Here are some more valuable thoughts from Hillsdale College's Imprimis magazine: New Thinking Needed on National Defense. There's no pay wall.
Please remember that I never agree with all of an author's ideas. That should be obvious but apparently isn't. When a problem is worth thinking about, it is inevitable that bad ideas will emerge. But we'll never get to the good ideas (or even recognize the bad ones) without casting a wide net. My goal is to stimulate thinking by presenting information I find interesting and/or helpful.
A smattering of semi-random quotes. Emphasis mine.
This raises the question of how we can spend so much on our national security but still have a military that seems so woefully underprepared for a major conflict.
[PGM=“precision guided munitions”] A key lesson of the Ukraine War is that when we deploy certain types of PGMs, such as anti-tank missiles or man-portable air-defense systems like Stinger missiles, it takes years to manufacture new ones. We have also learned that the tooling needed to produce various types of PGMs no longer exists—indeed, in some cases entire factories have been dismantled. This means that if we want more PGMs, we will have to start from scratch.
One of the key vulnerabilities of our defense and high-tech infrastructure is that the technology on which it relies is routinely stolen by foreign countries, especially China.... Despite various efforts to hinder or put a stop to this, cyber theft has become a huge business and is tremendously damaging to America’s national security. Until very recently, we have done virtually nothing about this cyber espionage. The thieves are almost never punished. All we do is complain while our enemies bleed us dry.
An important thing we learned very early on in the Ukraine War was that the incredibly expensive tanks we gave to the Ukrainians were defenseless against very inexpensive FPV drones. [In Yemen,] when the Iranian-backed Houthis started firing drones at ships in the Red Sea, what was the U.S. response? For each $30,000 Iranian drone we shot down, we employed two $2 million missiles.
Recently, by the way, forces on the ground in Ukraine have found that relatively inexpensive shotgun technology is proving more effective against drones than previously tried methods.
We need new thinking...about national defense. A guiding principle of that new thinking must be that the defense budget is not inexhaustible.
