Rafael wrote:
It repudiates much of what people believe about nutrition and the consumption of media, which seems to be the author's point and the reason for the analogy.
The explanation of the analogy, was the entirety of what I wrote, not just one sentence.
Your explanation of the analogy relied on that sentence which was tautological. That greatly weakens its value for illustration.
In any case, I don't think the analogy itself is really the major issue here. Information is not sugar which is not an opiate. Each interacts with the body in a different way even if some of the observable effects are similar.
What's far more interesting, I think, is the assertion that longer = better. I feel there's some truth in that, but not necessarily. Since he seems to like The Atlantic, let's take
this example. I won't repost the complete text on account of it's... length. Note that there's at least 6 responses elsewhere on the website, a reading list, a memo by Gary Hart, and possibly a few other materials all related to this article. This in itself is a strong recommendation for this source simply because it directs you to more information - but even that runs into some problems.
Now, this article is not
bad; it makes a number of valid points - most notably it discusses the fact that the last 13 or so years of fighting have been pretty remote from society; it discusses at some length the way in which major defense contracts are parceled out inefficiently to keep as many voters happy as possible, it makes legitimate points about the sometimes near-comical "appreciation efforts", and it discusses the fact that military policy was nearly untouched in the last Presidential campaign.
On the surface, this article presents the illusion of being an informed and thoughtful exploration of present military policy, but a careful examination reveals that it really is doing pretty much the same thing that short news blurbs do - just taking longer to do it. It's "better" insofar as it does present more raw facts - quite a few more - but in a sense it may be even worse because it has far more room to lay out a case and its selectivity is much more subtle. Unlike a short news blurb where bias one way or the other comes right through because they only have a short time to get what they want to say out there, this article disguises what's essentially advocacy as if it were analysis - the print version of NPR.
All three of the major subsections of the article have underlying serious problems. In the first section:
Quote:
Yet from a strategic perspective, to say nothing of the human cost, most of these dollars might as well have been burned. “At this point, it is incontrovertibly evident that the U.S. military failed to achieve any of its strategic goals in Iraq,” a former military intelligence officer named Jim Gourley wrote recently for Thomas E. Ricks’s blog, Best Defense. “Evaluated according to the goals set forth by our military leadership, the war ended in utter defeat for our forces.” In 13 years of continuous combat under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the longest stretch of warfare in American history, U.S. forces have achieved one clear strategic success: the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Their many other tactical victories, from overthrowing Saddam Hussein to allying with Sunni tribal leaders to mounting a “surge” in Iraq, demonstrated great bravery and skill. But they brought no lasting stability to, nor advance of U.S. interests in, that part of the world. When ISIS troops overran much of Iraq last year, the forces that laid down their weapons and fled before them were members of the same Iraqi national army that U.S. advisers had so expensively yet ineffectively trained for more than five years.
The author in quoting these people, is exploiting something he knows and that the people he is quoting knows, but that the average person, or even most very-well-informed people won't:
The military and military leadership does not set strategic goals. The military sets operational and tactical goals. Strategy (in any area) is set by civilian authority - in regard to war, primarily by the President, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, and of course Congress. The high-level military leadership advises on strategy, from an operational standpoint, and may think strategically since it must understand strategy to advise on it - but it does not set it.
The reason this is important is that if the national strategy is untenable or incoherent - and "incoherent", in the sense of "trying to please everyone and succeeding in pleasing no one" is the biggest problem we have had since the end of the Cold War - no amount of military success will ever result in a win, because the win condition is some combination of undefined and impossible. Either that, or even if a win condition is achieved or nearly achieved, events
after the win condition that result in new problems are exploited to argue that a win was never achieved in the first place.
The last line I quoted illustrates this. The fact was that there was nothing wrong with the training given to the Iraqi Army; what there was, was a problem with the Iraqi civilian leadership. Al-Maliki for political reasons, managed to get rid of much of his Army's leadership, thereby neutralizing the effect of much of the training given. This was an underlying issue leading to calls that he resign when ISIS started having so much success, but it has never really been clearly conveyed - and he makes no attempt to convey it here. Instead, he subtly misinforms the reader with lines like those quoted which carry an implication of "ok, military, here's Iraq, go solve it" and assign all success or failure to the military
despite the fact that this sort of sectioning-off of the military from the rest of government and society is what he's ostensibly taking issue with in the first place.
Or, we can take the second section, which contains some good information, but lacks an important logical connection - what does the state of weapons procurement have to do with society supposedly getting casually into wars?
The answer is absolutely nothing, and his choice of targets - the F-35 - is very revealing, partly because he's got some good points regarding the inadvisiblity of trying to make the same airplane do essentially everything, and also divide its production up amongst as many different states and districts as possible, but also because A) he was a Carter White House staffer, B) he links his comments to Gary Hart closely, and C) because of his selection of the A-10 for comparison.
Most readers will be unaware of Gary Hart's history. Gary Hart was, back in the 1980s, making the same complaint about 1980s-era weapons based on 1960s technology that this author is making about modern weapons based on 1980s technology. this is heavily salted with some pre-Rumsfeld but nevertheless Rumsfeldian ideas about "doing more with less", expressed mainly as "simpler and cheaper is better".
In point of fact, nearly every major weapon system wince WWII has appeared to be a technological boondoggle when it is first introduced, and older systems seem better in terms of reliability and expense - this is because they're older systems with more of the bugs worked out, and numerous improvements from their initial form.
Now, the author chose his target well because the F-35 has more problems than typical for a new system - it is essentially 3 aircraft in one frame, it's built with numerous international partners, and everyone wants a slice of the "helping build it" pie, but none of these decisions, except maybe the first one, are due to the military. Again, these are political decisions. The "military industrial complex" never existed - what we've had for decades is a
congressional-industrial complex wherein Congress trades around the components of procurement in order to buy as many votes as possible. In fact, Barney Frank illustrated this best of all when he said that he didn't want the F-35, but if we had it he wanted engines built in his district.
Looking more closely, however, we see that the author tips his hand a bit - he mentions the F-16 and the A-10 at the beginning of the section, then goes on to compare the A-10 to the F-35 and the F-16 sees no more mention - despite the fact that the F-16 is a much more appropriate inter-generational comparison than the A-10.
Both the F-16 and the F-35 are multi-role aircraft.* In the case of the F-16 it was initially a cheaper air defense supplement to the F-15 that rapidly evolved into a fighter-bomber as well. The A-10 is not, and never has been. It is very good at close-air support
because it is designed for that and only that. It is possible to make a very cheap close-air-support-only aircraft because of the nature of that mission, but it is not possible to push that aircraft into the roles of other ones. In fact, when the A-10 was pushed to make deeper and deeper attacks in Desert Storm losses began to rise. When pulled from those roles, losses dropped.
Close air support can, however, be done by the F-35, and in fact by the F-16 as well. The F-16 does it quite frequently. So can the F-15, and the F/A-18 and even the B-1B and B-52 - and in the last 2 cases this is not by just dropping an assload of bombs all over the place. The B-1B has proven particularly valuable in this role because it's large size means a large bombload and large fuel load, meaning it can stay on station a long time and support a lot of missions before it has to land.
In any case, the A-10's low expense and high proficiency at its role are a product of it being a simple platform designed to do only one thing. While "close air support" plays right into the "support the troops" mentality of the average person, it's not inherently an imperative - deeper strike missions are as important or more important in major combat; it's better to stop enemy forces form moving forward rather than destroy them when already in contact - but it does not have the visible connection to helping privates with rifles as the A-10 does, which conjures up pictures of belagured troops rescued by the flying cavalry firing massive bullets from its huge sexy cannon!
This brings us to the cost chart, and in fact the focus on cost. Note that the chart looks at a very select few airplanes - the A-10, a drone, then 3 relatively new airplanes, and then inexplicably the B-2. The entire piece basically amounts to "why are we keeping the expensive and getting rid of the cheap?!" and using the chart to support it while avoiding considering relative
capabilities - nor for that matter bothering to explain why it leaves out the F-15, -16, or -18, or B-1B or -52, or why it ignores that the A-10, B-2, and F-22 are all out of production (for over 10 years in 2 of the 3 cases) and why it is bothering to complain about their purchase costs? For that matter there's the silliness of comparing the cost per flight hour of the B-2 to any of the other aircraft on the chart simply by virtue of the fact that it's
simply much, much larger - never mind all the other differences.
Now, the point isn't "he's wrong about the F-35!" (he's not
entirely wrong) but rather that the advantage of this writing over a short news piece on the same subject is contained almost entirely in A) the greater number of raw facts and B) greater sourcing o additional viewpoints and information. In terms of its actual discussion of the issue, it falls victim to quite a few of the same vices the writer of Taly's OP castigates.
Finally, there is the article's general suggestion that most people have little contact with the military - which is true until we remember that there's these things called the Reserves and National Guard and their AF, Navy, and Coast Guard equivalents, and all of these Reserve components have been assuming more and more missions, not less, and are pretty ubiquitous throughout most of the country.
Taly's OP writer is, as Coro points out, pimping. He does like the New Yorker pretty well, but he's really pimping for a certain category of editorial viewpoint. It's not
that biased - there's no Mother Jones to be found there - but it's definitely a subtle hint that "Center-left sources are the way to go."
*Note that the F-35 does accept significant performance limitations in terms of range and speed in an attempt to keep costs down, but it still has a much wider variety of roles and capabilities than the A-10.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
