politics

I think the issues go deeper than the changes in leadership. Trump had only been back in power for a little over a year at the point where they started this conflict. It takes a while for leadership changes to create the kinds of issues we're seeing here. I'm not saying those leadership changes aren't part of the problem, but they're not the whole problem. There are much, much deeper failures in American military planning and leadership that are being exposed here.

The most fundamental of these is that the US has entirely failed to acknowledge the lessons being raised by the Ukraine war. Ukraine has been actively reaching out to their NATO partners for years, offering to share their technology, training, doctrines, etc; everything they've learned about countering large scale drone and missile attacks. Every NATO partner has taken them up on this, except the US.

Patriot is the best air defence system in the world. There's no arguing with that no matter how much I might want to. But at $4 million per intercept, it's designed for an outdated model of warfare. Patriot was built to kill $50m+ aircraft. In that role, it's incredibly cost effective. But against a $20,000 shahed drone it's like killing a fly with a tank. The US cannot build and supply enough missiles to keep their Patriot and THAAD systems working against the kind of massed attacks that Iran is using.

The second lesson the US should have learned from Ukraine is how effectively an enemy without air superiority can still maintain air suppression, and how effectively an enemy without naval assets can maintain naval suppression. Ukraine learned that without having the ability to control the air or sea, they could still deny those spaces to their enemy. Iran took those lessons to heart. The US have been losing planes and taking hits to their ships because they assumed air and naval superiority was a license to act with impunity in those theatres. Having the best aircraft isn't the same thing as having unbeatable aircraft. Technology can reduce the risk to pilots but not eliminate it.

Now, when you deploy those pilots recklessly and relentlessly, you increase that risk by orders of magnitude. This is where those leadership changes absolutely do make a difference. I know through personal sources - which obviously means I cannot prove this claim without getting people in trouble, but I'll include it for context anyway - that the pilots stationed in Iran were running on close to zero sleep and a truly heinous amount of stimulants, had no clean water (bottled only, and limited amounts of that), and running an absolutely reckless mission rate. That kind of stuff is exactly why you get accidents happening. Combine that with a refusal to properly communicate with local allies, because they're too goddamn arrogant, and you get friendly fire incidents stacked on top of those accidents and other failures.

The other issue we're seeing is that there's just a general lack of deployment readiness among US forces. Again, from personal sources (different ones this time, but same caveat applies) I know that US troops in the Balkans were being pulled directly off of NATO Forward Presence to go home and immediately work up for potential deployment to Iran. That's insane. Normally when someone is off of deployment you want to give them a solid month of leave just for a start. Deployments - even non-combat - are stressful and gruelling. People get bored, they get lonely, they get frustrated. They drink, they do drugs, they get in fights. Shit gets bad. No one runs deployments longer than 6 months because at some point basic order starts breaking down. Outside of dire need, you absolutely do not pull people off deployment just to work up for deployment. Even Ukraine is cycling people off of the front-line when they can. Same goes for naval (you can find plenty of articles about this); they've been pulling ships out of theatres like South Asia to use in the Mediterranean. That shouldn't be happening with the world's largest / most powerful military.

What this traces back to, I suspect, is issues that we saw as far back as the start of the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. A lot of the units that they tried to deploy literally failed their readiness work-ups so many times that they just had to scrub their deployments entirely. What this means is that while the US employs a lot of troops and has a lot of ships, those soldiers and that equipment aren't actually at a condition or level of training suitable to being used in a real conflict. This is forcing them to pull stuff off active deployments because the stuff that's actively deployed is the only stuff they have that's capable of being deployed at short notice. That's a very, very serious problem. It's why you've got the Gerald Ford running what's expected to be an 11 month mission. Can you imagine 11 months trapped on a boat at sea? A whole year away from your family, away from real food, entertainment, privacy... A whole year of hot bunking (that means you trade your bed off with two other people; it's not your bed, it's the bed of whoever is sleeping right now) and navy canteen food while you queue for 45 minutes for toilets that don't work. I'd go insane. I guarantee there have been fights on board. And that stress leads to sloppy work and accidents.

These issues are compounded by the fact that the US fleet is, basically, old as fuck. The US Navy have been trying and failing to build new ships for decades now. It's been a litany of failed projects, each one supposed to replace a design currently in service, each one collapsing and having its funding pulled after proving to not be suitable for the task. First there was the Zumwalt, then the Litoral Combat Ship, then most recently the new frigates (which got pulled before even a single one came off the line). Now they're pulling funding off their next gen destroyers and cruisers to build the "Trump Class Battleship", which will almost certainly get killed off in a few years time unless they can find some way to reconfigure it into a design that actually makes sense. Meanwhile the ships they have are getting older and harder to maintain.

All of this together, I believe, paints a picture of decades of financial mismanagement. This isn't a problem that started with Trump's latest return, or even his last outing. It's been going on for much longer than that. This is a military with an obscenely bloated budget and no idea how to use it effectively. A military that has grown so big and unwieldy that no one knows how to keep it in working shape anymore. A military that throws hundreds of millions at Microsoft to develop AR goggles that soldiers hate, but has to cut funding for battlefield medicine. A military that builds and then cancels a light tank that can't be carried on a transport aircraft or cross the bridges on the training ground it was designed for. A military that reintroduces bayonet training after issuing a rifle that doesn't have bayonet lugs.

Trump certainly hasn't helped things by putting a guy like Hegseth in charge. He's exactly the right kind of idiot to actively accelerate this decline. But in my estimation, the decline has been happening for quite some time.