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The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said.
This has nothing to do with cutting expenditure corners. It's about making decisions on where to spend (waste in some cases) the funds. But this actually exposes another problem within the Pentagon. The Pentagon and the RMA often loses sight of the world their troops inhabit. This is what happens when war fighters become too far removed from it, become politically minded, and are surrounded by civilians who have never experienced the uniform yet "out rank" them.
The Gulf War taught the Pentagon and the RMA the wrong lessons. Instead of the future they envisioned, where technology alone would win wars with the minimum of ground troops waltzing in to greet the surrendering enemy, they got the same future history has produced for thousands of years. Technology has its place, but war will never change. Of course, it would take the blundering of fools at high levels years to prove this correct with the concept of non-lethal weapon fantasies and "Shock and Awe" fireworks.
We spend billions of dollars on a jet program that exists to fight a Soviet model enemy, but no troop receives adequate body armor to protect him against the 7.62 round that has been fired at him since the inception of the AK. I guess individual armor wasn't technological enough of a toy to play with. But once it became a political tool....
Foolish theories and blundering decisions do indeed infect the hierarchy of the Defense sector. Our military power around the globe has allowed our diplomats and politicians to be unimaginitive and feed an impractical idea that our military can do anything at anytime with little effort (another bad lesson learned from the Gulf War). This relates directly into assuming that the enemy will behave in the manner in which our toys have been made. Or that if our enemy actually points out a weakness in our systems that he will be too stupid to "know how to exploit it." How about a UAV leak allows our enemy to understand our patterns? Or how to adjust his movement tactics? Just another example of how far removed the Pentagon thinkers and their civilian over lords are from the world of the troop. Our enemy has mixed the Internet, cellular phones, and Radio Shack devices with donkeys and the good old reliable AK. We spend billions on our toys and the media focuses on the 100 dollar IED. Who is getting a bigger bang for their buck?
We are thinking too big. While we must remain aware and ready for that improbable war with a bigger nation state enemy, we must also be aware of the enemy history is placing before us.
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