His warning is really about the defense industry directing national policy, which is good advice and should be heeded. It doesn't conflict with what I'm saying.
The 2015 example is irrelevant, because the USMC gave up their takes and turned them over to the Army. Sensational headline aside, part of the reason for maintaining that tank corps is that rebuilding that industrial capacity takes a lot of time and can be lost if you don't do it. The actual text of the article is more nuanced:
>"We are still having to procure systems we don't need," Odierno said, adding that the Army spends "hundreds of millions of dollars on tanks that we simply don't have the structure for anymore." [Emphasis added]
The Army had retooled itself to fight a counter-insurgency for what ended up being 20 years (stupidly), and is in the process of reverting back to fighting peer or near-peer adversaries. Obviously you need less tanks in a COIN fight than in a potential fight in Eastern Europe. Bet Odierno would be glad that we bought those tanks in 2015 now that Russia is engaging in some tomfoolery in Europe right now. I'm not denying that there's lots of inefficiency in defense procurement, but the reflexive "spending money on war machines is bad" takes are really reductive and signal a shallow understanding of geopolitics and the global security situation.
> the reflexive "spending money on war machines is bad" takes are really reductive and signal a shallow understanding of geopolitics and the global security situation
I think if you revisit this comment chain, you’ll find that no one made that argument, and it almost seems like you are defensively projecting a straw man to fight.
The original argument was about should we spend more money on defense (such as f35 development) given that we dominate the next 3 players put together by most metrics. Eg 11 aircraft carriers vs 2 (and yes I know that national defense does not simply boil down to num_carriers)
I’m a strong advocate for the US military being the strongest in the world, but I’m anti the position that we need to be 5x the next spender.
Edit: and yes, I’ll admit my understanding of the geopolitics and defense is indeed shallow, but from where I sit the “experts” got us into War in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam before that. So maybe we need less of this “expert” thinking
The 2015 example is irrelevant, because the USMC gave up their takes and turned them over to the Army. Sensational headline aside, part of the reason for maintaining that tank corps is that rebuilding that industrial capacity takes a lot of time and can be lost if you don't do it. The actual text of the article is more nuanced:
>"We are still having to procure systems we don't need," Odierno said, adding that the Army spends "hundreds of millions of dollars on tanks that we simply don't have the structure for anymore." [Emphasis added]
The Army had retooled itself to fight a counter-insurgency for what ended up being 20 years (stupidly), and is in the process of reverting back to fighting peer or near-peer adversaries. Obviously you need less tanks in a COIN fight than in a potential fight in Eastern Europe. Bet Odierno would be glad that we bought those tanks in 2015 now that Russia is engaging in some tomfoolery in Europe right now. I'm not denying that there's lots of inefficiency in defense procurement, but the reflexive "spending money on war machines is bad" takes are really reductive and signal a shallow understanding of geopolitics and the global security situation.