This fall has certainly been one of distraction, so this Max Boot article in WaPo left me breathless:
Now add this fall’s Nagorno-Karabakh war to the list. In six weeks of fighting, the oil-rich nation of Azerbaijan defeated Russia’s ally Armenia to reclaim territory it had lost in the early 1990s. A key to Azerbaijan’s triumph was its use of killer drones such as Turkey’s Bayraktar TB2, which is armed with antitank missiles and is similar to the U.S. Reaper, and Israel’s “kamikaze drones,” which home in on radar emissions.
Wait. What war?!?!?!?!
Why doesn’t anyone ever tell me about these things!
Well, since I’m here, I’ll quote Boot on the chronic American problem:
That inertia is reinforced by the “iron triangle” of defense contractors, members of Congress and the Pentagon bureaucracy. The new defense authorization bill set to be passed by the House on Tuesday authorizes 93 F-35 fighters — 14 more than the Pentagon requested — and an extra Virginia-class submarine that the Pentagon did not ask for. A Virginia-class submarine costs about $3 billion and an F-35 at least $80 million.
And there’s no guarantee that those extras were the idea of Republicans, because Democrats are vulnerable to the pressures that can be brought to bear by huge defense contractors. And then:
That’s a lot of money — but it’s chicken feed compared with the cost of building new aircraft carriers that could become target practice for Chinese missiles. The new Gerald R. Ford, still not complete, cost $13 billion, and the Navy is building two more in its class. In 2018, then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis proposed that the Harry S. Truman be retired halfway through its service life. But President Trump overruled him. The Navy will need to spend $20 billion to keep this flat-top, already a quarter-century old, at sea for another 25 years.
And I wonder at our bloated defense budget. We should probably retire the USS Harry S. Truman and abort construction of the USS Gerald R. Ford, and begin looking into small vessels capable of transporting large numbers of small, unmanned (remotely controlled? Or take a big change chance on autonomous?) fighting vehicles.
