New thinking<\/a>\u00a0for the military.<\/p>\nWe\u2019re keeping the fantastically expensive and kludgy F-35 plus all 11 Carrier Battle Groups but we\u2019re going to cut the A-10 Warthog, since we\u2019ll never again need a tank-buster.\u00a0 And the U-2 is obsolete in the satellite era.\u00a0 Oh, and we don\u2019t need 100,000 people.<\/p>\n
I get that we don\u2019t want to be preparing to fight the last war.\u00a0 But what war are we preparing to fight?<\/p>\n
Joe Doakes<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Back in 1987, the great historian Edward Luttwak wrote\u00a0The Pentagon and the Art of War<\/em>, a comprehensive critique of US military strategy at a time when we’d just endured five straight military failures (Vietnam, the\u00a0Mayaguez<\/em>\u00a0incident, Desert One and Lebanon) and one unnecessarily costly victory (Grenada).<\/p>\nThe conclusion? \u00a0The US didn’t really\u00a0have<\/em> a strategy; our military was designed to fight the Cold War as a rematch of World War 2, and our military was not really suited for the threats we faced or the society we had.<\/p>\nThe book tied in with a wave of thinking in political and military circles that led to the epic reforms of the late eighties, based on the world as it was at the time.<\/p>\n
I’m not convinced that the cuts Obama is proposing have anything to do with the world we live in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: New thinking\u00a0for the military. We\u2019re keeping the fantastically expensive and kludgy F-35 plus all 11 Carrier Battle Groups but we\u2019re going to cut the A-10 Warthog, since we\u2019ll never again need a tank-buster.\u00a0 And the U-2 is obsolete in the satellite era.\u00a0 Oh, and we don\u2019t need 100,000 people. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-president-obama","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42116"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42118,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42116\/revisions\/42118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}