An active-duty US Marine captain wrote a stinging op-ed for the Marine Corps Gazette, going through all the problems he sees with the Department of Defense and the Marine Corps in addition to recent failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The biggest problem, according to Capt. Joshua Waddell, is "self-delusion."

"Let us first begin with the fundamental underpinnings of this delusion: our measures of performance and effectiveness in recent wars," he wrote. "It is time that we, as professional military officers, accept the fact that we lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."

The active-duty infantry officer, who served with and lost Marines under his command with 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, in Afghanistan, didn't come to this conclusion lightly. He said it took several years for him to accept that, with the goal of improving the system.

A case in point, he says, is a comparison of the US military with other adversaries.

The Pentagon's budget dwarfs the combined defense spending of the next 10 countries. The Army and Marine Corps are arguably the best-trained fighting forces in the world. The Air Force has the most high-tech aircraft and weaponry, while the Navy maintains nearly 20 aircraft carriers — far more than adversaries like Russia and China that have only one each.

These stats should mean the US military is unstoppable, but the budget, talk of being the best in the world, and other claims it makes don't square with measures of effectiveness, Waddell writes.

"How, then, have we been bested by malnourished and undereducated men with antiquated and improvised weaponry whilst spending trillions of dollars in national treasure and costing the lives of thousands of servicemen and hundreds of thousands of civilians?" he wrote.

Waddell continues:

"For example, a multibillion-dollar aircraft carrier that can be bested by a few million dollars in the form of a swarming missile barrage or a small unmanned aircraft system (UAS) capable of rendering its flight deck unusable does not retain its dollar value in real terms. Neither does the M1A1 tank, which is defeated by $20 worth of household items and scrap metal rendered into an explosively-formed projectile.

"The Joint Improvised Threat Defeat Organization has a library full of examples like these, and that is without touching the weaponized return on investment in terms of industrial output and capability development currently being employed by our conventional adversaries."

His article isn't just a critique; Waddell offers several solutions to get the military out of the "business-as-usual" mindset that looks good in PowerPoint briefs but doesn't translate to success on the ground.

While military leaders typically complain to Congress that constrained budgets have a "crippling" effect on the military, Waddell says the military should work more efficiently with the money it has. He gives an example of a nation already doing this: Russia."

LINK

Ouch. More at the link.

No one should have any illusions -- our military basically sucks. It's purpose is not to win wars. It's purpose is to waste money.