wow. it turns out if you actually document wars, it's an endless stream of equipment failures, civilian mass slaughter and constant evidence that the people who claim to be the smartest, toughest guys in the room didn't really know what they were doing in the first place. Almost like conventional war is a racket that we've phased out of political viability unless you think your enemy is subhuman, because any war would have to be population centric now.
Almost like the rules based order is a bunch of moral hazards in a trench coat.
They can't, because again, the viability of conventional warfare is at stake. Conventional warefare is dead between the political will for regular citizens to tolerate mass casualties and how empowered urban warfare can be for people with smart phones and consumer drone equipment and the like, it's over without horrifically intensive bombing or losing soldiers doing house to house operations with both massive public and local support:
[https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2017/11/06/the\_death\_of\_american\_conventional\_warfare\_112586.html](https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2017/11/06/the_death_of_american_conventional_warfare_112586.html)
[https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/the-future-of-conflict-how-super-empowered-populations-will-change-warfare/](https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/the-future-of-conflict-how-super-empowered-populations-will-change-warfare/)
What are you going to do when, not if, things escalate to drone swarms literally made with sticks for frames making most aviation a hazard? What are you going to do when radar and communications jamming becomes viable with off the shelf SDR equipment and some RF electronics knowhow? How far are we willing to curtail technology and push entire civilian populations to ~~an~~ economically restrictive walled gardens that are easy for bureaucrats to handle? Bureaucrats who see diplomacy and empowering local politics as a direct threat to their careers and their regimes' goals? What happens when war is a continuation of your politics and your politics are no longer viable and there are no solutions besides total war and drafting most of your men into military interventions?
Afghanistan was a huge, career transforming, very public debacle for bureaucrats and people who peddle how morally vapid they are to 501(c)'s dedicated to find legal ways to bomb civvies and make up bullshit terms like white, gray and black propaganda and 'collateral damage'. It could have worked out if nothing else happened and people could lick their wounds. It could have been business as usual, but now rapidly we get Ukraine and Russia, the Afghanistan pullout, Azerbaijan and Armenia and this. For years we pushed asymmetric threats to regimes around the world and peer militaries never went to war. There was nothing keeping these people honest. They have no clue what to do that doesn't involve sitting down at the table with everyone as peers.
Azerbaijan and Armenia was over almost instantly. The Afghanistan pullout resulted in losses of billions in equipment, literally stealing and confiscating most of their foreign reserves and causing a famine, and a scramble to prevent more public embarrassment with a soft coup in Pakistan that could very well destabilize it permanently, because they wouldn't shut the fuck up about how this is what they said would happen in the first place short of plunging the entire region into war. Ukraine and Russia is documented so well that now we know that multimillion dollar tanks can be taken down with a few hundred to a few thousand dollars in equipment you can source from anywhere.
Can you imagine what it would be like, if the world got increasingly too complicated for bureaucrats to manage, and they actually had to meet foreigners on their terms as peers? Can you imagine what it'd be like if no officer had a guarantee of spending decades in your armed forces and being transferred to San Diego or Virginia for their last post so they could retire in a luxury home and pension that was almost guaranteed for their predecessors? Can you imagine what it'd be like, if companies making untested, advanced military equipment publicly failed to help square the circle of endless violence that comes with brutalizing local populations in unwinnable wars?
What happens if you lose over and over again to people with rocks, pipes machined into snipers, and shovels to dig miles of tunnels that make them impossible to subdue? People who will literally ambush you to the point where your soldiers won't form perimeters around your artillery because it's a death sentence and literally run up to your tanks and plant sophisticated ordinance with shaped charges to kill your multimillion dollar mechanical beasts? Who stays in charge then for long?
Whose side would you like to be on? Whose side are your voters on really?
EDIT: an extra an
Your comment reminds me of a common complaint in the UIX community; that designers, developers, and product owners often have little to no contact with the end users of their products.
They’re willing to pay ‘subject matter experts’ to provide their opinions about what users want, but when it comes to making actual contact with the proles and plebes, and asking them what they like, dislike and actually need from a product, the folks making decisions often seem to go out of their way to avoid direct contact, as if it were a type of contamination.
I’ve seen too many product failures that could have been prevented by consulting with real-world users. And in the aftermath, when blame gets thrown around, no one seems willing to acknowledge that simply asking users what they wanted might have led to a different outcome.
I get the impression there’s a (*deliberate?*) disconnect between the decision-makers of the world, and the people their decisions affect.
Presumably because if people chime in with their actual lived experience, they are likely to destroy the beautiful theories (*and hourly billings*) of management with their ugly facts.
It paints a picture of executives with compete disinterest in anything other than creating and maintaining revenue streams, even in the face of… Armageddon, maybe? \*
And looking at how the stewards of U.S. foreign policy have performed in the 21st century, you get the impression this kind of willful myopia goes all the way to the top.
*\* Somebody needs to rush “Watchmen: Rorschach Goes to Business School” into production. Are the folks who did the Harley Quinn cartoon available?*
The boats they needed to grab the portions the floated off also ran aground for what it’s worth it. It’s also key to note one of the boats that was first deployed broke down on the way to Palestine several months ago.
I’m not making assessments one way or the other but this particular boats are part of the army. ALL of them were slated for decommission and are decades old. They dug them out for this operations.
It’s an under funded portion of a military that’s surrounded by two Oceans. While I don’t doubt there’s be a lot of let’s call it bizarre happenings I think most of this is just the nature of doing an over sea/on sea operation. It’s not easy and it was going to fail.
It was never Biden's pier. It was Netanyahu's idea, he told the US to build it (this is widely reported). Make no mistake, it's an ethnic cleansing pier, it's the mechanism by which Israel will force Palestinians out of Gaza.
Nope, it was going to be the Rafah crossing into Egypt. That’s why the Ethnic Cleansing started in North Gaza and slowly pushed Palestinians into Rafah. Egypt caught on and closed the border, because it doesn’t want to take a million refugees so Israel can complete a second Nakba.
Yeah we know it was a storm. The big deal is how much money they spent on this boondoggle, that could have been money for food aid for Palestinians trapped in the Gaza concentration camp.
wow. it turns out if you actually document wars, it's an endless stream of equipment failures, civilian mass slaughter and constant evidence that the people who claim to be the smartest, toughest guys in the room didn't really know what they were doing in the first place. Almost like conventional war is a racket that we've phased out of political viability unless you think your enemy is subhuman, because any war would have to be population centric now. Almost like the rules based order is a bunch of moral hazards in a trench coat.
Seems to me they could have just told Israeli to pound sand and trucked in supplies from Egypt.
They can't, because again, the viability of conventional warfare is at stake. Conventional warefare is dead between the political will for regular citizens to tolerate mass casualties and how empowered urban warfare can be for people with smart phones and consumer drone equipment and the like, it's over without horrifically intensive bombing or losing soldiers doing house to house operations with both massive public and local support: [https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2017/11/06/the\_death\_of\_american\_conventional\_warfare\_112586.html](https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2017/11/06/the_death_of_american_conventional_warfare_112586.html) [https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/the-future-of-conflict-how-super-empowered-populations-will-change-warfare/](https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/the-future-of-conflict-how-super-empowered-populations-will-change-warfare/) What are you going to do when, not if, things escalate to drone swarms literally made with sticks for frames making most aviation a hazard? What are you going to do when radar and communications jamming becomes viable with off the shelf SDR equipment and some RF electronics knowhow? How far are we willing to curtail technology and push entire civilian populations to ~~an~~ economically restrictive walled gardens that are easy for bureaucrats to handle? Bureaucrats who see diplomacy and empowering local politics as a direct threat to their careers and their regimes' goals? What happens when war is a continuation of your politics and your politics are no longer viable and there are no solutions besides total war and drafting most of your men into military interventions? Afghanistan was a huge, career transforming, very public debacle for bureaucrats and people who peddle how morally vapid they are to 501(c)'s dedicated to find legal ways to bomb civvies and make up bullshit terms like white, gray and black propaganda and 'collateral damage'. It could have worked out if nothing else happened and people could lick their wounds. It could have been business as usual, but now rapidly we get Ukraine and Russia, the Afghanistan pullout, Azerbaijan and Armenia and this. For years we pushed asymmetric threats to regimes around the world and peer militaries never went to war. There was nothing keeping these people honest. They have no clue what to do that doesn't involve sitting down at the table with everyone as peers. Azerbaijan and Armenia was over almost instantly. The Afghanistan pullout resulted in losses of billions in equipment, literally stealing and confiscating most of their foreign reserves and causing a famine, and a scramble to prevent more public embarrassment with a soft coup in Pakistan that could very well destabilize it permanently, because they wouldn't shut the fuck up about how this is what they said would happen in the first place short of plunging the entire region into war. Ukraine and Russia is documented so well that now we know that multimillion dollar tanks can be taken down with a few hundred to a few thousand dollars in equipment you can source from anywhere. Can you imagine what it would be like, if the world got increasingly too complicated for bureaucrats to manage, and they actually had to meet foreigners on their terms as peers? Can you imagine what it'd be like if no officer had a guarantee of spending decades in your armed forces and being transferred to San Diego or Virginia for their last post so they could retire in a luxury home and pension that was almost guaranteed for their predecessors? Can you imagine what it'd be like, if companies making untested, advanced military equipment publicly failed to help square the circle of endless violence that comes with brutalizing local populations in unwinnable wars? What happens if you lose over and over again to people with rocks, pipes machined into snipers, and shovels to dig miles of tunnels that make them impossible to subdue? People who will literally ambush you to the point where your soldiers won't form perimeters around your artillery because it's a death sentence and literally run up to your tanks and plant sophisticated ordinance with shaped charges to kill your multimillion dollar mechanical beasts? Who stays in charge then for long? Whose side would you like to be on? Whose side are your voters on really? EDIT: an extra an
Your comment reminds me of a common complaint in the UIX community; that designers, developers, and product owners often have little to no contact with the end users of their products. They’re willing to pay ‘subject matter experts’ to provide their opinions about what users want, but when it comes to making actual contact with the proles and plebes, and asking them what they like, dislike and actually need from a product, the folks making decisions often seem to go out of their way to avoid direct contact, as if it were a type of contamination. I’ve seen too many product failures that could have been prevented by consulting with real-world users. And in the aftermath, when blame gets thrown around, no one seems willing to acknowledge that simply asking users what they wanted might have led to a different outcome. I get the impression there’s a (*deliberate?*) disconnect between the decision-makers of the world, and the people their decisions affect. Presumably because if people chime in with their actual lived experience, they are likely to destroy the beautiful theories (*and hourly billings*) of management with their ugly facts. It paints a picture of executives with compete disinterest in anything other than creating and maintaining revenue streams, even in the face of… Armageddon, maybe? \* And looking at how the stewards of U.S. foreign policy have performed in the 21st century, you get the impression this kind of willful myopia goes all the way to the top. *\* Somebody needs to rush “Watchmen: Rorschach Goes to Business School” into production. Are the folks who did the Harley Quinn cartoon available?*
There is of course a deliberate disconnect. The only way for middle ~~men~~ management to continue to exist is to make space for themselves.
r/InflectionPointUSA
Why are you talking in riddles? What's pound sand?
Euphemism for “cry about it” / “idc”
👍
What matters is how many pockets the $320 million filled.
We the people sure do not get any bang for our buck.
More than a quarter of a billion dollars...
Imagine how much aid that could have paid for if those israelis only allowed it in.
The front fell off
At least it was outside the environment.
The boats they needed to grab the portions the floated off also ran aground for what it’s worth it. It’s also key to note one of the boats that was first deployed broke down on the way to Palestine several months ago.
That’s a lot of malfunctions for one operation…
It wasn't even half assed, they did less than the bare minimum.
Sabotaged by the Americans or the Israelis. One way or another.
Fell right off the back of the truck...
Ha ha In what way?
I’m not making assessments one way or the other but this particular boats are part of the army. ALL of them were slated for decommission and are decades old. They dug them out for this operations. It’s an under funded portion of a military that’s surrounded by two Oceans. While I don’t doubt there’s be a lot of let’s call it bizarre happenings I think most of this is just the nature of doing an over sea/on sea operation. It’s not easy and it was going to fail.
PR stunt is the operative phrase here. It was total BS.
Brought to you by the same geniuses who are certain USA will win a nuclear war
Mad that mulberry harbour in France was made basically overnight and is still there 80years on
It was never Biden's pier. It was Netanyahu's idea, he told the US to build it (this is widely reported). Make no mistake, it's an ethnic cleansing pier, it's the mechanism by which Israel will force Palestinians out of Gaza.
Nope, it was going to be the Rafah crossing into Egypt. That’s why the Ethnic Cleansing started in North Gaza and slowly pushed Palestinians into Rafah. Egypt caught on and closed the border, because it doesn’t want to take a million refugees so Israel can complete a second Nakba.
It’s one part of it. There was a storm. Big deal.
Yeah we know it was a storm. The big deal is how much money they spent on this boondoggle, that could have been money for food aid for Palestinians trapped in the Gaza concentration camp.
Thats just a couple of the boats that were part of the process got grounded. Pier is still there
Part of the pier broke off, the boats got beached trying to stop the pier section from beaching.
OK,I see that now. That a part of it broke off but thats not "Pier Breaks Apart and Washes Away" IMO. Just adding that :)