“I know you’re studying peace ops, and that’s fine. I just want you to know that in ten years, the chickens are going to come to roost here. You’ll be in your thirties, and I be either retired or near to it. So I want you to remember this discussion you are having.”

And then I told her to bone up on the readings I had assigned her from Jomini’s “Art of War”.

My instinct is that the QDR fails to be pertinent or helpful, because it is written as a service-to-service competition for resources, by many of the same people who have messed up the requirements in the first place.

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing and posturing in recent years concerning the use of advanced technology to generate break-through capabilities against emerging threats. We read a tremendous volume in sources such as the TRL Deskbook and DoD 5000.2 concerning so-called “Critical Technologies” and Technology Readiness Levels in Milestone B decisions. Unfortunately, such talk is largely pointless word noise. By the time programs get to Milestone B, their associated CONOPs and engineering have already been corrupted by ICD requirements that propose to violate laws of physics or ignore fiscal reality. From such a basis, we are programming ourselves to fail both our soldiers and our Nation.

If I were ever invited to advise senior DoD officials and Congress on what they need to do to “fix” Defense Acquisition, I would suggest that the JROC process needs to be revised in a big way. No acquisition program should be allowed to get past Milestone A review to enter concept demonstration and early development, unless its baseline requirements have been validated as feasible within technologies already demonstrated under representative conditions (TRL-6 or –7, depending on who you ask).

This doesn’t mean new technology should not be invented or developed. But it does mean that our Services should not be allowed to engage in wishful or magical thinking about their near-term force capabilities, based on laboratory curiosities and their hunger for the most recent flashy toys. The JROC needs to be directed to make a hard distinction between military “desirements” that define long range research needs in 6.1 and 6.2 programs, versus “requirements” that drive full scale development and production in 6.3 and 6.4 programs. If we don’t get this concept straight, we’ll be doomed to repeat our failures on programs both large and small.

The enemy is a bunch of insurgents. They have no Army, no Navy, no Air force. The only weapons they have are AK-47’s, RPG’s, and IED’s. A real Army has tanks, helicopters, APC’s, etc. Closet thing the Taliban have are pickup trucks with a gun mounted on top.

Thunder350 your an idiot. We are at war in both Iraq and Afghanistan, against a army not of a state, but of an insurgent organization that is better equiped, in the case of Afghanistan than the state. Men and Women are dying daily fighting in the trenches. The war lasted only three weeks not just because of “big ticket items” but because of a consorted effort among various U.S. Military forces, Our allies, and the technonoligical systems we developed. This effort included troops on the ground as well as in the sky, and in CONUS monitoring systems and providing that information back to the War Fighters.

We are at war(s), or have you forgot, we have big ticket items that are sitting in CONUS depots (Abrams and Bradley) that are useless in Afghanistan. The much hypes Stryker that arrived in Afghanistan last summer has mostly been use for convoy escort duties between Kabul and Kandahar, to little effect but building up excessive US casualties.

I’m listening, how is the F-22 going to help us in Afghanistan, how is BMD going to help us finish the war in Iraq? As someone said here, he supports the F-35 because it would help prevent another Pearl harbor. I responded how? Still haven’t got an answer.

Looking at the daily air summery for the past few months it would appear that the AF has fewer then 75 (A-10’s-F-15s-F16’s) in both theaters at any time. The only bomber to appear in the war zones the past few months are single sortie B-1B’s.

Note: The B-1B’s big deal to justify it existence, the “sniper ball”, where the bomber can pinpoint a sniper on the ground and then release a GBU-38, 500 lb. laser guided bomb from 10-20K ft to take out the sniper has been sold to Turkey. The Turks don’t have any B-1B’s of course, so they will mount this “miracle weapons” on an F-16. So much for stupid and dumb excess to justify and find a use for a weapons platform that was never needed in the first place.

The Navy who is flying mostly in Iraq, has about a half dozen F-18’s in use on any day. Because of being 14 hour missions and I would assume the build up of hours on the air frame most of the dozen F-18’s in Afghanistan are Marine and land based in Kandahar. The AV-8B Harriers in Afghanistan appear to be kept on stand by.

Total combat sorties in BOTH war zones appear to be about 30–40 a day. Tanker sorties is about 40–50 a day. For all the hundreds of billions of dollars the United States has invested in these “big ticket items” they are doing pathetically little in helping to win these wars.

The UAV’s are not listed on this report but the CIA and Army numbers look like about 65 Predator, Reaper missions in any give day. They don’t list if any single mission is an RQ or MQ mission.

I would say Usetobe, that “big ticket weapons” are not how to win a war.

ALLONS,
Byron Skinner

“corrupting influence of these think thanks both the lace curtains liberal one who like to stealthly work the back rooms of power and that peculiar institution of winger tanks who have to chose their spread their venomous ideology in the public place is to cut off their money from both contractors and the DoD.”

That has got to be the most confusing sentence I have read on this site… What is this venomous ideology you speak of Byron? Peace through Strength? Limited government? Traditional values? What is it that we so called right wing “hatemongers” do that is so venomous? I don’t recall eating any children recently.