While Trump is stomping the world making desperate attempts to sate his Deal Lust at whatever cost to plausibility, partnerships, policy or prestige, business goes on in the vastness of the US government: and it seems possible not all of his appointees are complete dickheads. I give you the youthful Army Secretary Dan Driscoll (wiki doesn't seem to know quite how old he is).
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| The M10 'Booker'. Of no use to man nor beast |
Upon taking office this chap has noticed that the M10 Booker program - is it a tank, is it an assault gun, is it an "armored infantry support vehicle"? - is, in any event, a costly dud. And rather than soldier on regardless, as in many a similar circumstance over the decades, he has simply scrapped it, boldly and wisely stating that he ain't gonna fall for the Sunk Cost Fallacy.
What a man!
The soundness of his decision-making is of course compounded many-fold by the war in Ukraine, which signals as clearly as anything could that the weapons and doctrinal paradigms of the 20th Century are badly in need of 100% overhaul, not to say wholesale discarding. In the race to do this effectively, every dollar spent on badly-procured, intrinsically obsolete stuff like the M10 is a dollar wasted, that could have been spent much better on something so completely different, it makes the head spin.
In another excellent move, the US Army is not going to replace its 150,000 lumbering Humvees like-for-like. For infantry purposes they are going instead for this - at a fraction of the cost.
The Mad Max vibe obviously represents the future: see also the Russians abandoning the use of APCs for assault use - they get instantly malleted by Ukrainian drones - in favour of motorbikes on weaving courses to traverse the open fields between tree-lines.
I do feel sorry for the descendants of the two Booker families being commemorated. Hopefully, they can take faint cheer from the wisdom of Driscoll's action.
Anyhow: to encounter a politician who properly understands the Sunk Cost Fallacy is a rare event, much to be applauded. (Maybe there are other such people in Team Trump ..?) As a matter of urgency, can Driscoll take Ed Miliband aside, please? Hinkley Point, Sizewell, government-financed hydrogen projects etc etc, this means you.
ND
5 comments:
The first rule of naval shipbuilding is now that there are only two sorts of ships: submarines and targets.
What about armies: just drones and motorbikes? How about an army equivalent of a submarine: we could call it a "mole"?
As for air forces: what? The helicopter will presumably go the way of mass assault by parachute - mere history. So, satellites and missiles?
Oh, I almost overlooked them, mines - both for armies and navies.
All in all it's a wonderful opportunity for nations that haven't spaffed their wealth on obsolete types of weapons. It also means that the Yanks don't need to worry that so many of their weapons are duds - even if they'd built good'uns, they'd be obsolete too.
"the Sunk Cost Fallacy": one of the great discoveries of my young adult life was how stupid the economic beliefs of most people are. The stuff I'd learnt at my father's knee - a closed book to most people, even those you'd think might be quite intelligent.
A useful lesson to the UK (and Europe as a whole… or, indeed, the rest of the world…) when considering defence procurement.
The estimable Wolfgang Münchau made this point in passing in his latest podcast (https://www.eurointelligence.com/podcasts) — it is silly to frame defence spending in terms of a particular percentage of GDP as a target, or some arbitrary monetary amount. What is necessary is to determine what capabilities you are seeking. Then you can work back — what supply chains will make them and at what cost.
I don’t have any expertise to even begin to consider that. But it does seem that the notion of tanks lumbering across the countryside with helicopter gunship support isn’t quite what it used to be. Nor even, perhaps, are precision guided cruise and ballistic missiles. I’m still waiting, for example, for “Ukraine’s electrical grid to be destroyed”.
@ I’m still waiting, for example, for “Ukraine’s electrical grid to be destroyed”.
Clive - it more-or-less has been, several times! They keep going by (a) astonishing feats of repair, and (b) truly gigantic use of diesel gennies, at all scales.
Some Ukr refugees of our acquaintance, living now in the UK, have made a serious business of exporting domestic-scale gennies. (When they are not cooking in the much-revitalised pub ...)
Thanks ND, that confirms a hunch I had.
And unpeels yet another layer to this onion. Disabling a power grid is a perfectly sensible strategic objective. Russia no doubt assumed it had the capability to deliver it with the resources at its disposal. It even seems, from that account, to have achieved it. So far, so good.
But then it turns out that achieving the military strategic objective isn’t actually going have the desired operational impact (turning Ukraine back into a pre-electrical age society with all that entails).
Perhaps, speculating somewhat, because Russia overlooked some disrupters (cheap, easily transportable, readily available small scale and medium scale diesel generators, rapid logistical responses to getting repair materials to the grid asset locations, inventory management, capable air (anti missile) defence, computer-aided loss of load calculations and recovery priorities, internet and mobile communications to the field force of engineers — I’m just listing a few areas here which aren’t enough on their own, but combined, you get network effects where the whole ends up much better than the sum of the parts). So what was planned — in perfectly competent Russian military planning exercises — turned out to be hopelessly outmanoeuvred by, well, let’s say, “events”.
Who’d want to be a military planner or defence procurement agency today!?
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