(Amerika) Streitkräfte der USA - allg. Sammelthread

[revan]

Ich habe gerade bei defenseindustrydaily neben einen sehr interessanten Artikel zur Misswirtschaft bei denn US Streitkräften auch die neuste Rede von Robert Gates gefunden die ich keinen vorenthalten will. Der Artikel selbst beschäftigt sich desweiteren explizite mit der Misswirtschaft und möglichen Reformen.


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“The United States cannot expect to eliminate national security risks through higher defense budgets, to do everything and buy everything. The Department of Defense must set priorities and consider inescapable tradeoffs and opportunity costs….”

That statement was reinforced at a recent press conference, where Aviation Week quoted him as saying that:

“While in operational terms, the services have become very joint, I think when it comes to budgets and programs, they are still very service-oriented,” Gates says. “Are you willing – and here is what could get really hard – do you offset risk by investing more in a future-oriented program of one service and less of that in another service?”

RE: shifting toward counterinsurgency:

“The kinds of capabilities needed to deal with [insurgencies and failed states] cannot be considered exotic distractions or temporary diversions. The United States does not have the luxury of opting out because these scenarios do not conform to preferred notions of the American way of war.”

....”Yet even with a better-funded State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, future military commanders will not be able to rid themselves of the tasks of maintaining security and stability. To truly achieve victory as Clausewitz defined it—to attain a political objective—the United States needs a military whose ability to kick down the door is matched by its ability to clean up the mess and even rebuild the house afterward.”

....”When thinking about the range of threats, it is common to divide the “high end” from the “low end,” the conventional from the irregular, armored divisions on one side, guerrillas toting AK-47s on the other. In reality, as the political scientist Colin Gray has noted, the categories of warfare are blurring and no longer fit into neat, tidy boxes. One can expect to see more tools and tactics of destruction—from the sophisticated to the simple—being employed simultaneously in hybrid and more complex forms of warfare.”

....”The Department of Defense’s conventional modernization programs seek a 99 percent solution over a period of years. Stability and counterinsurgency missions require 75 percent solutions over a period of months. The challenge is whether these two different paradigms can be made to coexist in the U.S. military’s mindset and bureaucracy.”

....”In Iraq, an army that was basically a smaller version of the United States’ Cold War force over time became an effective instrument of counterinsurgency. But that transition came at a frightful human, financial, and political cost. For every heroic and resourceful innovation by troops and commanders on the battlefield, there was some institutional shortcoming at the Pentagon they had to overcome. There have to be institutional changes so that the next set of colonels, captains, and sergeants will not have to be quite so heroic or quite so resourceful.”

....”Apart from the Special Forces community and some dissident colonels, however, for decades there has been no strong, deeply rooted constituency inside the Pentagon or elsewhere for institutionalizing the capabilities necessary to wage asymmetric or irregular conflict—and to quickly meet the ever-changing needs of forces engaged in these conflicts.”

RE: conventional peer threats:

....”As someone who used to prepare estimates of Soviet military strength for several presidents, I can say that Russia’s conventional military, although vastly improved since its nadir in the late 1990s, remains a shadow of its Soviet predecessor. And adverse demographic trends in Russia will likely keep those conventional forces in check.”

...”In the case of China, Beijing’s investments in cyberwarfare, antisatellite warfare, antiaircraft and antiship weaponry, submarines, and ballistic missiles could threaten the United States’ primary means to project its power and help its allies in the Pacific: bases, air and sea assets, and the networks that support them. This will put a premium on the United States’ ability to strike from over the horizon and employ missile defenses and will require shifts from short-range to longer-range systems, such as the next-generation bomber.”

RE: Transformation and Net-Centric Warfare:

....”We should be modest about what military force can accomplish and what technology can accomplish. The advances in precision, sensor, information, and satellite technologies have led to extraordinary gains in what the U.S. military can do. The Taliban were dispatched within three months; Saddam’s regime was toppled in three weeks. A button can be pushed in Nevada, and seconds later a pickup truck will explode in Mosul. A bomb dropped from the sky can destroy a targeted house while leaving the one next to it intact.

But no one should ever neglect the psychological, cultural, political, and human dimensions of warfare. War is inevitably tragic, inefficient, and uncertain, and it is important to be skeptical of systems analyses, computer models, game theories, or doctrines that suggest otherwise. We should look askance at idealistic, triumphalist, or ethnocentric notions of future conflict that aspire to transcend the immutable principles and ugly realities of war, that imagine it is possible to cow, shock, or awe an enemy into submission, instead of tracking enemies down hilltop by hilltop, house by house, block by bloody block. As General William Tecumseh Sherman said, “Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.” “

Auch interessant ein weiterer Test der MDA von 3 Dezember.

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Multiple Kill Vehicle Completes Hover Test

Langsam beginnt das Konzept vielversprechend zu werden zu mahl der Multi Kill Vehikel auch ein wirksames System gegen MIRW Raketen währe und man somit sich auch gegen die bekannten Aggressoren wehren könnte, zwar nicht gegen denn Russen aber gegen den Chinesen. Dazu kurze Infos zum MKV.

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