Top Ten: Thing That Matter That You Hardly Ever Hear About

[Valin]

Strategy Page:

January 2, 2014:

 

Many critical military events never get much publicity. Sometimes it's because they involve espionage; often it's because, well, the media never really gets interested. Here are ten (in alphabetical order) you should at least be aware of:

 

1. Anti-Terrorism Operations. Oh, sure, you hear about this in the news, but never in detail. And it's the details that make or break these efforts. A lot of the effort is plain old detective work - a lot of stakeouts, many interviews with suspects, or their friends, family or neighbors. Even more underground are the electronic operations (bugging terrorist e-mail, phone calls) and crypto (breaking secret codes used on phone calls and e-mail.) All this work is very expensive, and if the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. decide to shift their resources elsewhere, you won't see it in the news. You will see, months down the line, an increase in successful terrorist attacks. The counter-terrorism people prefer the lack of attention, because when details of the pursuit become public the terrorists know what to do to become harder to detect.

 

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5. Military Pork Barrel. Most of the $1.4 trillion spent each year on defense worldwide comes with political strings attached. For obvious reasons, politicians like to keep quiet the political horse-trading that goes on when the defense budget is carved up. For good reason, as "defense" generally takes second place to "how can this help me get reelected, rich, or both." The battles over military pork largely take place in the shadows. But the outcomes of these conflicts eventually have an impact, usually catastrophic, on the battlefield.

 

 

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10. Who's Ready for What? The size of armed forces usually is reported in terms of quantity, not quality. This is odd, since most wars are decided by the quality of the troops, not how many of them there are. "Readiness" is the term most often used to describe this and you rarely get a straight answer when looking for the readiness of any armed forces. But it's how much readiness a forces has, not how many troops or weapons, that says it all regarding fighting power.