We're Designing Ourselves to Lose

a glass fortress defended by sea monkeys

Of course we lost you nitwits. We've designed a palace of glass as our our fortress;

In a fake battle for Taiwan, U.S. forces lost network access almost immediately. Hyten has issued four directives to help change that.

An aggressive red team that had been studying the United States for the last 20 years just ran rings around us. They knew exactly what we're going to do before we did it,” Hyten told an audience Monday at the launch of the Emerging Technologies Institute, an effort by the National Defense Industrial Association industry group to speed military modernization.   

The Pentagon would not provide the name of the wargame, which was classified, but a defense official said one of the scenarios revolved around a battle for Taiwan. One key lesson: gathering ships, aircraft, and other forces to concentrate and reinforce each other’s combat power also made them sitting ducks. 

“We always aggregate to fight, and aggregate to survive. But in today’s world, with hypersonic missiles, with significant long-range fires coming at us from all domains, if you're aggregated and everybody knows where you are, you're vulnerable,” Hyten said.  

I'm sorry, but in spite of all the warnings provided about building an exquisite Tiffany force and shoveling billions in to critical peacetime capabilities that in war immediately are converted in to critical vulnerabilities with zero benefit and uncounted risk ... we are shocked?

Study for 20 years? Bullshit, you can see our vulnerabilities in open source in 20 minutes. 

If we had a culture that allowed aggressive critique as opposed to obsequious agreement, we wouldn't be here. We let the military industrial complex sell of a bill of peacetime-only concepts about networks, real time video, invulnerable satellites, the whole transformational offsetting grabassery that no intelligent person expected to survive any near peer adversary.

No one here at least.

Again; if your entire warfighting CONOPS rests on the chalk-brittle supports of networks, GPS and satellite VOX/DATA, then at war I will blind you, confuse you, target you and kill you. We've been pointing this out here for a decade and a half, as have a legion of others.

We willfully ignored all the hard lessons of a challenged electro-magnetic spectrum. We've raised generations of "thought leaders" who decided it was not profitable to remember that if you leak you die ... instead we flood the air with proof of our location, and cannot fight without giving the enemy all they need to destroy us.

We need new elites. We need new processes. We need a new culture.

The fact that this is actually news, and people are acting as if this is a surprise - that alone should tell you how deeply corrupt and incompetent we have allowed our military to become.

Yes, I'm blogging tired and pissed off. You should be tired and pissed off too. Tired of being lied to, and pissed off at what has been done to the greatest military power the world has seen by a generation of ill-focused, poorly selected, perversely incentivized leaders. Then when they can't hide it anymore, they expect you to give the system a pass.

Bullshit.

Just look at the state of it all; we have a CONOPS that two fundamentals of warfare teamed with two laughably intellectually prolapsed pipe dreams.

Earlier this month, Hyten released four directives to the services: one each for contested logistics; joint fires; Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2; and information advantage. On Monday, he revealed new details about these “functional battles.”

This is just painful. 

Contested logistics. Creating new ways to deliver fuel and supplies to front lines. U.S. Transportation Command and the Air Force are working on using rockets and a space trajectory to get large cargo spaceships into and out of battlefields. 

First of all, logistics in warfare has always been contested. Also - how about we invest in airlift, sea lift and land transport what can support and sustain a long war with attrition west of Wake by mid-decade first ... then ... for the love of Pete ... who lets this get proposed .... just look at it again.

...large cargo spaceships into and out of battlefields...

I'm sorry, but go fire yourself. That is along the lines of the worst ideas of the post-Korean War nuclear Army.

Joint fires: “You have to aggregate to mass fires, but it doesn't have to be a physical aggregation,” Hyten said. “It could be a virtual aggregation for multiple domains; acting at the same time under a single command structure allows the fires to come in on anybody. It allows you to disaggregate to survive.” Hyten said the joint fires concept “is aspirational. It is unbelievably difficult to do.” And the military will have to figure out what part will be affordable and practical, he said. 

I'm sorry, but go fire yourself again. We proved over the last two decades we cannot make a simple imperial brushfire work, how we are going to fight and win with this fragile construct? I'll save everyone the trouble - you can't.

In the Terrible 20s budgetary environment with so many pressing needs for things to get ready for the fight, this is almost criminal. This is doubling down on the mistakes that made you lose your stupid wargame to begin with.

JADC2: The Pentagon’s push to connect everything demands always-on, hackerproof networks, Hyten said. “The goal is to be fully connected to a combat cloud that has all information that you can access at any time, anyplace,” so that, like with joint fires, the data doesn’t get exposed or hacked because it’s housed in one centralized location, he said. 

This is what happens when people get high off their own supply. This will never happen. If it does, and you rely on it, you will not be able to fight without it ... as such, you lose.

Information advantage: This element is the sum of the first three, Hyten said: “If we can do the things I just described, the United States and our allies will have an information advantage over anybody that we could possibly face.”

Strategic over-promise and under-deliver. This is strategic Sea Monkeyism. We had a huge information advantage over the Taliban and how did that work out for us. We learn nothing.

The new operating concept comes as the U.S. military reshapes its footprint in the Middle East to better prepare for a fight with China. On Monday, President Joe Biden announced U.S. troops will end their combat role in Iraq by the end of the year; the announcement comes just two months after Biden announced a full withdrawal from Afghanistan.   

If we think the above is what will defeat China, we've already lost the war.

Next slide.

As a military, we have learned absolutely nothing.

Sea Monkey marketing is an unattractive look for a superpower.