Millennium Challenge: a Corrupted Military Exercise and Its Legacy (2015)

The USA-led coalition conclusively won the Gulf War. We don’t think about it as much precisely because it wasn’t a boondoggle that lasted years and years.

  Grenada (1983)
  Panama to arrest General Noriega (1989)
  Iraq in Gulf War 1 (1991)
  Haiti (1994) 
  

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most countries haven't adopted US copyright standards out of a concern that the US military is going to break down their door; they're motivated by the opportunity to sell goods to the massive US consumer market.

There is a bigger underlying point, which is there is no trump weapon that defeats everything in war [1]. Everything has a counter, and if you're basing your entire strategy on saying that this weapon doesn't have a counter that we know of yet, well, you'll find that counters quickly get developed (see, e.g., the evolution of drone warfare in the Russo-Ukrainian War).

Ripper's argument that his tactics "won" the Millennium Challenge strike me as rather similar to the thoughts behind the Jeune École school of naval warfare, which argued for the use of massed small ships (torpedo boats) to counter battleships... except that had an easy counter in the form of the (torpedo boat) destroyer, and most naval theorists generally agree that the French Navy's embrace of Jeune École ended up doing more harm than good to their navy.

[1] The closest thing to a counterexample here is nuclear bombs, for which there isn't really a meaningful defense. Except that the use of nuclear bombs is predicated on the theory of strategic air bombing, which has been promising an easy-win button for wars for a century now, has been tried in every major conflict since then, and whose could-even-be-argued-as-maybe-a-successes in that timeframe can be counted on one hand, with some fingers missing. I'm galled that you still have military personnel and advisors today who advocate for its success, given its track record of the complete opposite.

One thing I thought when I read this is that if you only train for the competent adversary you may be unprepared for the one who is different. Could you lose if your theory of mind was wrong? But when I made a rudimentary search for this (Google is so hard to phrase, but I also used LLMs) it seems that in practice every victory is through the commander's skill in navigating their constraints. Surely, some commander out there did a stupid thing and attacked when the rational thing would have been to retreat and it worked, or surely someone didn't keep reserves just out of sheer incompetence and it paid off. But I can't find an example.

Either battles are uniquely unforgiving for bad strategy (entirely possible, they are usually long, which has a law of large numbers effect to it) or military historians back-form rationalizations for the victors or some other third thing I can't think of right away.

I was hoping there'd be some crystal clear example of the equivalent of not folding on an off-suit 2/7 and having it play off. But I found none. Interesting.

I would add:

… and generally antagonistic towards the identification of them.

Training != exercise.

The one builds an ability, the other tests its success.

There are many young, economically disenfranchised Americans that see the military as a way out of poverty. The military understands this and positions recruitment centers in poorer neighborhoods.

Well, you're supposed to get the lifelong disability by claiming PTSD, Tinnitus, Migraine. That's why disability has skyrocketed recently. Social media has allowed spreading the game plan pretty widely and most veterans know how to get as close to 100% disability as possible. There are entire channels dedicated to gaming this.

There are lots of healthy people out there claiming this (though obviously there are lots of people who do actually have the conditions as well).

Creating a strong image to adversaries, aka deterrent, is a key function of all nations militaries. But the US conducts tough rigorous exercises against impossible odds constantly. All ground forces are rotated through NTC and JRTC where expert opfor units are given all the toys, home-field advantage, and usually win.

I wouldn't encourage anyone to enlist myself, but the benefits are still pretty good even if the salary is crap. The GI Bill doesn't expire anymore and you can get a lot of credits easily while you're in. Subsidized housing, food, free healthcare, free college, etc. It's a pretty comfy life for someone out of high school with zero plans.

I enlisted during what turned out to be the absolute nadir of the Iraq war (2005-2010) so the risk today is also a lot less ominous IMO (for now lol...)

Anecdotally, yes: I have two young cousins who both joined the US military this year.

Graduate school has never been part of the "traditional path" for the majority of people. And it's only recently that an associate's and bachelor's degree have become something of a default.

I also think it's a bullshit excuse. Iran was famous for wasting manpower to gain speed, eg during the Iran-Iraq war where they had large numbers of school age children martyr themselves in human wave attacks to slow down tanks or clear minefields. Van Riper just extended that concept to the marine environment.