After decades of propping up US military manufacturers (not dissimilar to how the US government propped up canal builder, railroads and steel industries in the 1800s), it is becoming obvious that any industry subsidized this way gets very ineffective and very inefficient while never being innovative. One only has to look at recent super-large military projects like the latest carriers, F-35 and littoral class ships to see that for all the money spent, what the US taxpayer (now and in the future as the debt interest for these expenditures hits) got is of little value.
In his blog post, Andrei Martyanov writes about the F-35:
.. to shoot down F-35 one has to have two different bands radar, good sensor-fusion algorithms and decent signal processing protocols and voila’. S-300 PMU2 Favorit can do this, certainly [the] S-400 [can] ..
This explains why Israel is nervous flying near Syria these days. With customers like India and Turkey now opting for Russian build defense systems, the basic “free-market” economics are finally overriding threats from the US Empire. At the end of the day, these countries want good defense of their nation. This is something that the US has failed to accomplish for itself as it is distracted with the military-industrial complex racket that is in effect a jobs program first and the actual defense of the US is a distant priority.
Andrei goes on to explain what gives Russian military industrial manufacturers the edge:
Unlike American military-industrial complex Russian military-industrial complex is not jobs program or corporate welfare system, it never was. Allow me to quote myself:For a nation with such a military history as Russia’s the issue of military technology is an issue of survival. As such, weapons in Russia are sacralized because behind them are generations of Russians who shed blood to make those weapons what they are. They have become a part of the culture to such a degree that commercial considerations take a very distant second place to a main purpose of these weapons—to actually defend the nation. This is absolutely not the case in the United States, with some exception for its Navy, with Americans having no knowledge or recollection of what real war is and what instruments for fighting and winning it are needed. Those things cannot be paid for in money, they are paid for in blood.I guess this should help explain why Russia is so successful on the international market with her weapons.
.. the incompetence of U.S. military design are the Littoral Combat Ships, which are essentially unarmed fast boats. The “stealth” DDG-1000 Zumwalt class destroyers were supposed to support ground troops with their long range guns. Built at $4 billion a piece the ships are now losing their guns because the ammunition turned out to be too expensive to buy. Before that they lost much of their stealth capabilities because some necessary communication equipment was left out of the original design. The ships new task will be that of a missile launch platform, a job that any commercial ship, carrying containerized Russian missiles (vid), can likewise fulfill.
Epic fails. I could write more about the latest carrier fiasco, but I digress. This is only a symptom of a bigger issues as Ian Walsh in the same post points out:
There is a lot of ruin in a nation, but for almost 40 years now America’s elites have treated the US as something to loot, and assumed that the good times would keep rolling. They were uninterested in actually governing. They were happy to move much of America’s core manufacturing overseas, to the most likely nation to replace America as a hegemon, because the Chinese were smart enough to make American elites rich.
So all these short term gains are typical in a democracy. A monarchy is actually one notch better in keeping the long-term in mind.
Alastair Crook extends this demise to the West itself when he was quoted in Moon of Alabama’s post as concluding:
as the post-war élites in America and Europe become more and more desperate to maintain the illusion of being the vanguard of global civilisation, how will they cope with the re-appearance of a ‘civilization-state’ in its own right: i.e. China?
I guess it is time to read Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s “Democracy – The God That Failed“. This book is pricey ($40), so an alternative is another Hoppe book I have read called “From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy – A Tale of Moral and Economic Folly and Decay” is a good read available for $4 (Kindle at Amazon) or a PDF from the Mises Library for FREE!
Placing hope in nations, in militaries and in government leaders is foolish. Time to reflect on family, faith and focusing on the local as the empire slowly dies. Maybe Ron Paul was right on a few things (quote from his book ‘Swords into Plowshares’):
“The people, who far outnumber the would-be dictators, can succeed in a worldwide revolution that fully deprives the dictators of their power. But, any revolt must not lead to just changing the name of the authoritarian system or the political parties in the system. Instead, the revolt must be based on rejecting the trust in government doing the things that only the people can and should do for themselves. This revolt will probably come in stages—in bits and pieces—and be different in the various countries of the world.”
― Swords into Plowshares: A Life in Wartime and a Future of Peace and Prosperity
-SF1