Newfie wrote:Tanda,
Thank you for that thoughtful post.
I would like to play with that idea a bit and see where it goes.
My knee jerk reaction is that you explained why Democracy is at the core of of our inability to do meaningful long term planning.
Because thinking is difficult for the individual we have developed institutions whose job it is to systematically do the long term planning. To pay people to do this. Let's break this into three groups: business, government, and military.
Business is beholden to share holders (voters) and thus quarterly profits. There long term thinking is limited to 2 or 3 quarters.
Government works on election cycles, usually 2 or 4 years. That's their limit.
The military is not so limited and seems to have undertaken several long term studies that indicate the likelihood and difficulty with peak oil and cc. I seem to recall the USA, GB, and Germany all making similar reports.
Thoughts?
Thank you for reading it
My first thought is you are focusing on Western Europe and North America where the so called 'Democracies' are the rule of the day. It is still that case that the majority of human beings live under other forms of government where people who rise to the top are often very long view thinkers. For example the Chinese are still planning and building for the future, not the present. Another example, the Castro family in Cuba has been in constant control for approaching 60 years, and while they have had ups and downs during that time they have been smart and skilled enough to hold onto power. Even longer term the House of Saud in Arabia and the Kim family in North Korea have maintain continuity of power through the transition of leadership more than once. IMO the reason Democracies fail over and over throughout history is they lose focus on the long term in their leadership circles and in the competition with longer term thinking outsiders they get out maneuvered.
In China there are still a lot of government owned businesses who follow the long term plan dynamic, not the next quarter or year dynamic followed in North America and Europe. This allows them to take advantage of the opportunities created by our short term business cycle driven thinking. It is not a miracle or a perfect system, but it offers major advantages over the borrow, invest, pay off and borrow again system we use. Even here companies like the one ROCKMAN works for where the monied owners do not follow the loan cycle system has major advantages. Unfortunately starting around 1913 the USA changed from a monied investor driven economy to a loan qualified investor driven economy. Because the loans are always requiring a payback growth has been built into the system and can not be avoided so long as loans are the driving force of the economy.
The third group you mentioned is the military. While in some ways the US military industrial complex has improved its efficiency by adopting renewable energy supplies for base locations in other ways they are very much married to the past. For an example, the USAF is still planning to deploy a hundred or so F-35 aircraft despite its great number of problems. Meanwhile updating the avionics in already existing designs would achieve most or all of the 'improvements' planned for the F-35, but they can't do that because the culture is they have to have the newest latest greatest most complicated most expensive aircraft on the planet. Second example, in World War II which ended 70 years ago the USN achieved great success with a two pronged approach, Aircraft Carriers and Submarines. They did this by mass producing them so fast that neither Germany nor Japan could sink them fast enough to cause the fleet to shrink, and by training the crews and getting them into service quickly. When WW II ended the USA had close to 150 aircraft carriers in service and even more submarines. They built almost all of them in 4 years while taking substantial losses the first year from the pre war forces. The USA fleet today is actually smaller than it was in 1939, but unlike the 1930's the USA has almost no ship building capacity. We were building larger aircraft carriers in 15-24 months and small ones in 10 months and we were building Submarines in under 6 months. It now takes 7 to 10 YEARS to build an aircraft carrier, and we only have one shipyard with the ability to build 2 at the same time. We now have one submarine building shipyard and it is lucky to build one submarine a year. You can make any claim you want about how much more capable a 2015 era carrier is compared to 1945, but when you put all your eggs in one basket any prospective enemy only has to knock out that one basket.
The US Army is not really much better off, they use an advanced version of the rifle deployed in 1965. They use 'hummers' designed in the early 1980's. They have some advanced helicopters techniques, but the airframes are all 1990's vintage designs. They have some very advanced (in 1990) laser guidance systems for artillery/rockets/mortars to get them to hit exactly where they want if they can get a spotter to 'light' the target and they can get the supplies of special ammunition to the front quickly enough. On the other side of the coin the active duty numbers for the Army are about 2/3rds of what they were in 1990, and almost all of the cuts came from the front line fighting forces because they still had to have the byzantine logistics system to keep those fewer troops supplied.
For beating up on Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya fighting alone we are like the Mongol hoards, they do not stand a chance. For anyone regularly developing the same kind of technology we use like China, Japan, India, Russia, the EU where it would be our technology against theirs the equation is vastly different. The problem is we have swatted a dozen very weak countries over the last 40 years, and the only fairly capable one, 'Iraq' we spent months degrading with guided munitions before we steamrolled in. We lost Vietnam because Russia supplied them with all sorts of nifty weapons and trained them in how to use them, and we were unwilling politically to do what we would have had to do to actually win. Up through the 1980's we never took on another Russian client state because of the Vietnam effect, we knew the USSR would support anyone we invaded in their sphere of influence.
Well as of earlier this year Russia is back in the game in Syria in a big way. We had a window of opportunity in 2010-12 when we could have taken out Syria, but we squandered that time with speeches and not much else. Once the civil war started we played around the margins but we never had international approval to intervene decisively, and we refused to do anything without international approval.
Our military would be excessive if dropped in 1945 and told win the war ASAP weapons free. In 2015 we don't dare go weapons free because we are not the only nuclear weapon country on the planet like we were in 1945. A miss step now can be irrevocable disaster. There is a very old saying, the most expensive luxury a country can have is the second best military. If you can't win them all that money spent on the military is wasted. The second strategy is not to be second best, but to be good enough that anyone attacking you will suffer too much to make it worth fighting you. Russia adopted this plan about a decade ago. They can't "beat" us, but they can sure as heck maul us to the point we both lose.
So you have to ask yourself, is our military excessive for 2015? It all depends on what you think the military is for. If our military is intended to beat another technologically advanced country then our military is to small. If our military is to beat up on weak third world countries then our military is grossly excessive. If our military is just to deter other people from attacking us because the price is too high for the attacker we are much excessive for that goal as well.
You have to pick a standard and stick with it, and our leadership is failing to do that.