Thread by @Pinboard

Large aircraft carriers live in an interesting twilight zone. They would be instantly sunk in any real conflict, but we've grown fond of usin them as mobile airports for use against third world powers. There hasn't been a carrier engagement against real opposition since WWII

https://twitter.com/duandang/status/1442077131769401345

A contentious debate over whether large warships are vulnerable against air attack was settled over the course of six hours in 1941. We're likely to get an equally brisk and definitive answer about large ships vs. missiles when two major powers go to war. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_o…

In the meantime, we keep building the things, part of a dysfunction in the American military where all the major weapons systems are obsolete, designed to fight wars we never had, and being used at fantastic expense to blow up Toyota Hiluxes that look like they're up to something

The oversight crisis in the US military is really something. They build carriers that have no defense against attack, fighter jets that don't work, billion-dollar bombers with no mission, and now a new branch of the military busy inventing uniforms and a mission for itself.

This bloated and sclerotic military just got defeated by a bunch of semi-literate beardos after twenty years of proclaiming victory, and what was the result? No one fired, no investigations, just Congress automatically raising their budget beyond what even the President asked for

The US military is a socialist mini-state parasitizing the American economy, obeying its own obscure bureaucratic laws and no longer capable of performing the only mission it exists to serve. Its principal use is to generate a politically untouchable victim class of "heroes".

Pentagon spending becoming unaccountable and uncontrollable isn't just a problem if you dislike militarism, it's also a problem if you love militarism but still want the army to win glorious victories in the future. Ours hasn't faced even odds since Korea, and it's getting weird.

Every time I visit my mom I drive past this sea cybertruck being built in Bath, Maine. It's a Zumwalt-class destroyer, designed around a new gun that got cancelled for being unworkable. But the ships are being built anyway, while the Navy tries to figure out what to use them for.

The real purpose of this floating monument to purposelessness is to maintain 5,000 jobs at Bath Iron Works—basically the entire shipbuilding sector in Maine. Jobs like these are among the last remaining high-wage manufacturing jobs in America, making them politically untouchable.

I like Jared Golden (the ME-2 congressman), I worked hard to help him get elected, and believe that as a combat veteran he sees the military with clearer eyes than most. But even he boasts about keeping this pointless program alive. So where can substantive reform ever come from?

In the past, it was politicians who served in the military who we could count on to rein it in. Their experience gave them both political cover to insist on change, and firsthand experience with its pathologies. But today there's no constituency in either party for fighting bloat