US Army Spent $2.7 Billion On Crashing Computer 196
An anonymous reader writes "According to two former US Army intelligence officers, the multi-billion-dollar DCGS-A military computer system that was designed to help the US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan simply doesn't work. DCGS-A is meant to accrue intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and provide real-time battlefield analysis and the current location of high-value targets — but instead, it has hindered the war effort rather than helped. Major General Michael Flynn, the top intelligence officer in Afghanistan, says that DCGS-A's faults have even resulted in a loss of lives (PDF)."
Re:Pentagon Irresponsibility (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't just "war on terror" that is a scam. Almost all high cost "war on ______ " government projects are a scam, including: drugs, poverty, illiteracy, teen pregnancy.
I chalk it all up to the logic found in most government projects: "Something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done"
Don't try to paint this as a Democratic thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:high-tech armies are vulnerable (Score:4, Insightful)
That and the laws of war. There is no way to defeat a popular insurgency without committing so-called "war crimes" directly or by proxy.
Therefore, only a Hafez Assad or a Stalin can win those sort of wars.
Re:Don't try to paint this as a Democratic thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Fact: democrats love pork just as much as republicans do. What free market? There is no free market here. A republican walks up to a democrat and says, "Hey, I got this company back home that wants to develop shitty trucks for $1 million a pop", and the democrat responds, "Really? Because I got a company back home that wants to develop ballistic armor made of Saran-Wrap. Let's do lunch." If you don't believe that, you are living in a fantasy world.
Re:Pentagon Irresponsibility (Score:3, Insightful)
Taking inflation into account, $426b in 1988 is worth $775b today
Re:high-tech armies are vulnerable (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, the problem is that the GP abridged Lawrence: in fuller context, Lawrence explains these points in ways that meet PP's criticism:
Rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as the Arab revolt had in the Red Sea ports, the desert, or in the minds of men converted to its creed.
All of our enemies currently have this.
It must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of occupation too small to fulfill the doctrine of acreage: too few to adjust number to space, in order to dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts.
This combines points (2) and (3) in GP's version. "Sophistication" for Lawrence didn't mean "technologically advanced" in the form of using whiz-bang giant walking mechanical spiders that can be disabled with a stick of chewing gum left on the ground by a rebel or any such nonsensical and romantic/cinematic view of a technocratic oppressor: it meant an army with restricted rules of engagement and predictable patterns of behavior. Another distinction between Lawrence and GP's abridgment is the word "alien": the guerilla ought to be in some way indigenous. The definition of "alien" is open to debate in some of our modern conflicts, as irregular fighters in Afghanistan and Iraq have often been aliens themselves to the population from a tribal or even national perspective, but not necessarily so from a religious perspective. In relative terms, western forces may be said to be more alien than the guerillas. Lawrence might also reuse the ideological interpretation of space from the first point, where he said that the rebel "base" can be the "minds of men," rather than relying on a geographic or ethnic definition of "alienness."
It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2% active in a striking force, and 98% passively sympathetic.
GP's abridgment used the unfortunate word "support," and the parent poster rightly criticized this but with the caveat that the Taliban "have been successful at terrifying significant fractions of the populace into not opposing them." That's exactly what Lawrence means: "sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy." The guerilla doesn't need the love of the people: fear is enough, so long as fear is sufficient to keep the people from opposing the rebel. That's why "hearts and minds" campaigns get so much attention: if the locals refuse to tolerate the guerillas (that is, if they see them as "alien"), the insurrection is over.
The few active rebels must have the qualities of speed and endurance, ubiquity and independence of arteries of supply.
PP criticized this rightly as not being meaningful, but I'd go a step further and say that much of it applies just as much to the regular force as to the irregular: an occupying or governing army can't afford to be lethargic, weak, or absent. The regular force will naturally have some dependence on supply lines, but over-dependence is fatal: bases need stockpiles that can withstand interrupted lines of support for limited periods of time, but the overall command structure also needs to be able to re-secure those lines of support and to resupply the bases.
They must have the technical equipment to destroy or paralyze the enemy’s organized communications, for irregular war is fairly Willisen’s definition of strategy, “the study of communication,” in its extreme degree, of attack where the enemy is not.
This is very different from GP and PP's criticism of GP, but still quite open to debate. As PP points out, irregulars depend (though I would not say solely) on shifting political opinion, and the attacks that get the most media attention