I had always heard Colonel Blimp used as shorthand for a kind of dim, blustery military fool. Then i saw the movie and realized the (actual?) character was brave, honorable, and far from dim. Great movie. And Roger Livesey gave a great performance.
Provocative title. One remembers what happened to MacArthur when he made the mistake of thinking he was setting American Strategy, the wisdom of his thinking notwithstanding. It is a lesson not lost on military officers even today.
Having completed Naval War College recently, I can tell you that the military has a very clear view of what strategy is and how it should be developed and implemented. What flag officers do with that knowledge once they become key decision-makers, the military universities cannot account for.
Many of the issues you address in regards to our Ways and Means (in a country where we can rarely agree on what the strategic Ends are) are concerns that keep all of us awake at night. In my 30+ years of DoD experience, I have never seen an environment where uncertainty and risk are so readily accepted and embraced, with mitigations for those risks clearly identified and pursued.
I was happy to see you ended your blog post with the assessment that we are, at the end of the day, a civilian-led military, as it should be. Democracies are poor at developing Grand Strategy - consider the number of inconsistencies between our current National Security Strategy and our National Defense Strategy. We may never get it right. But an engaged public voting for engaged leaders would go a long way towards getting it MORE right than our competitors through the entire DIME-FIL spectrum.
Left out of this good review by Tom is political warfare and its derivatives. Our adversaries have studied us and know how shallow our options are. Whether thought of as rungs on the escalation ladder or tools in the toolbox, we have focused on the militarization of our foreign policy to the detriment of the other means. The pearl clutching over the "gray zone" and "hybrid warfare" are like the complaints earlier this century about asymmetric insurgents. Instead of understanding and exploiting opportunities and vulnerabilities, we focus on the comfortable and tangible that is the military. Meanwhile, cheaper means that can be tried and revised through iterations, that is potentially long-lasting without the need of an occupation army, and destroys less stuff that needs to be rebuilt – aka political warfare – is virtually ignored... by us, not "them." Yes, we talk about what "they" are doing as we seek ways to *counter* them, but few discussions really focus on addressing the vulnerabilities that are exploited or to work toward what we want tomorrow to look like. Instead, we focus on "competition" and allow "them" to set the agenda while we pursue policies that can too often be distilled down to two words: "Stop It!" In the end, my concern is that we'll have lost the next war before we realized it started because the beginning was outside the military domain.
You make good points, but you don't seem to fully grasp how dire the situation has become.
Our military personnel are NOT well trained and supplied outside of the marines and various special forces, and even these few elites are woefully unprepared for peer conflict. Imagine them attempting to operate in hostile lands without reliable GPS, communications, or air supremacy when engaging a professional military.
Furthermore, faced with a protracted high-intensity conflict such as we're seeing in Ukraine, our stockpiles and production of materiel are completely insufficient. We'd be reduced to an infantry-only force within a few months. The morons in charge are just counting on never having to fight that hard for that long.
All branches are experiencing difficulty recruiting, and only 15% of the youngest generation are even mildly patriotic. The disasters around Iran and politicized woke crap have damaged morale and severely alienated their most reliable pool of recruitment. A substantial proportion of those currently serving are just in it for the paycheck. A draft would only swell the ranks with unfit and mutinous malcontents. If you thought the fragging in Vietnam was bad, just wait!
Our airforce has become so degraded that pilots struggle to maintain their required flight hours in peacetime because there are so few airworthy planes. Planes are largely in such bad shape because the MIC is so convoluted and incompetent that maintenance teams are forced to reverse-engineer components of our own aircraft. The F35 is a jack-of-all-trades boondoggle and has certainly not helped the situation.
Our navy is making a habit of losing ships and personnel to gross negligence, and all of our surface vessels are already obsolete in a conflict against our two primary rivals.
And the cherry on top of this shit sundae is that we are barely capable of producing or servicing nuclear weapons. The only plant in America which could produce and recycle the necessary fissile material was out of commission for a decade due to personnel incompetence, politics, and mismanagement before recently restarting work. It remains to be seen whether they are now reliable.
I had always heard Colonel Blimp used as shorthand for a kind of dim, blustery military fool. Then i saw the movie and realized the (actual?) character was brave, honorable, and far from dim. Great movie. And Roger Livesey gave a great performance.
Provocative title. One remembers what happened to MacArthur when he made the mistake of thinking he was setting American Strategy, the wisdom of his thinking notwithstanding. It is a lesson not lost on military officers even today.
Having completed Naval War College recently, I can tell you that the military has a very clear view of what strategy is and how it should be developed and implemented. What flag officers do with that knowledge once they become key decision-makers, the military universities cannot account for.
Many of the issues you address in regards to our Ways and Means (in a country where we can rarely agree on what the strategic Ends are) are concerns that keep all of us awake at night. In my 30+ years of DoD experience, I have never seen an environment where uncertainty and risk are so readily accepted and embraced, with mitigations for those risks clearly identified and pursued.
I was happy to see you ended your blog post with the assessment that we are, at the end of the day, a civilian-led military, as it should be. Democracies are poor at developing Grand Strategy - consider the number of inconsistencies between our current National Security Strategy and our National Defense Strategy. We may never get it right. But an engaged public voting for engaged leaders would go a long way towards getting it MORE right than our competitors through the entire DIME-FIL spectrum.
Left out of this good review by Tom is political warfare and its derivatives. Our adversaries have studied us and know how shallow our options are. Whether thought of as rungs on the escalation ladder or tools in the toolbox, we have focused on the militarization of our foreign policy to the detriment of the other means. The pearl clutching over the "gray zone" and "hybrid warfare" are like the complaints earlier this century about asymmetric insurgents. Instead of understanding and exploiting opportunities and vulnerabilities, we focus on the comfortable and tangible that is the military. Meanwhile, cheaper means that can be tried and revised through iterations, that is potentially long-lasting without the need of an occupation army, and destroys less stuff that needs to be rebuilt – aka political warfare – is virtually ignored... by us, not "them." Yes, we talk about what "they" are doing as we seek ways to *counter* them, but few discussions really focus on addressing the vulnerabilities that are exploited or to work toward what we want tomorrow to look like. Instead, we focus on "competition" and allow "them" to set the agenda while we pursue policies that can too often be distilled down to two words: "Stop It!" In the end, my concern is that we'll have lost the next war before we realized it started because the beginning was outside the military domain.
totally agree. America spent 20+ years shitting the bed during the Global War on Terrorism.
You make good points, but you don't seem to fully grasp how dire the situation has become.
Our military personnel are NOT well trained and supplied outside of the marines and various special forces, and even these few elites are woefully unprepared for peer conflict. Imagine them attempting to operate in hostile lands without reliable GPS, communications, or air supremacy when engaging a professional military.
Furthermore, faced with a protracted high-intensity conflict such as we're seeing in Ukraine, our stockpiles and production of materiel are completely insufficient. We'd be reduced to an infantry-only force within a few months. The morons in charge are just counting on never having to fight that hard for that long.
All branches are experiencing difficulty recruiting, and only 15% of the youngest generation are even mildly patriotic. The disasters around Iran and politicized woke crap have damaged morale and severely alienated their most reliable pool of recruitment. A substantial proportion of those currently serving are just in it for the paycheck. A draft would only swell the ranks with unfit and mutinous malcontents. If you thought the fragging in Vietnam was bad, just wait!
Our airforce has become so degraded that pilots struggle to maintain their required flight hours in peacetime because there are so few airworthy planes. Planes are largely in such bad shape because the MIC is so convoluted and incompetent that maintenance teams are forced to reverse-engineer components of our own aircraft. The F35 is a jack-of-all-trades boondoggle and has certainly not helped the situation.
Our navy is making a habit of losing ships and personnel to gross negligence, and all of our surface vessels are already obsolete in a conflict against our two primary rivals.
And the cherry on top of this shit sundae is that we are barely capable of producing or servicing nuclear weapons. The only plant in America which could produce and recycle the necessary fissile material was out of commission for a decade due to personnel incompetence, politics, and mismanagement before recently restarting work. It remains to be seen whether they are now reliable.
Did not know that. Thanks for sharing. Agree it's a fabulous movie. I got to see it on big screen at Stanford Theatre and it was glorious.