|
Wednesday, December 8, 2004
Of late the Medium Lobster has heard many complaints, from the usual leftist quarters, regarding the Bush Administration’s retention of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Few outside the White House have truly appreciated the hard work Secretary Rumsfeld has put into transforming America’s military, turning it from a large, cumbersome force slowly bogging itself down in one war after another, to a lighter, faster, smaller, more flammable army capable of losing numerous conflicts simultaneously.
As Rumsfeld pointed out today to a group of sadly uninformed American troops, traditional concepts such as “armor” have become obsolete in today’s new and challenging world: "You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored Humvee and it can be blown up." The military of the future can’t afford to waste money armoring vehicles that can eventually be blown up, shot up, or gradually broken down by the steady process of natural erosion. That thinking belongs to Old Military – a disdainful, backwards approach to warfare that the United States must cast off in order to succeed across the globe. No, America must turn to the bold, fresh, emerging ideas of New Military, replacing bulky, expensive armor plating with lighter, more efficient designs: papier mache Humvees, chicken wire bombers carrying Styrofoam payloads, folded origami troop transports, and for heavy-duty combat, tanks made entirely of blown glass. The advantages of such a revolution in military technology and logistics should be apparent to all: a faster, more flexible, lightweight military capable of winning wars fast and losing postwar-occupations even faster, allowing for speedy retreat and redeployment to another invasion. Indeed, with Donald Rumsfeld’s New Military, the United States could soon be losing up to three or four wars at once across the globe, failing at its objectives at a record pace. In these new and dangerous times, we can ask no less.
posted by the Medium Lobster at 6:05 PM
|
|
|
