this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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It is common to apply new technologies to fields they have not been used before if the technology seems promising. In most cases if you have to rely on the technology you test whether it works better than your previous approach. I am sure that the US army has resources to do such tests. Indeed, testing in house is not the same as in a real world, but assuming no tests were performed is naive and treating the largest as army in the world as an organization working like a high school student preparing the exam on the night before.
I'm not sure why you say this, I'm afraid this kind of information only the US military has access to. They may diffuse the information because they got great results or as false flag; difficult to know what is real in these cases.
War tends to be won by good strategy, tactics do play a role, but without good strategy good technologies are worthlessness. The US lost in a despicable way several wars, they did not do well in Afghanistan, and they were fighting an occupied country with no resources.The current war is a terrible thing happening, but it is not comparable. This is occupying a broken country versus attacking a developed country who has been preparing for war for many years and with a large population, with a very difensible geography. I do not know exactly why the US decided to start this war, this is not public information; however the two wars are not comparable. Even taking out of the equation the alliance with Israel and being brought into other conflicts, attacking Iran is not comparable to attacking Afghanistan. I would not place the blame on the incompetence of the army; indeed generals had plans to attack Iran, as they do for many countries of relevance for their national. The decision to attack is of the government. The job to execute a ch attack is of the army. The idea is that the army talks to the government before the attack happens, if it difficult or impossible the army would stop the government before it happens. I can not know what happened in this case. I don't know whether the army was overconfident in their ability to attack or if the government ignored their advice not to attack. Their war is not doing well, but this is not necessarily the fault of the generals; if they have to fight a war they can not win it is difficult to blame them for not winning it.
Everything you say is reasonable, provided you have reasonable people in place. It is very simple to verify that many senior people left the US military in the last year and a half, someone whose last significant role prior to being promoted to secretary of defense was a media gig, and many actions with the military have been done for ideological, rather than pragmatic, reasons. The most recent that leaps to mind is the reinstating of required flu vaccinations after their current leadership discovered both that flu vaccines work pretty well and that having a significant number of sick soldiers doesn't. Actions like those place their other decisions under scrutiny, whether that be starting the war in the first place or using an LLM to help, or perhaps entirely, create the battle plan they used.
I'm afraid we have nothing more to talk about. While I have no idea whether people working in the US military are incompetent or not, I would tend to think they are not. It appears you think the opposite. One of the two of us may be closer to the truth, however I doubt any of us actually knows. It's been a good chat!