was that the only "pacified" and secure ground was that which a Marine was standing on. As soon as he moved, it was considered to be in play again. When a drone can do that, we will have to be worried.