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Sunday, September 28, 2025

Former Secretary of Defense: "Defense Industry Consolidation Has Turned Out Badly"


EDITORS NOTE: As our government faces crucial decisions during the current budgeting cycle, the below article a decade ago by Former Secretary of Defense, William J. Perry comes to mind regarding a key government contractor strategic policy error during his administration that has led to the huge financial impact of today's Military Industrial Complex.

"NATIONAL DEFENSE MAGAZINE" By Sandra I. Erwin

"The architect of the post-Cold War consolidation of the defense industry believes that, in hindsight, the Pentagon paid a huge price for allowing top weapons manufacturers to merge into a handful of huge companies."

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"Dozens of prime contractors merged or were absorbed into mega-corporations.
The trend toward fewer and larger prime contractors has the potential to affect innovation, limit the supply base, pose entry barriers to small, medium and large businesses, and ultimately reduce competition — resulting in higher prices to be paid by the American taxpayer.

 William J. Perry - Image:  Wikipedia 

William J. Perry, secretary of defense during the Clinton administration, gained legendary status in the defense industry for having hosted the so-called “last supper” in the fall of 1993 — when he was deputy defense secretary. That evening, Perry assembled top industry CEOs and alerted them that military spending was about to plummet and the Pentagon would no longer be able to support such a large industry.


Perry’s warning set off an unprecedented wave of mergers and acquisitions in the defense industry.


The end result was an “unnecessary, undesirable consolidation of the defense industry,” Perry said Dec. 3 during a breakfast meeting with reporters in Washington, D.C.

Perry is in town promoting his book, “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink,” which tells the story of his coming of age in the nuclear era and how his thinking has changed about the threats.


In his retrospection about the last supper, Perry recalled that the intent clearly was to help the Pentagon reduce the cost of weapons by compelling the industry to become leaner. But the opposite effect ensued, he said, as the industry became less competitive and continued to charge high overhead rates.


“The response we were seeking was a reduction in overhead,” Perry said. “What we got was the consolidation of the defense industry — few large companies, and less effective competition. … We got some of the things we asked for but also some things we didn’t ask for,” he added. “We would have been better off with more, smaller firms than with a few large ones.”


Perry pointed out that the phrase “last supper” to describe his meeting with with executives was coined by then CEO of Martin Marietta Norm Augustine, who stood next to him at the gathering. “Augustine turned to the man on his right, and the one on his left and said, ‘One of us is not going to be here next year.’” Sure enough, within a year, Martin Marietta had merged with Lockheed to create the world’s largest defense contractor Lockheed Martin.


The Pentagon should be careful about allowing further consolidation, Perry said. “We are still going to face declining defense budgets for acquisition, but the way to respond, I think, is not by allowing defense companies to charge more overhead.” Perry suggests the Pentagon should put more pressure on companies to operate more efficiently. “We would hope we are not going to encourage more industry consolidation, because that would be moving in the wrong direction. We should learn that lesson from the 1990s.”


The Pentagon should be “more explicit in the kind of guidance we give to companies,” he said. Contractors should shrink overhead but that should not come at the expense of competition, Perry said.


Perry’s observations come at a time of growing angst at the Defense Department about industry mergers. Most recently, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall criticized Lockheed Martin's acquisition of helicopter manufacturer Sikorsky Aircraft. Kendall lamented the lack of legal means available to the Pentagon to prevent such deals. “The Department of Defense is concerned about the continuing march toward greater consolidation in the defense industry," he said."

Former SecDef Perry: Defense Industry Consolidation Has Turned Out Badly

Sunday, September 21, 2025

Gaining Trust By Listening Then Learning From Each Other


We have grown acclimated to viewing the world through media sound bites and opinionated, biased news, financed by those that spend enormous amounts of money to influence our opinions.

To a very large degree trust is a personal responsibility. We must become involved, make prudent judgments and think for ourselves. Above all, we must listen and learn from each other to evolve true trust.

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Has independent thinking by researching a personal perspective become a lost art in our day in age?


Are we just too busy to develop a credible opinion of our own due to the fast pace our social values demand? Or are we misinformed?


Trust is hard to establish in the modern era. We see very little true statesmanship in the good people we send to govern, who promptly become ground up in a media machine in order to survive.


Communications and expectations are two vital elements in measuring trust. To an extraordinary extent, the age in which we live is requiring us to redefine trust and the degree to which communication and expectations contribute to it.


Consider trust in simpler times. Trust was necessary in many venues as a means of survival on a day-to-day basis. We relied on others extensively for our well being from our local store to our banker, from the policeman to the politician. And we knew them all better, we could reach out and touch them. We were not viewing them in sound bites and web sites, nor were we being bombarded with multiple forms of input to digest about them.


Mass marketing and communications have created expectations beyond reality in venues from romance web sites to building wealth and dealing with warfare.   We must come down to earth and become more sophisticated in the manner with which we view all this input and sift it in a meaningful way to have true trust. If we do not we run a high risk of tyranny and that fact is inescapable.


To a very large degree trust is a personal responsibility. We must become involved, make prudent judgments and think for ourselves. Above all, must learn from each other to evolve true trust.

What We Can Learn From People Who Are Different From Us

Saturday, September 20, 2025

Why Employment Is Only Half The Battle For America’s Veterans 



"THE HILL" By Rachel Scully  

"There is no “one size fits all” regarding career transitions for veterans. While changing career paths is difficult in any case, veterans face unique challenges."

________________________________________________________________________________

"The veteran unemployment rate is below that of non-veterans, but obtaining a job is only half the battle. After years spent training for battle or deployed into combat zones, most former service members still struggle to find satisfaction in a civilian work environment. 

“When you join the military, you’re going to for a very specific reason. And when you’re there, whether it’s four years or for 34 years, you’ve got your mission, team, camaraderie — you have a very clear purpose in what you’re doing,” Waco Hoover, a Marine Corps veteran and chair of the “Be the One” program at the American Legion, told The Hill.  

“When you transition out, all those things are not readily available, and it’s not there.” 

The U.S. is seeing some of the lowest ever unemployment rates for veterans, with the Department of Labor reporting a veteran unemployment rate of only 3 percent as of February, compared to 3.6 percent for non-veterans.  

Yet job satisfaction among veterans is far lower than the general population. A 2021 poll from Hill and Ponton, a veterans’ disability law firm, found that veterans were more than five times more likely to report having no satisfaction at their current job than non-veterans. 

One of the symptoms of this trend is high turnover rates among veteran hires, “and the reason for that is purpose,” Hoover said.  

CareerBuilder survey conducted last year found that 22 percent of veterans report feeling “underemployed.”  

“The one thing that I think is sometimes frustrating first for military members who are transitioning is you can be a very junior person in the military — first, second, third year — and you have tremendous responsibilities,” said Jeffrey Wenger, Senior Economist at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research institution. 

“And you get out of the military and someone wants you to stock shelves. And so you, you’re like, ‘I know I can do better than this.’”

Another driver of veterans’ dissatisfaction appears to be career progression. More than 1 in 4 veterans believed it was not at all likely for them to advance at their current jobs, according to the survey from Hill and Ponton.

“In the civilian sector, it takes many years to work your way up through the ranks,” Wenger said.  

But both the government and nonprofits are focusing more of their work on not only helping veterans get jobs, but helping connect them find fulfilling careers.  

Wenger pointed to the sustained efforts to raise public awareness of their skills, experiences and the programs provided to veterans after they separated — at the federal and state level. 

“I think we’ve done a better job of helping them transition into the civilian labor market,” Wenger said. “We now provide programs at the end of their service period that give them training on how to talk about the skills that they developed.”

The Labor Department provides programs aimed at helping veterans transition to, train for and advance in a civilian career, such as the Transition Assistance Program (TAP). Different programs are set up to provide extra training to veterans before separation, creating more marketable candidates.

However, whether those programs are working remains an open question.

“I would say that one of the things that’s been pretty apparent across the board with transition is just the sheer lack of actual valuable experiences that’s coming out of the transition, TAP programs,” said Nicole Tardif, public relations manager at the American Legion.

“It’s considered kind of a box check, as is the way that the program is set up, where you’re not really learning or being prepared for the civilian world, you’re really just checking the box to make sure you took the classes you were supposed to right before you get out,” Tardif added.  

“There’s not a lot of forethought once you actually move into the civilian world.” 

The Labor Department told The Hill it is addressing those concerns. The Employment Navigator and Partnership Program is a new effort to provide “one-on-one career assistance to interested transitioning service members, and their spouses, at select military installations worldwide,” according to the Labor Department.  

Hoover says there is no “one size fits all” regarding career transitions for veterans. While changing career paths is difficult in any case, veterans face unique challenges.

“You are with a group of human beings that are your team and your family in so many respects. And depending on how long you spend there, what your job was, the connections can be incredibly deep,” Hoover said of life in the military.

“You get out, and that same dynamic doesn’t exist,” he added.

Hoover noted the challenges and opportunities facing a service member departing in their 20s will differ significantly from those in their 30s or 40s.  

“We’ve got to make sure that those programs are oriented for those individuals,” he said. 

And service members should start preparing for their post-military careers while they are still active.

“Beginning with the end in mind, whether that’s four years, 20 years, whatever it is, being cognizant of that along the way … will help them process and have much more perspective for what they want to do,” he said.

“It’s not just giving them information, it’s giving them the tools to be introspective and understand, ‘What do I want to do post-service?’” 

Wenger encouraged veterans to manage expectations and explore their career preferences, taking advantage of the tight labor market to find a good fit.

“[As a veteran], I’m not having to take the first job offer that comes my way. I can be a little bit more selective about the kinds of things I’d like to do,” Wenger said. “And we can, you know, force employers to give you more responsibilities or at least match better to your preferences.”

Why Employment Is Only Half The Battle For America’s Veterans 


ABOUT THE AUTHOR







Rachel Scully - I am a Senior Audience Engagement Producer at The Hill, specializing in visual storytelling. In addition to writing, I create various graphic and video aids for a wide range of stories to provide a seamless reading experience for our audience.Originally hailing from Erie, Pennsylvania, my journey into journalism began with a passion for uncovering facts. In 2021, I earned my Bachelor’s in Political Science and Communication, with a minor in Spanish and Hispanic Studies, from John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. I began writing at my s newspaper – The Carroll News— igniting a passion that led me to pursue opportunities in journalism.Before joining The Hill full-time in July 2021, I interned as a reporter here and gained experience as an editorial intern at Cleveland Magazine. 

Sunday, September 14, 2025

Every Single F-35 Delivered To The US Military Last Year Was Late

 

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“TASK AND PURPOSE” By Matt White

“On average, new F-35s were delivered 238 days late in 2024. A government watchdog found that the Lockheed Martin continues to collect “hundreds of millions” in fees despite sagging delivery times. Current acquisition costs are $89.5 Billion more than 2012 Baseline Estimate.”

________________________________________________________________________________________________

“Every F-35 delivered to the U.S. military last year by Lockheed Martin was behind schedule by an average of seven months, a government watchdog found, but contractors kept millions in “incentive fees” designed to speed up the delivery.

To catch up, the aerospace giant now says it will “reduce the scope” of capabilities in new planes. 

The latest round of jets will now “cost $6 billion more and completion is at least 5 years later than original estimates,” a report by the Government Accountability Office found. “In 2024, Lockheed delivered 110 aircraft. All were late by an average of 238 days, up from 61 days in 2023.”

In a statement to Task & Purpose on the GAO report, a Lockheed Martin spokesperson said, “The F-35 is combat-proven, offers the most advanced capability and technology, and is the most affordable option to ensure America and its allies remain ahead of emerging threats.”

The F-35 has been slated to be the U.S. military’s primary modern strike and air superiority fighter since it was originally funded in 2001, and is — uniquely among strike aircraft — flown by all three fixed-wing air components. The Air Force took delivery in April of its 500th F-35the Marines own about 250, and the Navy has over 100. Those totals are about one-third of the roughly 2,470 fighters the Pentagon plans to buy and fly for 77 years, according to the GAO.

But the program has been beset by cost overruns and delayed deliveries since its inception. The total cost of the full F-35 fleet was expected to be $233 billion when originally funded in 2001. By December 2023, that number had more than doubled to $485 billion.

The latest round of F-35s delivered in the last seven years and currently on order are known as Block 4 of the program. Block 4 jets, the GAO said, were meant to come equipped with “new weapons, radar enhancements, and technology to avoid aircraft collisions” and with new features that “address new threats that have emerged since DOD established the aircraft’s original requirements in 2000.”

But those enhancements, the GAO said, will now be scaled back.

“The program plans to reduce the scope of Block 4 to deliver capabilities to the warfighter at a more predictable pace than in the past,” the GAO said.

The specific list of Block 4 enhancements that will be scaled back will be finalized this fall, the GAO said. F-35 officials told the GAO that they will delay “some capabilities—including those that require an upgraded engine to function—to future modernization efforts. Program officials stated that they will also remove others that no longer meet warfighter needs.”

In its statement to Task & Purpose, Lockheed Martin said it “will deliver 170-190 F-35s this year and continue fielding Block 4 capabilities to ensure the F-35 maintains its unmatched dominance in the skies.” 

A screenshot from the GAO report showing delays in 2024 compared to previous years. Screenshot via Government Accountability Office.

Dan Grazier, a senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center, has tracked the F-35 program for over a decade at government watchdogs. The admission that some Block 4 technology will be reduced “seems kind of innocuous, but is absolutely mind-blogging,” he said.

“[They] don’t go into what capabilities they’re shaving off the top, but I promise you, the capabilities that they aren’t going to deliver for the F-35 were the capabilities for which they sold the program in the very first place,” Grazier said. “The really high-end capabilities [are] what we’re really paying for when we’re paying this massive premium.”

Millions in fees for late deliveries

The GAO report also said Lockheed has collected “hundreds of millions of dollars” intended to reward quicker production for planes delivered late.

“The F-35 program’s use of incentive fees has largely been ineffective at holding the contractors accountable to delivering engines and aircraft on time,” the report found. “The F-35 program office compensated Lockheed Martin with hundreds of millions of dollars of performance incentive fees while the percentage of aircraft delivered late and the average days late grew.”

Through 2022, most F-35s were delivered by Lockheed Martin on time or with delays that averaged less than a month. But in 2023, 89 of 98 planes were late and in 2024, all 110 were late by an average delay of 238 days.

But as deliveries fell behind, the GAO found, F-35 officials adjusted the terms of the fees.

“Where the program originally tied incentives to on-time delivery, the program gave the contractor a second chance to earn fees by redirecting those incentives to other aspects of the program when it was clear that Lockheed Martin would not deliver any aircraft on time,” the GAO found.

Engine maker Pratt & Whitney also collected “tens of millions” in incentive fees despite late deliveries of the engines.

“This incentive structure and late delivery penalty was not effective at improving on-time deliveries,” the GAO said. “Unless the F-35 program reevaluates its use of incentive fees and better aligns them to achieving desired production schedule outcomes, it will be at greater risk of continuing to reward contractors for delivering engines and aircraft late.”

Every single F-35 delivered to the US military last year was late

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:



Matt Whit is a senior editor at Task & Purpose. He was a pararescueman in the Air Force and the Alaska Air National Guard for eight years and has more than a decade of experience in daily and magazine journalism. He also teaches news writing at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media where he is frequently referred to as a “very tough grader” on Rate My Professor. You can reach Matt at matthew.white@taskandpurpose.com





Sunday, September 07, 2025

US Troops Left Vietnam Over 50 Years Ago - Key Questions Must Be Asked Today Regarding Military Interventions

 

"THE HILL" By Bill Rivers

"Are we as a people — all 330 million or so of us, with all our divergent opinions, economic needs and aspirations, and beliefs about America’s role in the world — willing to resource the military arm of a fight commensurate with our political objectives?

If we are not, then the political objectives must be scaled back. This requires something more than just appetite-control; it requires statesmanship — both in dealings in foreign capitals and in committee hearing rooms at home."

__________________________________________________________________________________

"America’s two decades of involvement wouldn’t officially end until 20 months later, when the last civilian advisors from the most powerful country on earth were airlifted from the roof of their embassy in Saigon, literally chased out of the country by communists.

Numbers alone fail to capture the war’s true cost to the United States. Still, we must look: 1 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars; 150,000 wounded; more than 58,000 Americans killed.

Fast forward now to the present era, and the U.S.-Vietnam relationship is dramatically different. Vietnam was America’s 10th largest goods trading partner in 2020. According to the Department of Commerce, that same year, U.S. goods exports to Vietnam were nearly $10 billion, up 270 percent from the a decade prior. Today, Vietnam is a top ten market for U.S. food and agricultural products.

On the security front, in stark contrast to the 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam now seeks to bring America into southeast Asia — to counterbalance China. One salient example among many: In 2018, Vietnam issued an unprecedented invitation to U.S. aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson to make a port visit to Cam Ranh Bay — the first since the war ended in 1975.

And while the partnership between Hanoi and Washington has endured several recent missteps, that any partnership exists at all would have been unimaginable to the men fighting in the cities, jungles, and rice paddies 50 years ago.

Viewing the sacrifices of those men through the lens of today’s near-complete reversal of the strategic situation, perhaps it is only natural to ask now, five decades later, a hard question: “Was the war worth it?”

The answer depends on how we read history.

Two general camps can be described.

For the first camp, the answer is a clear “no.” While honoring the service of those who fought and died in Vietnam, the key lesson, they argue, is to remember how the dominos didn’t fall after U.S. military forces left in 1973. All of Southeast Asia didn’t turn communist. Decision-makers in the U.S. national security firmament should have given more than short shrift to inconvenient reports that contradicted calls for American involvement, like, for example, the 1964 National Board of Estimates report commissioned by the CIA, which concluded Domino Theory was flawed; “a continuation of the spread of Communism in the area would not be inexorable” should Vietnam fall.

For the first camp, the primary rationale for engagement was proved false. For them, the war was terrible mistake.

The second camp holds that while deeply painful and divisive, the war nevertheless bought strategic time for countries across Asia, newly emergent from colonialism, to develop the institutions and civil society they lacked and so avoid falling to communism.

For this camp, the dominoes stayed standing precisely because America sacrificed so many of her sons in Vietnam. America drew the fire, demanding resources and attention from regional communists and their Soviet backers. Those other nations were able to develop free economies which eventually became markets for American farmers and manufacturers. They also developed more or less open democratic societies with whom the United States could work on the international scene to ensure more favorable conditions for American interests. The primary rationale for fighting in Vietnam was to signal western resolve, both to friends and foes alike.

This camp answers that the war was indeed worth it — and believes that millions of free people across Asia would agree.

Which camp is right?

In philosophy, counter-factual hypotheticals hold no truth value — they are neither right nor wrong. If this holds for both politics and war, then, because the dominoes didn’t fall, we must ask different questions.

Here are three questions that national security deciders, from the E-Ring of the Pentagon to the West Wing of the White House, should consider as they assess the complicated international security landscape 50 years after American soldiers departed Vietnam:

First, are we as a people — all 330 million or so of us, with all our divergent opinions, economic needs and aspirations, and beliefs about America’s role in the world — willing to resource the military arm of a fight commensurate with our political objectives?

If we are not, then the political objectives must be scaled back. This requires something more than just appetite-control; it requires statesmanship — both in dealings in foreign capitals and in committee hearing rooms at home. Americans are still capable of this. They must remember it — and act accordingly.

Second, what consequences will foreign action have at home?

The war may have bought time for Asian countries to develop institutions and grow societal connective tissue, but it cost a rising generation of Americans their trust in their nation’s institutions and tore painfully at their social fabric. Amid the cultural chaos of the 1960s — including racial strife, assassinations, and bitterly contentious elections — the war deepened a divide, opening fault-lines within families, something I explore in my novel of the Vietnam War era Last Summer Boys.

On the economic front, it has been argued the billions spent on the war drove the inflation of the 1970s — which carried tectonic consequences all its own.

Walking by history’s lamp-light, today’s decision-makers must assess the impact of foreign intervention on the home-front. One area especially worth considering amid the current recruitment crisis is the impact on attitudes towards America’s military itself.

A the third and final question: How can we be worthy of the sacrifice?

Over nearly 20 years, what began with a few hundred “military advisors” under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy swelled into a bitter contest that would see more than 2.5 million American service members deployed in-country over the course of America’s involvement in the conflict.

Honoring the courage and sacrifice of America’s Vietnam War veterans means being better leaders for the young men and women serving today. And this means being exceptionally careful about committing America’s warriors to a fight.

The world is a far, far better place when Americans hold the preponderance of hard power. It is better still if their leaders use it only in gravest need, after sober analysis of their people’s true national interest. Because, when lawfully ordered, America’s men and women in uniform will unleash devastating power against the country’s enemies. And they will do so at enormous personal sacrifice.   

This is the most important question of all, and the true test of whether America gets Vietnam right. It may be 50 years late.

Better late than never."

US troops left Vietnam 50 years ago: Here are 3 key questions defense leaders must ask today

Bill Rivers served as speechwriter to U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis from 2017-19. He is a fellow at the Yorktown Institute and the author of “Last Summer Boys,” an Amazon Kindle #1 bestseller in historical fiction.

Thursday, September 04, 2025

How the US Military Became Walmart


“FOREIGN POLICY”  By 
“Asking warriors to do everything poses great dangers for our country — and the military.
Our armed services have become the one-stop shop for America’s policymakers.
Here’s the vicious circle in which we’ve trapped ourselves: As we face novel security threats from novel quarters — emanating from nonstate terrorist networks, from cyberspace, and from the impact of poverty, genocide, or political repression, for instance — we’ve gotten into the habit of viewing every new threat through the lens of “war,” thus asking our military to take on an ever-expanding range of nontraditional tasks. But viewing more and more threats as “war” brings more and more spheres of human activity into the ambit of the law of war, with its greater tolerance of secrecy, violence, and coercion — and its reduced protections for basic rights.
Meanwhile, asking the military to take on more and more new tasks requires higher military budgets, forcing us to look for savings elsewhere, so we freeze or cut spending on civilian diplomacy and development programs. As budget cuts cripple civilian agencies, their capabilities dwindle, and we look to the military to pick up the slack, further expanding its role.
“If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The old adage applies here as well. If your only functioning government institution is the military, everything looks like a war, and “war rules” appear to apply everywhere, displacing peacetime laws and norms. When everything looks like war, everything looks like a military mission, displacing civilian institutions and undermining their credibility while overloading the military.
More is at stake than most of us realize. Recall Shakespeare’s Henry V:
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage 
In war, we expect warriors to act in ways that would be immoral and illegal in peacetime. But when the boundaries around war and the military expand and blur, we lose our ability to determine which actions should be praised and which should be condemned.
For precisely this reason, humans have sought throughout history to draw sharp lines between war and peace — and between the role of the warrior and the role of the civilian. Until less than a century ago, for instance, most Western societies maintained that wars should be formally declared, take place upon clearly delineated battlefields, and be fought by uniformed soldiers operating within specialized, hierarchical military organizations. In different societies and earlier times, humans developed other rituals to delineate war’s boundaries, from war drums and war sorcery to war paint and complex initiation rites for warriors.
Like a thousand other human tribes before us, we modern Americans also engage in elaborate rituals to distinguish between warriors and civilians: Our soldiers shear off their hair, display special symbols on their chests, engage in carefully choreographed drill ceremonies, and name their weapons for fearsome spirits and totem animals (the Hornet, the Black Hawk, the Reaper). And despite the changes ushered in by the 9/11 attacks, most of us view war as a distinct and separate sphere, one that shouldn’t intrude into our everyday world of offices, shopping malls, schools, and soccer games. Likewise, we relegate war to the military, a distinct social institution that we simultaneously lionize and ignore. War, we like to think, is an easily recognizable exception to the normal state of affairs and the military an institution that can be easily, if tautologically, defined by its specialized, war-related functions.
But in a world rife with transnational terrorist networks, cyberwarriors, and disruptive nonstate actors, this is no longer true. Our traditional categories — war and peace, military and civilian — are becoming almost useless.
In a cyberwar or a war on terrorism, there can be no boundaries in time or space: We can’t point to the battlefield on a map or articulate circumstances in which such a war might end. We’re no longer sure what counts as a weapon, either: A hijacked passenger plane? A line of computer code? We can’t even define the enemy: Though the United States has been dropping bombs in Syria for almost two years, for instance, no one seems sure if our enemy is a terrorist organization, an insurgent group, a loose-knit collection of individuals, a Russian or Iranian proxy army, or perhaps just chaos itself.
We’ve also lost any coherent basis for distinguishing between combatants and civilians: Is a Chinese hacker a combatant? What about a financier for Somalia’s al-Shabab, or a Pakistani teen who shares extremist propaganda on Facebook, or a Russian engineer paid by the Islamic State to maintain captured Syrian oil fields?
When there’s a war, the law of war applies, and states and their agents have great latitude in using lethal force and other forms of coercion. Peacetime law is the opposite, emphasizing individual rights, due process, and accountability.
When we lose the ability to draw clear, consistent distinctions between war and not-war, we lose any principled basis for making the most vital decisions a democracy can make: Which matters, if any, should be beyond the scope of judicial review? When can a government have “secret laws”? When can the state monitor its citizens’ phone calls and email? Who can be imprisoned and with what degree, if any, of due process? Where, when, and against whom can lethal force be used? Should we consider U.S. drone strikes in Yemen or Libya the lawful wartime targeting of enemy combatants or nothing more than simple murder?
When we heedlessly expand what we label “war,” we also lose our ability to make sound decisions about which tasks we should assign to the military and which should be left to civilians.
Today, American military personnel operate in nearly every country on Earth — and do nearly every job on the planet. They launch raids and agricultural reform projects, plan airstrikes and small-business development initiatives, train parliamentarians and produce TV soap operas. They patrol for pirates, vaccinate cows, monitor global email communications, and design programs to prevent human trafficking.
Many years ago, when I was in law school, I applied for a management consulting job at McKinsey & Co. During one of the interviews, I was given a hypothetical business scenario: “Imagine you run a small family-owned general store. Business is good, but one day you learn that Walmart is about to open a store a block away. What do you do?”
“Roll over and die,” I said immediately.
The interviewer’s pursed lips suggested that this was the wrong answer, and no doubt a plucky mom-and-pop operation wouldn’t go down without a fight: They’d look for a niche, appeal to neighborhood sentiment, or maybe get artisanal and start serving hand-roasted chicory soy lattes. But we all know the odds would be against them: When Walmart shows up, the writing is on the wall.
Like Walmart, today’s military can marshal vast resources and exploit economies of scale in ways impossible for small mom-and-pop operations. And like Walmart, the tempting one-stop-shopping convenience it offers has a devastating effect on smaller, more traditional enterprises — in this case, the State Department and other U.S. civilian foreign-policy agencies, which are steadily shrinking into irrelevance in our ever-more militarized world. The Pentagon isn’t as good at promoting agricultural or economic reform as the State Department or the U.S. Agency for International Development — but unlike our civilian government agencies, the Pentagon has millions of employees willing to work insane hours in terrible conditions, and it’s open 24/7.
It’s fashionable to despise Walmart — for its cheap, tawdry goods, for its sheer vastness and mindless ubiquity, and for the human pain we suspect lies at the heart of the enterprise. Most of the time, we prefer not to see it and use zoning laws to exile its big-box stores to the commercial hinterlands away from the center of town. But as much as we resent Walmart, most of us would be hard-pressed to live without it.
As the U.S. military struggles to define its role and mission, it evokes similarly contradictory emotions in the civilian population. Civilian government officials want a military that costs less but provides more, a military that stays deferentially out of strategy discussions but remains eternally available to ride to the rescue. We want a military that will prosecute our ever-expanding wars but never ask us to face the difficult moral and legal questions created by the eroding boundaries between war and peace.
We want a military that can solve every global problem but is content to remain safely quarantined on isolated bases, separated from the rest of us by barbed wire fences, anachronistic rituals, and acres of cultural misunderstanding. Indeed, even as the boundaries around war have blurred and the military’s activities have expanded, the U.S. military itself — as a human institution — has grown more and more sharply delineated from the broader society it is charged with protecting, leaving fewer and fewer civilians with the knowledge or confidence to raise questions about how we define war or how the military operates.
It’s not too late to change all this.
No divine power proclaimed that calling something “war” should free us from the constraints of morality or common sense or that only certain tasks should be the proper province of those wearing uniforms. We came up with the concepts, definitions, laws, and institutions that now trap and confound us — and they’re no more eternal than the rituals and categories used by any of the human tribes that have gone before us.
We don’t have to accept a world full of boundary-less wars that can never end, in which the military has lost any coherent sense of purpose or limits. If the moral and legal ambiguity of U.S.-targeted killings bothers us, or we worry about government secrecy or indefinite detention, we can mandate new checks and balances that transcend the traditional distinctions between war and peace. If we don’t like the simultaneous isolation and Walmartization of our military, we can change the way we recruit, train, deploy, and treat those who serve, change the way we define the military’s role, and reinvigorate our civilian foreign-policy institutions.
After all, few generals actually want to preside over the military’s remorseless Walmartization: They too fear that, in the end, the nation’s over-reliance on an expanding military risks destroying not only the civilian competition but the military itself. They worry that the armed services, under constant pressure to be all things to all people, could eventually find themselves able to offer little of enduring value to anyone.
Ultimately, they fear that the U.S. military could come to resemble a Walmart on the day after a Black Friday sale: stripped almost bare by a society both greedy for what it can provide and resentful of its dominance, with nothing left behind but demoralized employees and some shoddy mass-produced items strewn haphazardly around the aisles.”

Monday, September 01, 2025

I Asked ChatGPT ITS OPINION ON AI MODELS LIKE ITSELF.

The answer, was stated objectively that it considers Large Language Models (LLM's) effective tools, but not capable of human intellect. (Click Image To Enlarge)

 









Retirement – Personal Invention and Re-Invention




If one aspires to simply maintain one’s material life style, retain responsibility for those close to us and relax as objectives, that is one form of retirement – call it maintenance.


Many cannot undertake a maintenance retirement due to challenges such as the economic events of recent years, family responsibilities involving their children, or aging parents. They must continue to generate an income but must adjust to advancing age and find new ways to generate revenue.

I hear from many individuals who seek to go into business for themselves on-line or in the home as a way to supplement their retirement.

Given reasonably good health and a responsibility-free environment, most find retirement rather boring after a time and seek continued professional growth. In fact it has been espoused that such a lethargic existence can be hazardous to our health.

Balance is the key – Balancing age with wisdom, lifestyle with responsibility and available means; a new professional endeavor, volunteer work, recreation, the arts, – that which gives meaning to continued existence.

If the need to generate revenue is a prominent factor, care must be taken in assessing risk to health and fortune by investing too much in effort or treasure. That is where the balance comes in.

We have heard 40 is the new 30, but yet I think “old” seems to always stay the same distance for me. At 25 I thought 50 was old, at 35 I thought 60 was old, now that I am approaching 80 years of age, 95 is old.

I know true age is more a matter of mind. I took a fall on the ice in front of the Middle School and 2 dozen 5th graders. The fall didn’t hurt nearly as much as the laughter and the subsequent whispers this year, “There goes that old guy again, do you think he might fall?”

I took a nap out in the wildlife refuge in a beautiful stand of aromatic pines. When I awoke I found two huge turkey buzzards staring at me intently from their perch nearby. I had known I was getting older but had not realized I had reached the carrion stage.

I reported a pollution spill in the Vermilion River and the Minneapolis paper picked up the story. A reader commented on the web site that the Minnesota pollution control program had now been relegated to an “Old Guy” in the vets home.

I feel fine about getting old. It’s how I am perceived by others that bothers me.

We will all retire in some form. We have no choice. What we invent or re-invent along the way to make the most of it is our personal challenge.

Ken Larson