
Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Design for Great Power Competition - thoughtstheseus
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46389
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LatteLazy
In an actual, real war with Russia or China both sides would suffer at least
100 million casualties in the first day from nuclear warfare.

Since that’s unthinkable, a real war is not something worth planning for.

So how about finding a way to win the sort of proxy wars the USA has sucked at
since Vietnam (and is currently headed towards for no reason in Iran)?

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badrabbit
You are assuming succssful missile delivery.THAAD is aging but is it that
ineffective?

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LatteLazy
Thaad is only for short to intermediate range missiles. No one has ever
intercepted an ICBM. There are some crazy/interesting programs researching how
to try but no one takes them seriously as far as I know. It's like trying to
hit a grain of sand travelling at mach 4 from 1000km away.

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jacobwilliamroy
I don't think the chinese military is real. As in, I don't think that the
military is China's primary mechanism for creating and enforcing international
hegemony, as it is in the United States.

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SkyMarshal
It's interesting that the US submarine force is almost not covered at all in
this report, except for two brief mentions of "subsurface". Clearly one of the
more classified components of US military strategy.

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bob1029
I know it sounds kind of strange, but maybe the solution to this is similar to
how you competitively attack a new market with a new company.

The DOD needs to look at a startup/agile mentality and centralize important
technical decision making within one room full of competent
engineers/architects/developers, rather than farming it out to 50 disparate
contractors.

Russia and China will be able to continue to threaten us using only a fraction
of our defense budget because of this organizational problem. I feel like our
enemies have a much more centralized scope of R&D when it comes to military
technology. The only reason the US is competitive is because we can 10x the
budget and move mountains every day.

Imagine if we had a monorepo for the entire United States military. All
warfighting software systems centralized into 1 location with a unified set of
models and logic which can enforce policy across the entire force. A developer
should be able to unit test the F35 avionics software at the same time they
are working on the air-to-air weapons system. After all, these would likely
share many important aspects being that they live in the same damn aircraft.

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WJW
I know it's cherrypicking but:

>The DOD needs to look at a startup/agile mentality

Please god NO! That's a really a bad idea not just for the DOD but for most
government services. 90+% of startups fail. This is fine because most startups
are not very essential. Government is often inefficient, but it rarely
outright fails. Can you imagine how a government run as a startup would be?
Garbage collection went bankrupt the other day, won't be another five months
until another one is spun up. Oh yeah we haven't implemented the fire
department yet, your house might be on fire now but we have it on the roadmap
for Q4 2021 so please hold on until then. Oh your wife is in the hospital? We
were running an A/B test on that so she's in the part without blood
transfusions. Hope everything goes well! When you are taking a VC bet on to
get a startup off the ground, many things are acceptable that are not really
feasible if people depend on your continued existence for at least the coming
decades.

Don't be overly impressed by the Russians and/or Chinese either btw. They
suffer from the exact same problems, but "the grass is greener on the other
side" is true in defence matters as much as in the rest of life.

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_jal
That's what DARPA is supposed to be for.

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edoo
If Russia can win a war with us with 10% of our budget then our entire
military industrial complex is a fraud.

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ProAm
We've been at war for 20 years in Afghanistan and can't win that one and they
have far less than 10% of our budget.

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dx87
We could have won that one if politicians had listened to their military
advisors. In James Mattis's recent book, he talks about how the Obama
administration didn't listen to recommendations for a larger military presence
because they were scoring too many political points by constantly "bringing
the troops home".

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ProAm
The military always says they would have won if they had more. I dont think
that is the case at all in Afghanistan or Iraq, in Iraq we essentially
invented an enemy and lost to them.

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tejtm
thanks but the bloom is off. think I will wait on a fresh batch of
politicians.

