There is no "future of warfare" in terms of just being one thing.

When guns came out, they said it would be the end of warfare. Instead of spending years training archers, you could pull farmers from the fields, put together huge armies almost overnight. When machine guns came out, it was the end of warfare. How could massed formations fight against so many rounds going downrange at the same time?

This continued on with aircraft, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons, missiles, and so forth. Nuclear weapons are especially interesting because instead of eliminating war, it looks like they eliminated formal war, pushing all that conflict down into police actions and non-state actors.

All those other things stuck around. What became really tough is that you had to integrate all of those other things together so that you use that right tools in the right way, almost like putting together a symphony. Cyber is the same way. What we're seeing now -- and I'm a firm believer we are currently in a cyber war -- are a lot of different actors seeing how hard they can push things. It's a war without any conventions about what "fighting fair" means. Bad place for us to be.

I think the F-35 has been a giant disaster, but that's part of a different discussion about military priorities versus strategic planning.

But I think you need to take a step back and ask what the point of a military is.

If the point were actually about defending one's country, then there are surely more effective ways to spend the money.

By all appearances, the modern military is just a convoluted way to funnel public money into the pockets of a few contractors and corporations (whose investors and shareholders win). It's an immensely inefficient way to skim money from the general population.

One might say the modern military is more precise, suggesting that we care about avoiding civilian casualties. However, the US drone use blows that theory.

If the goal were to defend a country from terrorists (modern invaders), then we would be concerned with right wing extremism which is responsible for more deaths than foreign "terrorists".

Lastly, if we were just concerned with human lives and longer lifespans, we would be putting most of our money into combating heart disease.

>>But I think you need to take a step back and ask what the point of a military is.

I completely agree. I think at the heart of the United States is a terrible vagueness and corrupt idea of why we have a military.

They to call it the War Department. While that certainly doesn't sound very nice, it cut to the direct point in having a military: fighting a war. That made it a lot easier to reason about.

So what's a war? A war is when people are doing something you don't like and you want them to stop. You have tried talking and reasoning with them and that didn't work. So you have to figure out other ways of making them stop fighting you.

That's it. You don't need guns, tanks, or even explosives. If you can make those other people over there stop fighting you, they surrender, you win.

At some point, probably around the time of WWI, mission creep started taking us into all kinds of places that either wasn't a war or we didn't like admitting was a war. So we started changing the language, setting up all sorts of units and programs that were only tangentially-related to war, and so forth. I read at some point when Bush was president we had military operations in over 80 countries.

Now most of those operations were peaceful: medic clinics, training, and so forth. You could argue that they were strategically fighting a war -- happy, trained people tend to be happier. But that sure looks like social programs, diplomacy, and police action than war. Don't get me wrong: these may be great things to do. My point is that if you stretch the language so far, then pretty much any damned thing you want to can be considered part of the military. Or a war, for that matter.

Based on this, and the ton of inertia and corruption that's been associated with war fighting since forever, I really don't think we can expect the Department of Defense to act in a sane manner. My gut tells me that we built the F-35 because we thought that's what we were supposed to do: come up with new, expensive tech that's better than the other guys.

We're going to need to get back to funding DoD to fight wars: real, live, in-person conflicts where the other guys need to be convinced to stop fighting us. That's going to take a ton of re-organization and strategic planning that I don't see happening any time soon. (Also, agreed with your statement about tunneling money to contractors, and defending the country. We've come a long, terrible way from the idea of a citizen soldier defending his home.)

Because you don't need much in resources to run a command center on diesel generators that can scramble some Russian surplus jets from the 1970s to start bombing runs on your carrier group. Electronic warfare is the next edge on the battlefield but you still need traditional weapons. There is a certain advantage to not have cutting edge tech in every facet of your society, how are you going to hack the power utility when they are still running the same equipment from the 50s?

You don't need a broken trillion dollar jet to combat 1970s jets. Our F16s would do that job nicely, even if the maintenance cost is high (but nothing on the scale of what the F35 costs to even operate).

You can disrupt 50s utility equipment with radio/em. You don't need a trillion dollar jet for that.

I'm just saying that we're spending money on the wrong stuff. And we're doing it in a HUGE way. There's a reason we do that, and it's not because of defense concerns...