"Jesus Christ, we deserve to lose every war"

[Vympel]

Link

Good to know that with the U.S. locked into two ground battles with Islamist insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Air Force doesn't take its eye off the ball: the budget. And here we were, thinking "strategic communication" meant the effort to win hearts and minds. Apparently it does, but those "hearts and minds" belong to Congressmen and defense contractors. (Click image to enlarge, and, if you have relatives who deployed to Iraq without proper body armor, prepare to be sickened by the winner-takes-all sentiment you encounter.)

There is just so much going on here, but following the USAF's unique understanding of strategic communication, how about let's start with the phrase "Returning the Air Force to Prominence in the National Security Arena." Well now there's a worthy goal! Throw out your copies of Clausewitz, because apparently national defense institutions have a new, more noble purpose: to ensure their own success in winning a slice of the budget. What really matters is not defeating the enemy fighting force or accomplishing policy objectives through the application of force but rather making sure that your branch is most favored in the Department of Defense budget.

Jesus Nuts, we deserve to lose every war we fight. Some guys living in caves in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or sleeping on the floors of apartments in Baghdad and Karachi are laughing their asses off right now.

Update: Abu Muqawama should have mentioned, as one of his readers did, that the flyer spoke of the "Budget Battle" being a "Zero Sum Gain." Whatever the hell that is. We can guess, anyway, what they mean. Somehow, Bill Chambers rose to be a Major General in the U.S. Air Force. It certainly wasn't due to his mastery of the English Language. Or by being a team player.

Update II: Small Wars Journal saw this too. And one reader complains the U.S. Army has used its Iraq and Afghanistan needs to push through funding for the FCS. Which, if true, is a fair criticism of the Army.

I came upon this article when reading about the USAF's latest brazen attempt to end-run the US budget process by sticking in an absurd $3.9 billion request for 15 more C-17s in its "unfunded requirements" list - ie the list the armed services distribute to Congress so they can get what they want even if the Pentagon refuses to give it to them.

In short, I had always understood the armed services of the United States to be competing for a slice of the budget pie, but I never knew it was this brazen. It's pretty laughable, actually. Retards.

Reminds me about something William S Lind said speaking about the Pentagon as a whole:

The fact is, Pentagon policy has nothing to do with war, which has a great deal to do with why we are losing two wars. The Pentagon is the last Soviet industry. It is not about producing a product, least of all a product that works. It is solely, entirely, about acquiring and justifying resources.

[Darth Wong]

The problem is that you can't discuss shrinking the US military without harming Americans' sense of their own imperial superiority. They don't want to feel like anything less than the Colossus who towers over all others.

Any time one discusses the requirements they have, you run into the argument that they need enough military might to do anything they might ever conceivably want to do, in terms of foreign policy. This is something of a perversion upon the word "need"; it literally mashes "need" and "want" together.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I can think of another nation led by Anglo-Saxons that had that particular issue around the turn of the 20th century...

[Surlethe]

It seems almost that there's been a Darwinian sort of selection: those departments which get the most funding grow the most and exercise the most influence, and in turn get more funding. So we should expect those behaviors that get more funding, even if they're pretty brazen, to show up in the most successful (i.e., most funded) departments.

Does this hold water?