If you look at top priorities of the US military, fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was one of those. In both cases the results were horrific. If the US military would be competent they likely would manage to defund useless paratroopers. Snowden is safely in Russia despite there being strong interest of the US intelligence department to have him not be free.
If we look at lying, the Afghanistan war was not setup in a way to prevent soldiers in Afghanistan from lying to their superiors but the opposite. Soldiers were encouraged to lie in a way that exaggerated the power of the Afghan military. As a result predictions about what happened after the withdraw were wrong.
The drive to move away from ineffective cost-plus contracting doesn’t come from inside the military but from Silicon Valley companies like Palantir and Andruil. Military contracting seems highly corrupt and inefficient.
Trump opposes those elites in multiple ways and he won his first election to the presidency. Right now he’s in a good road to win the Republican primary again and maybe even the general election even when deep state elites don’t like him to be in power.
If you look at top priorities of the US military, fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was one of those. In both cases the results were horrific. If the US military would be competent they likely would manage to defund useless paratroopers.
I generally think that “hypercompetent” was a poor word choice on my part. I agree that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are excellent case studies, and that incompetence in the war on terror gives good bayesian updates, especially against “hypercompetence”, as a hypercompetent inner regime in the US would be more capable of investigating the competence of US forces without worrying so much about stretching itself thin and giving away the positions of its VIPs (same goes for Russia). This is the evidence that my models are tested against. I think that, in reality, things related to military bureaucracies and officer’s academies would evolve to goodhart metrics that fool an inner regime in particular. They would be specialists at that, especially if infiltration risk from foreign fintelligence agencies mean that sending trusted VIPs to infiltrate a wide variety of bureaucracies runs a major risk of a large proportion of those trusted agents being compromised by foreign intelligence agencies.
Snowden is safely in Russia despite there being strong interest of the US intelligence department to have him not be free.
I don’t see how this is relevant. Russia needs a reputation for protecting elite US defectors, especially ones that deliberately permanently drastically alter global trends like Snowden.
Is Assange is a better example, since Ecuador and Sweden are within the US sphere of influence whereas Russia delinates the edges of the US sphere of influence? I understand Snowden extremely well (that stuff is my area of expertise, most stuff here is outside of it), but don’t know much about Assange.
If we look at lying, the Afghanistan war was not setup in a way to prevent soldiers in Afghanistan from lying to their superiors but the opposite. Soldiers were encouraged to lie in a way that exaggerated the power of the Afghan military. As a result predictions about what happened after the withdraw were wrong.
Can you go into more details about this, or suggest further reading? This is interesting and relevant.
The drive to move away from ineffective cost-plus contracting doesn’t come from inside the military but from Silicon Valley companies like Palantir and Andruil. Military contracting seems highly corrupt and inefficient.
A big reason why my competent inner regime model runs into falsifiability problems is because the competent trustworthy VIPs and the monopolized technology (e.g. functioning lie detectors) would be deployed conservatively, because stretching networks thin means more surface area, which means more risk of being compromised by foreign intelligence agencies.
I don’t know much about the history of Palantir or other silicon valley defense companies, and am interested in that (specifically Palantir and similar companies). Its possible that the rise of highly effective silicon valley defense companies might have come from a competent inner regime getting better at recognizing and cooperating with outside talent during the 2010s, rather than just Palantir massively outperforming contractors on obvious metrics.
Trump opposes those elites in multiple ways and he won his first election to the presidency. Right now he’s in a good road to win the Republican primary again and maybe even the general election even when deep state elites don’t like him to be in power.
I don’t think Trump is a good example, because even during his first campaign in 2015-16 when he was the least a creature of the system, it’s still not clear to what extent his promised purges could have benefited various elites, as it was always pretty vague and the promised purges could have been retargeted to anyone inconvenient.
Can you go into more details about this, or suggest further reading? This is interesting and relevant.
It’s my understanding that the US military set goals to train the Afghan military to have certain capabilities. When high-level commanders had those goals they were uncritically accepting bogus numbers from lower level-commanders about the success of those at training the Afghan military.
The general narrative that the US military wanted to tell the US public involved that they were good at training the Afghan military.
I don’t have good links for that and write based on my memory from the time after the withdrawal.
I don’t see how this is relevant. Russia needs a reputation for protecting elite US defectors, especially ones that deliberately permanently drastically alter global trends like Snowden.
The fact that Snowden went from Hong Kong to Russia and found shelter there instead of being captured suggests that the US intelligence service was outmanuvered by Snowden and Wikileaks (Wikileaks helped Snowden here).
I don’t know much about the history of Palantir or other silicon valley defense companies, and am interested in that (specifically Palantir and similar companies).
As Peter Thiel tells it: PayPal was faced with a lot of fraud. One key challenge that they had to overcome was to develop technology that used machine learning to detect fraud. After they sold PayPal, they thought that the same machine learning that was used to detect fraud could also be used to help analyze intelligence.
There was also the idea that it’s very important to actually write the rules of how surveillance can be used into code, to reduce abuse of intelligence capabilities and Palantir’s marketing is that they do that.
Its possible that the rise of highly effective silicon valley defense companies might have come from a competent inner regime getting better at recognizing and cooperating with outside talent during the 2010s, rather than just Palantir massively outperforming contractors on obvious metrics.
The fact that cost-plus contracting is bad at producing efficient technology is not about outperforming at specific metrics.
Palantir wouldn’t have needed to sue the Army if the Army leaders would have been competent.
Palantir/Arduril/SpaceX which are the main big new defense contractors are all opposed to cost-plus contracting.
SpaceX is an important defense contractor but that wasn’t Musk’s motivation. It’s just a good way for SpaceX to make money.
Arduril’s founder that that the F-35 program ballooning over 1 trillion dollars was part of his motivation for thinking that the current military procurement is broken and needs innovation.
Pilots are important for airforce decision making and thus there isn’t 1 trillion dollars invested in some advanced drone but in a craft that can be piloted by humans.
F-35 aren’t the crucial component to winning the kind of wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. They also aren’t the kind of weapon that are important to defend Taiwan. They are just what the airforce culture wants instead of being a choice made by a hypercompetent military.
I don’t think Trump is a good example, because even during his first campaign in 2015-16 when he was the least a creature of the system, it’s still not clear to what extent his promised purges could have benefited various elites, as it was always pretty vague and the promised purges could have been retargeted to anyone inconvenient.
Trump made Richard Grenell acting head of the DNI who’s independent enough to go to Glenn Greenwald, Trump also put a lot of other people who were not creatures of the system into various important roles.
If the DNI is an organization that uses lie detection equipment the way you are asserting, this would be pretty threatening to the system.
If the DNI is an organization that uses lie detection equipment the way you are asserting, this would be pretty threatening to the system.
There is only one thing I’m asserting on lie detection technology, which is that people who think that lie detection technology doesn’t work (even honest people with background in the area) are not to be trusted. That is exactly the kind of area where massive numbers of people, including experts in the field, receive military/counterintelligence disinformation instead of access to the actual technology (e.g. the heart attack gun), up to and including data poisoning on their datasets.
The fact that cost-plus contracting is bad at producing efficient technology is not about outperforming at specific metrics.
Palantir wouldn’t have needed to sue the Army if the Army leaders would have been competent.
Palantir/Arduril/SpaceX which are the main big new defense contractors are all opposed to cost-plus contracting.
I think this is very strong evidence against a “hypercompetent” inner regime, and a somewhat strong update against inner regime competence, and such stagnation in a key military area definitely explains the assumption of uniform incompetence that I’ve frequently encountered. I argue that it’s a strong update, but not an extremely strong update, since an inner regime will be concerned with spreading it’s VIPs thin, increasing surface area for infiltration, by sending trusted people to be immersed in the leadership AND middle management throughout the armed forces and defense industry. Doing so would make the US better at vastly outproducing and outperforming Russia and China at military production, and the status quo between the US and Russia and China only started declining in value ~10 years ago; before then, when these systems were set up, it potentially wouldn’t be worth it for a competent survival-focused inner regime to spread itself thin in order to get the country really good at building up its forces. There’s still the fact that ballooning costs at least indicate short time horizons in such an inner regime, which is extremely difficult to distinguish from incompetence and even uniform incompetence. But it still seems reasonable that a highly competent inner regime in the 90s and 2000s would just assume that these things have always been inefficient and wasteful and thus realistically always would be. A failure of imagination there is not incompatible with high levels of inner regime competence.
F-35 aren’t the crucial component to winning the kind of wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. They also aren’t the kind of weapon that are important to defend Taiwan. They are just what the airforce culture wants instead of being a choice made by a hypercompetent military.
I mostly agree with your perception of state (or something) competence, but this seems to me like a sloppy argument? True, the US does have to prepare for the most likely wars, but they also have to be prepared for all other wars that don’t happen because they were prepared, aka. deterrence. The F-35 may not be the most efficient asset when it comes to e.g. Taiwan, but it’s useful in a wide range of scenarios, and its difficult to predict what exactly one will need as these platforms have to be planned decades in advance.
Not sure how to put this in a way that isn’t overly combative, but since the only point you made where I have domain specific understanding seems to be sloppy, it makes me wonder how much I should trust the rest? At a glance it doesn’t look like artight reasoning.
EDIT: As a sidenote, what the airforce culture wants is in itself a military consideration. It’s often better to have the gear that works well with established doctrine than some other technology that outperforms it on paper.
The F-35 may not be the most efficient asset when it comes to e.g. Taiwan, but it’s useful in a wide range of scenarios
I didn’t just talk about Taiwan, I also talked about Afghanistan and Iraq. Those were wars that the US military essentially lost.
The US military failed to create the kind of innovation that they would have needed to pursue those conflicts successfully.
F-35 also doesn’t help with the Ukraine war.
and its difficult to predict what exactly one will need as these platforms have to be planned decades in advance.
A key alternative for the F-35 plan would have been unmanned aircraft for the same job.
True, the US does have to prepare for the most likely wars, but they also have to be prepared for all other wars that don’t happen because they were prepared, aka. deterrence.
What wars do you think the F-35 deters?
At a glance it doesn’t look like artight reasoning.
When it comes to military matters, the beliefs I have come from reading some articles and interviews.I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other people here with a lot more domain knowledge.
Evaluating whether or not the military spends its money well is generally hard as a lot of relevant information is secret.
Palmer Luckey from Anduril who would know seems to say that there was a severe underinvestment into autonomous vehicles.
Alex Karp from Palantir also speaks about underinvestment of the military into AI.
I’m not an expert either, and I won’t try to end the F-35 debate in a few sentences. I maintain my position that the original argument was sloppy. “F-35 isn’t the best for specific wars X, Y and Z, therefore it wasn’t a competent military decision” is non sequitur. “Experts X, Y and Z believe that the F-35 wasn’t a competent decision” would be better in this case, because that seems to be the real reason why you believe what you believe.
“F-35 isn’t the best for specific wars X, Y and Z, therefore it wasn’t a competent military decision” is non sequitur. “Experts X, Y and Z believe that the F-35 wasn’t a competent decision” would be better in this case, because that seems to be the real reason why you believe what you believe.
Generally, in security threat modelling is important. There’s the saying “Generals always fight the last war” which is about a common mistake in militaries that they are not sufficiently doing threat modeling and investing in technology that would actually help with the important threats.
There are forces where established military units aren’t looking for new ways of acting. Pilots wants planes that are flown by pilots. Defense contractors want to produce weapons that match their competencies.
I do see the question of whether a military is able to think well about future threats and then invest money into building technology to counter those threats as an important aspect of competency.
This is not that I just copied the position from someone else but I have a model feed by what I read and which I apply.
Earlier this month, the US Navy’s top officer, Admiral Michael Gilday, lit into defence contractors at a major industry conference for lobbying Congress to “build the ships that you want to build” and “buy aircraft we don’t need” rather than adapt to systems needed to counter China. “It’s not the ’90s any more,”
Aircraft we don’t need is what the F-35 program is about. The main threat related to countering China is defending Taiwan (and hopefully in a way where there’s deterrence that prevents the war from happening in the first place).
EDIT:
If you would make some argument about the Navy already having the correct position here because Michael Gilday is advocating the correct position, if there would be a hypercompetent faction in the military, that group should have no problems with exerting their power in a way to get defense contractors to produce the weapons that high military leaders consider desirable to develop.
If you look at top priorities of the US military, fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was one of those. In both cases the results were horrific. If the US military would be competent they likely would manage to defund useless paratroopers. Snowden is safely in Russia despite there being strong interest of the US intelligence department to have him not be free.
If we look at lying, the Afghanistan war was not setup in a way to prevent soldiers in Afghanistan from lying to their superiors but the opposite. Soldiers were encouraged to lie in a way that exaggerated the power of the Afghan military. As a result predictions about what happened after the withdraw were wrong.
The drive to move away from ineffective cost-plus contracting doesn’t come from inside the military but from Silicon Valley companies like Palantir and Andruil. Military contracting seems highly corrupt and inefficient.
Trump opposes those elites in multiple ways and he won his first election to the presidency. Right now he’s in a good road to win the Republican primary again and maybe even the general election even when deep state elites don’t like him to be in power.
I generally think that “hypercompetent” was a poor word choice on my part. I agree that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are excellent case studies, and that incompetence in the war on terror gives good bayesian updates, especially against “hypercompetence”, as a hypercompetent inner regime in the US would be more capable of investigating the competence of US forces without worrying so much about stretching itself thin and giving away the positions of its VIPs (same goes for Russia). This is the evidence that my models are tested against. I think that, in reality, things related to military bureaucracies and officer’s academies would evolve to goodhart metrics that fool an inner regime in particular. They would be specialists at that, especially if infiltration risk from foreign fintelligence agencies mean that sending trusted VIPs to infiltrate a wide variety of bureaucracies runs a major risk of a large proportion of those trusted agents being compromised by foreign intelligence agencies.
I don’t see how this is relevant. Russia needs a reputation for protecting elite US defectors, especially ones that deliberately permanently drastically alter global trends like Snowden.
Is Assange is a better example, since Ecuador and Sweden are within the US sphere of influence whereas Russia delinates the edges of the US sphere of influence? I understand Snowden extremely well (that stuff is my area of expertise, most stuff here is outside of it), but don’t know much about Assange.
Can you go into more details about this, or suggest further reading? This is interesting and relevant.
A big reason why my competent inner regime model runs into falsifiability problems is because the competent trustworthy VIPs and the monopolized technology (e.g. functioning lie detectors) would be deployed conservatively, because stretching networks thin means more surface area, which means more risk of being compromised by foreign intelligence agencies.
I don’t know much about the history of Palantir or other silicon valley defense companies, and am interested in that (specifically Palantir and similar companies). Its possible that the rise of highly effective silicon valley defense companies might have come from a competent inner regime getting better at recognizing and cooperating with outside talent during the 2010s, rather than just Palantir massively outperforming contractors on obvious metrics.
I don’t think Trump is a good example, because even during his first campaign in 2015-16 when he was the least a creature of the system, it’s still not clear to what extent his promised purges could have benefited various elites, as it was always pretty vague and the promised purges could have been retargeted to anyone inconvenient.
It’s my understanding that the US military set goals to train the Afghan military to have certain capabilities. When high-level commanders had those goals they were uncritically accepting bogus numbers from lower level-commanders about the success of those at training the Afghan military.
The general narrative that the US military wanted to tell the US public involved that they were good at training the Afghan military.
I don’t have good links for that and write based on my memory from the time after the withdrawal.
The fact that Snowden went from Hong Kong to Russia and found shelter there instead of being captured suggests that the US intelligence service was outmanuvered by Snowden and Wikileaks (Wikileaks helped Snowden here).
As Peter Thiel tells it: PayPal was faced with a lot of fraud. One key challenge that they had to overcome was to develop technology that used machine learning to detect fraud. After they sold PayPal, they thought that the same machine learning that was used to detect fraud could also be used to help analyze intelligence.
There was also the idea that it’s very important to actually write the rules of how surveillance can be used into code, to reduce abuse of intelligence capabilities and Palantir’s marketing is that they do that.
The fact that cost-plus contracting is bad at producing efficient technology is not about outperforming at specific metrics.
Palantir wouldn’t have needed to sue the Army if the Army leaders would have been competent.
Palantir/Arduril/SpaceX which are the main big new defense contractors are all opposed to cost-plus contracting.
SpaceX is an important defense contractor but that wasn’t Musk’s motivation. It’s just a good way for SpaceX to make money.
Arduril’s founder that that the F-35 program ballooning over 1 trillion dollars was part of his motivation for thinking that the current military procurement is broken and needs innovation.
Pilots are important for airforce decision making and thus there isn’t 1 trillion dollars invested in some advanced drone but in a craft that can be piloted by humans.
F-35 aren’t the crucial component to winning the kind of wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. They also aren’t the kind of weapon that are important to defend Taiwan. They are just what the airforce culture wants instead of being a choice made by a hypercompetent military.
Trump made Richard Grenell acting head of the DNI who’s independent enough to go to Glenn Greenwald, Trump also put a lot of other people who were not creatures of the system into various important roles.
If the DNI is an organization that uses lie detection equipment the way you are asserting, this would be pretty threatening to the system.
There is only one thing I’m asserting on lie detection technology, which is that people who think that lie detection technology doesn’t work (even honest people with background in the area) are not to be trusted. That is exactly the kind of area where massive numbers of people, including experts in the field, receive military/counterintelligence disinformation instead of access to the actual technology (e.g. the heart attack gun), up to and including data poisoning on their datasets.
I think this is very strong evidence against a “hypercompetent” inner regime, and a somewhat strong update against inner regime competence, and such stagnation in a key military area definitely explains the assumption of uniform incompetence that I’ve frequently encountered. I argue that it’s a strong update, but not an extremely strong update, since an inner regime will be concerned with spreading it’s VIPs thin, increasing surface area for infiltration, by sending trusted people to be immersed in the leadership AND middle management throughout the armed forces and defense industry. Doing so would make the US better at vastly outproducing and outperforming Russia and China at military production, and the status quo between the US and Russia and China only started declining in value ~10 years ago; before then, when these systems were set up, it potentially wouldn’t be worth it for a competent survival-focused inner regime to spread itself thin in order to get the country really good at building up its forces. There’s still the fact that ballooning costs at least indicate short time horizons in such an inner regime, which is extremely difficult to distinguish from incompetence and even uniform incompetence. But it still seems reasonable that a highly competent inner regime in the 90s and 2000s would just assume that these things have always been inefficient and wasteful and thus realistically always would be. A failure of imagination there is not incompatible with high levels of inner regime competence.
I mostly agree with your perception of state (or something) competence, but this seems to me like a sloppy argument? True, the US does have to prepare for the most likely wars, but they also have to be prepared for all other wars that don’t happen because they were prepared, aka. deterrence. The F-35 may not be the most efficient asset when it comes to e.g. Taiwan, but it’s useful in a wide range of scenarios, and its difficult to predict what exactly one will need as these platforms have to be planned decades in advance.
Not sure how to put this in a way that isn’t overly combative, but since the only point you made where I have domain specific understanding seems to be sloppy, it makes me wonder how much I should trust the rest? At a glance it doesn’t look like artight reasoning.
EDIT: As a sidenote, what the airforce culture wants is in itself a military consideration. It’s often better to have the gear that works well with established doctrine than some other technology that outperforms it on paper.
I didn’t just talk about Taiwan, I also talked about Afghanistan and Iraq. Those were wars that the US military essentially lost.
The US military failed to create the kind of innovation that they would have needed to pursue those conflicts successfully.
F-35 also doesn’t help with the Ukraine war.
A key alternative for the F-35 plan would have been unmanned aircraft for the same job.
What wars do you think the F-35 deters?
When it comes to military matters, the beliefs I have come from reading some articles and interviews.I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other people here with a lot more domain knowledge.
Evaluating whether or not the military spends its money well is generally hard as a lot of relevant information is secret.
Palmer Luckey from Anduril who would know seems to say that there was a severe underinvestment into autonomous vehicles.
Alex Karp from Palantir also speaks about underinvestment of the military into AI.
I’m not an expert either, and I won’t try to end the F-35 debate in a few sentences. I maintain my position that the original argument was sloppy. “F-35 isn’t the best for specific wars X, Y and Z, therefore it wasn’t a competent military decision” is non sequitur. “Experts X, Y and Z believe that the F-35 wasn’t a competent decision” would be better in this case, because that seems to be the real reason why you believe what you believe.
Generally, in security threat modelling is important. There’s the saying “Generals always fight the last war” which is about a common mistake in militaries that they are not sufficiently doing threat modeling and investing in technology that would actually help with the important threats.
There are forces where established military units aren’t looking for new ways of acting. Pilots wants planes that are flown by pilots. Defense contractors want to produce weapons that match their competencies.
I do see the question of whether a military is able to think well about future threats and then invest money into building technology to counter those threats as an important aspect of competency.
This is not that I just copied the position from someone else but I have a model feed by what I read and which I apply.
The argument I made seems also be made by military generals:
Aircraft we don’t need is what the F-35 program is about. The main threat related to countering China is defending Taiwan (and hopefully in a way where there’s deterrence that prevents the war from happening in the first place).
EDIT:
If you would make some argument about the Navy already having the correct position here because Michael Gilday is advocating the correct position, if there would be a hypercompetent faction in the military, that group should have no problems with exerting their power in a way to get defense contractors to produce the weapons that high military leaders consider desirable to develop.