The New York Times editorial board has some thoughts about the U.S. military and “the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically advanced ones.”:
The late, great Jeff MacNelly had a few thoughts along those lines himself. This one is from his collection “Directions” … copyright 1984.
Mad Blog Media 
Read that. Put the fear of Dog in me. We are always caught, pants around ankles, fighting the last war.
And it ain’t easy to fight with one’s pants around the ankles. Shucks, I was never anyone’s idea of Jack Dempsey even when I had ’em pulled up and buckled tight.
We’re fucked any way you look.
https://clip.cafe/the-big-lebowski-1998/you-see-nothings-fucked-here-dude/
Maybe not Carl according to Walter
Then again, maybe so, according to Walter.
I was thinking about watching that Movie since I haven’t seen it. Nah.
In other news, Raul Malo has died at 60. We lost a great voice, one of the best. Glad I got to see the Mavericks in concert a few years ago. I would have paid the big money to have seen him playing solo in a small venue.
Ah don’t judge it by the two clips of Walter we posted POB. It’s got some hilarious scenes. WOW sorry to see Raul checked out so damn early. He had such a great voice. A bit of Texas flavored Roy Orbinson don’t ya think?
I’ll second Herb’s motion, Paddy me lad. Friggin’ high-sterical it is. Jeff Bridges, John Goodman (who says it’s his favorite of all the flicks he’s done), Steve Buscemi (playing very much against type), Julianne Moore (who crushes it), David Huddleston (Olsen Johnson from “Blazing Saddles”), Philip Seymour Hoffman (who likewise crushes), Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jimmie Dale Gilmore (another fine musician), T Bone Burnett as musical consultant, Dom Irrera and Jon Polito, Sam Elliott (as “The Stranger”), and more.
The Coens claimed this was something of a riff on “The Big Sleep,” but a sleeper it is not.
The Dude abides…
Yah, I saw a comment by a Special Forces guy who said that his guys wouldn’t last 30 minutes on the front lines in Ukraine, on account of the rapid evolution of warfare there. If we had someone competent at the helm, we’d have advisers in Ukraine on the front lines (literally and electronically) to see what they’re doing. And then telling the giant military contractors to get on the stick.
’Ees a puzzlement, for sure. It’s like a coach refusing to watch any tapes of the team his guys need to beat on Sunday. I expect Russia and China have had boots on the ground taking notes during our various overseas adventures.
Except for the military industrial complex, it is not about winning wars. It is about getting fat government contracts to build lots of shit we probably don’t need, parceled out among all 435 Congressional districts so the Congresscritters all suck up to the big corporations.
I recall reading we were building tens of thousands of fighter planes in WW II and thousands were shot down. Shoot down a dozen modern billion dollar wonder fighters and bankrupt the nation.
The more complex the mechanism, the greater the likelihood of failure.
Those WWII planes were being serviced and repaired pretty damn close to where the shooting was, too. How many IT guys do you think we’d need in harm’s way to keep the F-35s in the air if the shit got real? How do you download a software patch when your Chinese adversary unplugs your Internet while two-ruble autonomous Russian drones chase you around your workspace? Where do you warehouse all the parts? And who makes ’em? I’ll bet a list of all the nuts, bolts, circuit boards, bells, whistles, gewgaws, whizbangs, whatchamacallits and comosellamas in that bad boy would make Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” look like a quick-start manual for a Cateye Velo 8 cyclocomputer.
Ah, logistics. The poor stepchild in weapon systems procurement. In my over 30 years of experience, the only DoD activity that had their procurement act together was the NSA. There may have been others, in departments other than the Army, that did good work, but I am not aware of any.
In a town where a “Genius” can’t even replace the battery in a 10-year-old MacBook Pro without banjaxing its display, I shudder to think of crouching behind a rock in someone else’s desert as the two-ruble drones buzz around like heavily armed skeeters and my tech-support dude tells me, “We might could have the motherboard by next Thursday, but the guy who usually installs ’em got smoked yesterday, so I dunno what to tell you. Have you tried turning it off and then back on again?”