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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   35137 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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Elon's solution to an incredibly large bureaucracy is to fire most of it, then deal with the credibly large bureaucracy which remains.

And what is your opinion on the pentagon and dod needing this kind of shakeup?

Imo there's clearly a lot wrong there. But this is one of the places where 'fire 80% of the people' isn't a good idea. It's often +EV, but a 20% chance of destroying twitter is fineE, it's just one website, while being ready for a conflict three months from now is critical. What you'd basically want to do IMO is let most of the bloated but currently working stuff continue to exist while you build something better.

while being ready for a conflict three months from now is critical.

Is the us ready for conflict 3 months from now? From my understanding the building and maintaining of carriers are way behind schedule, the recruiting targets are not met, the war in Ukraine showed some supply chain issues - like the ability of US to manufacture a specific artillery piece barrels at 30 per month, and Ukraine burning trough 400 ...

IMO the US military is entering a dangerous period where it's actually less ready in the near future than it is now. 80s cold war stuff is getting used up in Ukraine faster than anything new can be produced, veterans from the Iraq war are retiring while they're struggling with new recruitment, and more ships are being decomissioned than commissioned. That's probably not something that any SecDef can actually fix in the near future.

Who wouldn't want to cut into the poster child of waste and corruption since Eisenhower that routinely happens to "lose" billions of dollars in mazes of programs and initiatives?

I kinda want to ask the opposite question, what sane person thinks that US military spending is in any way reasonable? Not anybody that's ever interacted with the US military, that's for sure.

While the military is often brought up as an implicit gotcha (the message being "See, Republicans, it's not programs we like that are busting the budget, it's your precious toy soldiers"), I'm with @zeke5123a here -- they certainly need that sort of shakeup.

Yes Chad

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