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Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

I am not from US, but reading this makes me feel US is very, VERY vulnerable.

They made it so they are more dependant on logistics than any army already is, meaning if they ever got in a war against peers (China, Russia, etc...), USA could lose the war because the front line got cut-off or sieged.

Seriously, for example if you send a special force group to sabotage a carrier for example, then all you need to keep the carrier non-funcional is siege it, place boats with anti-air equipment in certain positions and shoot any airplane trying to reach the carrier.

Land battles against bases seemly can be won by just sieging them and waiting all their gear to break, specailly if it is in harsh environment (like desert or snow), don't need to wait them to run out of food or ammo, just have to wait until their gear stopped working properly and then you can assault.

How the leadership doesn't see that?

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In time of full scale war (or potentially whenever they want) the gov't can do whatever they want including changing the deal. This of course doesn't obviate your claims, because in case of all out war all the broken equipment contractors have been milking might cause huge problems. Also, it might be nuclear already, so who knows if anyone will be there to fix it, or even pull the trigger.

Regardless, this looks to me like a function of the huge $$$ that is referred to as the "Military Industrial Congressional Complex[0]", in which the mostly protected cost center of "defense" and of course those thousands of global US mil installations essentially milk these degenerate spasms of cash all over each others faces in the name of patriotism, service, the public, and whatever else.

Also refer to "War is a Racket" (1935)[1] by medals of honor recipient Major General Smedley Butler

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_co...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket and https://feralhouse.com/war-is-a-racket/

> Also refer to "War is a Racket" (1935)[1] by medals of honor recipient Major General Smedley Butler

That is a terrific piece, and one that's had a lot of HN attention:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=War+is+a+Racket

Most active discussion, from five years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012255

Smedley Butler is also one of the few people in history who was tapped to help with a fascist coup and refused the seduction of power. A modern day Cincinnatus.

> In time of full scale war (or potentially whenever they want) the gov't can do whatever they want including changing the deal. This of course doesn't obviate your claims, because in case of all out war all the broken equipment contractors have been milking might cause huge problems.

I mean, assuming the soldiers have the tools and training to do it. If they don't, changing the terms of the deal doesn't matter much, since the soldiers won't be able to repair when they need to.

Yeah, the military contractors silo off the repair data and probably special tools, but I mean if it were really an emergency the Defense Production Act can compel the contractors to turn it over today. They can throw them in jail, too.

Not saying this is likely, but it is possible. I'm not educated enough to rate the probability.

Here's an example of this power being used to compel telecoms to spill some beans: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-30/obama-inv...

> In time of full scale war (or potentially whenever they want) the gov't can do whatever they want including changing the deal.

Nothing quite says 'military preparedness' like, "In the event of an actual real conflict, we can always just scramble to change everything."

It's the American Way of War. See also the US Civil War, US participation in WWI (the US went into that one with essentially horse-mounted dragoons intended for the Indian Wars), and, of course, WWII.

isn't this how most countries changed to a total war system? looking at world war 2, most countries radically changed their economies and nationalised a ton of industry to be able to conduct warfare.

Yes, they saw USA create a military from scratch in five years and curb-stomp two giant multi-continental martial empires who had been building their armies for decades. The lesson they somehow drew from that was "it's bad to build a military from scratch!"

> milk these degenerate spasms of cash all over each others faces

You really could have omitted that thought.

I don't think you're speaking with much context.

> USA could lose the war because the front line got cut-off or sieged

No formation is set up to operate without resupply anyway. That's not a thing in the first place - issues with contracting or not.

> don't need to wait them to run out of food or ammo, just have to wait until their gear stopped working properly

Why do you think gear would stop working before they run out of ammo? Ammo is almost always going to be your limiting factor way before anything else. Ammo runs out in hours.

> can be won by just sieging them

Just run a siege. Simple as that, huh? How many people do you think that takes? Huge cordon, defending in both directions at the time same? I wouldn't want to do that. Would you?

Worse yet, sitting in one place like that with modern artillery and air support is just asking to be obliterated from beyond line of sight range. And if you have the ability to counter them with counter artillery or air superiority why not just shell or bomb it in the first place?

If you want to recover sensitive intelligence - if you are cutting off supply lines then you already lost as the obvious response is to destroy any intelligence so it doesn't get captured.

Even the Admiral Kuznetsov, intended to sail solo, would completely ruin any type of 'siege' attempt.

The DoD employs millions, the United States is bordered by two oceans, and has enough nuclear weapons to kill billions of people.

'VERY vulnerable' is the least accurate description I can think of for it, despite TFA.

With enough screw-ups, it might be at a point where it can't effectively press an overseas war, but it's not going to be 'vulnerable' in our lifetimes.

It's not like the history of logistics and repair when it comes to war was solved / squeaky clean to begin with.

Not to hand wave the actual problem but this topic isn't exactly new.

Also just not knowing if another given nation does or doesn't have a problem sometimes is more about how open they are about it ...

The US is protected by two oceans and nuclear weapons. Amphibious landings are some of the most complex and difficult military operations, D-Day is so hyped in part because it's so difficult. We'll be fine.

The question to ask is what the heck are we doing out around the world.

Isolationism doesn't work. Two world wars showed that.

I'm not an isolationist. I'm against global military dictatorships. I think that if there were a democratic institution like the UN with required contributions and no single country vetos, we'd have a mostly better system.

It would be a terrible system. A country the size of China with 1 point something billion people, would have the same clout as a country like Belgium, with 11.5 million. Unless you will give proportionate representation, but why would smaller countries agree to get swallowed up?

Why would smaller countries that are constantly being invaded by the US agree to give vetos to the US??

You're very confused about how these things work.

> Seriously, for example if you send a special force group to sabotage a carrier for example, then all you need to keep the carrier non-funcional is siege it, place boats with anti-air equipment in certain positions and shoot any airplane trying to reach the carrier.

A Navy ship does its important resupply via ship, not via aircraft.

> Land battles against bases seemly can be won by just sieging them

If any of this stuff you are suggesting were feasible, it would mean the US already lost the war.

> If any of this stuff you are suggesting were feasible, it would mean the US already lost the war.

It didn’t win the one discussed in the article - Afghanistan.

Special case. The US has a lot of experience with counter-insurgencies and screws it up every time.

> Special case. The US has a lot of experience with counter-insurgencies and screws it up every time.

Arguably, in Afghanistan the US came closer than ever before to not screwing it up, despite Afghanistan being a particularly hard nut to crack.

The leadership does, but their interests are political so that they may end up in the ranks of the private contractors selling materials and services to the military. It's beyond dysfunctional and isn't well recognized. The military industrial complex has converged into a self-defeating feast of taxpayer's money.

The US military has a long and glorious record of getting into situations with craptastic gear and training and half-assing things until they kind of figure out what they're doing (and then half-assing that). But yeah, that first year or so really sucks.

Because you are rewarded to cuddle metrics not make things that work properly.

I would consider the possibility that reading a bunch of YouTube comments that Matt Stoller copy pasted to his Substack probably did not give you a full picture of the U.S. global military posture.

The US military is far better at logistics than any other military. If nothing else, they have had more recent practice at larger scale and longer term deployments than any other military.

The US would definitely lose against China if a war was fought today.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/china-pape...

In a war between nuclear powers, I expect both sides to lose.

Depends heavily on the objectives of both sides. That is nowhere near being absolutely true.

I think both that the US is vulnerable for these reasons, but systemic issues like this are worse in China, and Russia is not a substantial threat outside of nuclear engagement. I think the US military is actually much better than China at maintaining decently competent people in positions of power. You'd be much more critical of China if you were able to witness their actually attempting a military objective.

> I think the US military is actually much better than China at maintaining decently competent people in positions of power.

Looking at what China and the US have accomplished in the past 30 years, how do you draw that conclusion?

What has China accomplished militarily in the last 30 years?

I think it was the last decade that China changed troop deployment from being primarily based on railroads. America conquered a few countries far outside their traditional sphere of influence.

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