Nothing is working for anyone with a clear eye to reform in the Department of Defense. We may find some reform will take place now but I am cynical and not holding out much hope.
Nothing.
“Fixes are proposed; panels are held; good, sensible reforms are constantly suggested: yet nothing works, everything keeps getting worse, and there seems to be no way out of the crisis.”
The crisis will be solved through the bankruptcy the state is volunteering for.
The missing link inside the American policy establishment today is a basic discussion about the future and sustainability of the empire in light of America’s industrial weakness and cultural confusion. Powerful ideological and political constraints, however, currently make such discussions not just impossible but also career-ending for any individual who would dare to attempt them. The result of this chronic unwillingness to even acknowledge basic first principles inside Washington is to trap the Navy, Army, and all the other branches of the U.S. military on the far side of the Red Queen’s magic mirror: forcing them to constantly make impossible trade-offs and sacrifices just to postpone necessary discussions a little bit into the future, dooming them to running faster and faster just so that America’s leadership class won’t ever have to move an inch. In this clash between ideology and reality, ideology is almost always the victor. And it is winning at the cost of destroying the U.S. military itself.
To a student of human history, the woeful state of America’s national security establishment does not appear as some sort of great mystery. It is far from unique; in fact, it might not even be noteworthy. It is just the normal stuff of human history, going back thousands of years. The USSR is still very much in living memory; what went on in that empire in its final decade wasn’t all that different from what is happening in America today. Despite all the hype, America’s empire is not actually very exceptional; it is far more similar to than different from history’s many other empires that have all risen to wealth and glory only to then fall away. The cancer eating away at the U.S. military is of a similar genus to that which once ate away at the Red Army; the oblivious and out-of-touch responses coming from elites inside Washington aren’t particularly different from the attitudes of Soviet elites of days past. Having foolishly succumbed to the slow-acting poison of an ideology that proclaims that America possesses the first and only non-ideological military in the world, America’s civilian and military elites now find themselves trapped in a grim and decaying Wonderland of their own making.
Ideology has so blended with the Imperial City and the military temples at the Pentagon ensure an absolutely impossible problem set where no one has the will or means to stop the massive train from running out of tracks in a spectacular crash that will sunder the American empire.
The Wayback Machine reminds us of all past tense showing us the future. The base in Balakliya, near Kharkiv, is around 100km (60 miles) from fighting against Russian-backed separatists in the eastern oblasts (2017).
https://web.archive.org/web/20170801064637/http://scout.com/military/warrior/Article/Small-Russian-Drones-Do-Massive-Damage-WIth-Grenade-Weapons-103103172