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  1. ROSE COVERED GLASSES @rosecoveredglasses.wordpress.com@rosecoveredglasses.wordpress.com ·

    The Awful Arithmetic Of Our Wars

    “DEFENSE ONE” By Peter W. Singer

    “The math of current battlefields remains literally orders of magnitude beyond what our budget plans to spend, our industry plans to build, our acquisitions system is able to contract, and thus what our military will deploy.”

    ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

     “At the lowest point of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln characterized the core factor between victory and defeat as finding a general who understood the “awful arithmetic” of war. War is a contest of blood and treasure; each can, and must, ultimately be counted and measured. It has been the same for every conflict before and after. 

    Yet this arithmetic is constantly changing, and never faster than right now. If the United States cannot update its calculations to properly reflect our new era, our failure will not just cost us blood and treasure, but will drive us toward defeat.

    Cost imposition has long been a tenet of U.S. strategy. During the Cold War, the U.S. launched expensive programs such as stealth and Star Wars not just for their tactical value, but to send a strategic signal to the Kremlin: neither your economy nor your war machine can keep up. Gorbachev, persuaded, gave up the decades-long competition with the U.S. 

    The very same concept of cost imposition was also elemental to the most celebrated operations of the past year. In Operation Spider’s Web, Ukraine used inexpensive drones, reportedly costing less than $500 each, to damage strategic bombers worth many millions of dollars, degrading Russia’s long-range strike capabilities for years to come. Similarly, in Operation Rising Lion, cheap Israeli drones took out Iranian surface-to-air missiles and radars, paving the way for the destruction of command and nuclear facilities worth tens of billions of dollars. In each, the tactical became the strategic through new operational concepts that leveraged the new math of new technologies. 

    Now contrast this with our own approaches, which overwhelmingly rely on sophisticated but costly overmatch.

    The most lauded U.S. operation of 2025 was Operation Midnight Hammer, our followup to Rising Lion. One estimate put its cost at $196 million, from combining B-2 bomber’s nearly $160,000 per flight hour and Tomahawk missiles’ rough price of $1.87 million apiece. (It does not count the initial purchase of the seven B-2 Bombers that cost $2.1 billion each, nor the $4.3 billion submarine that launched the missiles.) 

    Perhaps it was worth spending one-fifth of a billion dollars to damage Iranian nuclear facilities, but the numbers in Operation Rough Rider—the strikes against the Houthis last spring—illustrate the problem more starkly. The Pentagon spent roughly $5 billion on munitions and operating costs to stop attacks on Red Sea shipping, which simply started back up.

    The same awful arithmetic haunts the current operations in the Caribbean against the Venezuela-based, government-connected Cartel de los Soles. The entity was recently designated by the Trump administration as a foreign terrorist organization, as part of its argument that US forces are engaged in an “armed conflict.” The cartel was declared by the Department of Justice to be the hub of a cocaine transport network, shipping a reported street value of between $6.25 billion and $8.75 billion in drugs (the cartel gets an unknown, but clearly lesser, percentage of that overall value in actual profit). 

    To battle this foe, the United States has assembled a fleet that cost at least $40 billion to buy in total. The carrier Ford alone cost $4.7 billion to develop and $12.9 billion to build. The fleet is backed by at least 83 aircraft of assorted types, including 10 F-35Bs ($109 million apiece), seven Predator drones ($33 million each), three P-8 Poseidons ($145 million per), and at least one AC-130J gunship ($165 million). To be sure, all of these assets will continue to serve long after Operation Southern Spear is wound down, but this is how we are using the investment. 

    But the current cost of operations and expendables hardly tells a better story. The Ford alone costs about $8 million a day to run. The F-35s and AC-130J cost about $40,000 per flight hour; the P-8s, about $30,000; the Reapers, about $3,500.

    Analysis of the strike videos on the 21 boats show that U.S. forces have fired AGM-176 Griffins ($127,333 apiece in 2019), Hellfires (running about $150,000 to $220,000) and potentially GBU-39B Small Diameter Bombs ($40,000). In some cases, they are reportedly firing four munitions per strike: “twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it.”

    All this is arrayed to sink motorboats, 21 at last report. One of the boats was described by Pentagon officials as a 39-foot Flipper-type vessel with four 200-horsepower engines. New ones go for about $400,000 on Boats.com, but the old, open top motorbots in the videos are obviously well below that in cost. Their crews have been reported as making $500 per trip.

    Put in comparison, the cost of the US naval fleet deployed is at least five times what the cartel makes in smuggling. The air fleet deployed costs at least another two times more.  It is roughly 5,000 times the cost of the suspected drug boats that have been destroyed. Indeed, just the cost of operating the Ford off Venezuela for a single day has still not yet equaled the maximum cost the cartel paid for the boats it has lost.

    In the air, the U.S. military spent roughly 66,000 times more to buy each unmanned drone in the operation than the cartel paid each man that the unmanned drones killed. The US spent between 80 to 300 times more for each bomb or missile it has used than the cartel paid each man killed by those bombs or missiles. 

    The math is arguably even worse when we’re on the defense. 

    In September, a wave of 19 Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace.. The Gerbera-type drones cost as little as $10,000—so cheap that they are often used as decoys to misdirect and overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses. NATO countered with a half-billion-dollar response force of F-35s, F-16s, AWACS radar planes, and helicopters, which shot down four of the drones with $1.6-million AMRAAM missiles. 

    This is a bargain compared to how challenging U.S. forces have found it to defend against Houthi forces using this same cheap tech. Our naval forces have fired a reported 120 SM-2, 80 SM-6, and 20 SM-3 missiles, costing about $2.1 million, $3.9 million, and over $9.6 million each. And this is to defend against a group operating out of the 187th-largest economy in the world, able to fire mere hundreds of drones and missiles. Our supposed pacing challenge, China, has an economy that will soon be the largest in the world and a combined national industrial and military acquisition plan to be able to fire munitions by the millions. 

    Even in America’s best-laid plans for future battlefields, there is a harsh reality that is too often ignored. The math of current battlefields remains literally orders of magnitude beyond what our budget plans to spend, our industry plans to build, our acquisitions system is able to contract, and thus what our military will deploy. 

    As a point of comparison, Ukraine is on pace to build, buy, and use over four million drones this year. The U.S. Army, meanwhile, aims to acquire 50,000 drones next year—about 1.25 percent of the Ukrainian total. In its most optimistic plans, it hopes to be able to acquire 1 million drones “within the next two to three years.” ​​ 

    When you spend orders of magnitude more than your foe, you are in what is known as a “losing equation.” And if we don’t change this math, we will need an update to Norm Augustine’s infamous “law” of defense acquisitions. Back in 1979, Augustine calculated that if the Pentagon couldn’t curtail the cost curve of its purchasing, by 2054 we wouldn’t be able to afford a single plane. 

    If we don’t master the new math of the battlefield, we won’t be able to afford to win a single battle.”

    The awful arithmetic of our wars

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

    P.W. Singer is Strategist at New America and the author of multiple books on technology and security, including Wired for War, Ghost Fleet, Burn-In, and LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media.

    #GovernmentInefficiency #GovernmentWaste #Iran #MiddleEast #news #Pentagon #politics #technology #war
  2. ROSE COVERED GLASSES @rosecoveredglasses.wordpress.com@rosecoveredglasses.wordpress.com ·

    The Awful Arithmetic Of Our Wars

    “DEFENSE ONE” By Peter W. Singer

    “The math of current battlefields remains literally orders of magnitude beyond what our budget plans to spend, our industry plans to build, our acquisitions system is able to contract, and thus what our military will deploy.”

    ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

     “At the lowest point of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln characterized the core factor between victory and defeat as finding a general who understood the “awful arithmetic” of war. War is a contest of blood and treasure; each can, and must, ultimately be counted and measured. It has been the same for every conflict before and after. 

    Yet this arithmetic is constantly changing, and never faster than right now. If the United States cannot update its calculations to properly reflect our new era, our failure will not just cost us blood and treasure, but will drive us toward defeat.

    Cost imposition has long been a tenet of U.S. strategy. During the Cold War, the U.S. launched expensive programs such as stealth and Star Wars not just for their tactical value, but to send a strategic signal to the Kremlin: neither your economy nor your war machine can keep up. Gorbachev, persuaded, gave up the decades-long competition with the U.S. 

    The very same concept of cost imposition was also elemental to the most celebrated operations of the past year. In Operation Spider’s Web, Ukraine used inexpensive drones, reportedly costing less than $500 each, to damage strategic bombers worth many millions of dollars, degrading Russia’s long-range strike capabilities for years to come. Similarly, in Operation Rising Lion, cheap Israeli drones took out Iranian surface-to-air missiles and radars, paving the way for the destruction of command and nuclear facilities worth tens of billions of dollars. In each, the tactical became the strategic through new operational concepts that leveraged the new math of new technologies. 

    Now contrast this with our own approaches, which overwhelmingly rely on sophisticated but costly overmatch.

    The most lauded U.S. operation of 2025 was Operation Midnight Hammer, our followup to Rising Lion. One estimate put its cost at $196 million, from combining B-2 bomber’s nearly $160,000 per flight hour and Tomahawk missiles’ rough price of $1.87 million apiece. (It does not count the initial purchase of the seven B-2 Bombers that cost $2.1 billion each, nor the $4.3 billion submarine that launched the missiles.) 

    Perhaps it was worth spending one-fifth of a billion dollars to damage Iranian nuclear facilities, but the numbers in Operation Rough Rider—the strikes against the Houthis last spring—illustrate the problem more starkly. The Pentagon spent roughly $5 billion on munitions and operating costs to stop attacks on Red Sea shipping, which simply started back up.

    The same awful arithmetic haunts the current operations in the Caribbean against the Venezuela-based, government-connected Cartel de los Soles. The entity was recently designated by the Trump administration as a foreign terrorist organization, as part of its argument that US forces are engaged in an “armed conflict.” The cartel was declared by the Department of Justice to be the hub of a cocaine transport network, shipping a reported street value of between $6.25 billion and $8.75 billion in drugs (the cartel gets an unknown, but clearly lesser, percentage of that overall value in actual profit). 

    To battle this foe, the United States has assembled a fleet that cost at least $40 billion to buy in total. The carrier Ford alone cost $4.7 billion to develop and $12.9 billion to build. The fleet is backed by at least 83 aircraft of assorted types, including 10 F-35Bs ($109 million apiece), seven Predator drones ($33 million each), three P-8 Poseidons ($145 million per), and at least one AC-130J gunship ($165 million). To be sure, all of these assets will continue to serve long after Operation Southern Spear is wound down, but this is how we are using the investment. 

    But the current cost of operations and expendables hardly tells a better story. The Ford alone costs about $8 million a day to run. The F-35s and AC-130J cost about $40,000 per flight hour; the P-8s, about $30,000; the Reapers, about $3,500.

    Analysis of the strike videos on the 21 boats show that U.S. forces have fired AGM-176 Griffins ($127,333 apiece in 2019), Hellfires (running about $150,000 to $220,000) and potentially GBU-39B Small Diameter Bombs ($40,000). In some cases, they are reportedly firing four munitions per strike: “twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it.”

    All this is arrayed to sink motorboats, 21 at last report. One of the boats was described by Pentagon officials as a 39-foot Flipper-type vessel with four 200-horsepower engines. New ones go for about $400,000 on Boats.com, but the old, open top motorbots in the videos are obviously well below that in cost. Their crews have been reported as making $500 per trip.

    Put in comparison, the cost of the US naval fleet deployed is at least five times what the cartel makes in smuggling. The air fleet deployed costs at least another two times more.  It is roughly 5,000 times the cost of the suspected drug boats that have been destroyed. Indeed, just the cost of operating the Ford off Venezuela for a single day has still not yet equaled the maximum cost the cartel paid for the boats it has lost.

    In the air, the U.S. military spent roughly 66,000 times more to buy each unmanned drone in the operation than the cartel paid each man that the unmanned drones killed. The US spent between 80 to 300 times more for each bomb or missile it has used than the cartel paid each man killed by those bombs or missiles. 

    The math is arguably even worse when we’re on the defense. 

    In September, a wave of 19 Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace.. The Gerbera-type drones cost as little as $10,000—so cheap that they are often used as decoys to misdirect and overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses. NATO countered with a half-billion-dollar response force of F-35s, F-16s, AWACS radar planes, and helicopters, which shot down four of the drones with $1.6-million AMRAAM missiles. 

    This is a bargain compared to how challenging U.S. forces have found it to defend against Houthi forces using this same cheap tech. Our naval forces have fired a reported 120 SM-2, 80 SM-6, and 20 SM-3 missiles, costing about $2.1 million, $3.9 million, and over $9.6 million each. And this is to defend against a group operating out of the 187th-largest economy in the world, able to fire mere hundreds of drones and missiles. Our supposed pacing challenge, China, has an economy that will soon be the largest in the world and a combined national industrial and military acquisition plan to be able to fire munitions by the millions. 

    Even in America’s best-laid plans for future battlefields, there is a harsh reality that is too often ignored. The math of current battlefields remains literally orders of magnitude beyond what our budget plans to spend, our industry plans to build, our acquisitions system is able to contract, and thus what our military will deploy. 

    As a point of comparison, Ukraine is on pace to build, buy, and use over four million drones this year. The U.S. Army, meanwhile, aims to acquire 50,000 drones next year—about 1.25 percent of the Ukrainian total. In its most optimistic plans, it hopes to be able to acquire 1 million drones “within the next two to three years.” ​​ 

    When you spend orders of magnitude more than your foe, you are in what is known as a “losing equation.” And if we don’t change this math, we will need an update to Norm Augustine’s infamous “law” of defense acquisitions. Back in 1979, Augustine calculated that if the Pentagon couldn’t curtail the cost curve of its purchasing, by 2054 we wouldn’t be able to afford a single plane. 

    If we don’t master the new math of the battlefield, we won’t be able to afford to win a single battle.”

    The awful arithmetic of our wars

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

    P.W. Singer is Strategist at New America and the author of multiple books on technology and security, including Wired for War, Ghost Fleet, Burn-In, and LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media.

    #GovernmentInefficiency #GovernmentWaste #Iran #MiddleEast #news #Pentagon #politics #technology #war
  3. 🟡 Civilian Casualties | 6/10
    🇺🇸

    US military operations killed 153 civilians in 2025, official says
    A Pentagon official stated that US military operations resulted in 153 civilian deaths in 2025.

    #OSINT #NewsGroup #CivilianCasualties #Pentagon #USMilitary

  4. Pentagon boosts PAC-3 MSE and THAAD buys amid China missile threat

    NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! The Pentagon is preparing a dramatic course correction after years…
    #NewsBeep #News #BreakingNews #armedforcestopics #army #breakingnews #China #Defense #Iran #Military #Pentagon #Politics #spending #warwithiran
    newsbeep.com/687093/

  5. #DiálogoAmericas, another #propaganda machine by the #Pentagon:

    dialogo-americas.com/

    ..is run by #HalcyonGroupInternational:

    "It operates in conflict and transition environments providing expert Counterinsurgency, Stability, and Influence Operations capabilities to the #UnitedStatesGovernment and partner nations to achieve strategic, operational, and tactical level objectives."

    halcyongroupinternational.com/

    #AI

  6. #DiálogoAmericas, another #propaganda machine by the #Pentagon:

    dialogo-americas.com/

    ..is run by #HalcyonGroupInternational:

    "It operates in conflict and transition environments providing expert Counterinsurgency, Stability, and Influence Operations capabilities to the #UnitedStatesGovernment and partner nations to achieve strategic, operational, and tactical level objectives."

    halcyongroupinternational.com/

    #AI

  7. *You can "define it" in exquisite ethical and legal detail, but this is what that looks like as an existent power-struggle that is actually happening in the contemporary USA #Pentagon #Anthropic

    bisi.org.uk/reports/pent...

    RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vcfp6lhpnvsbhg6q564kr7dm/post/3mspmldbptc2n

  8. #Pentagonul cere industriei de apărare din 🇺🇸#SUA să accelereze producția de arme, pe fondul scăderii stocurilor.

    🔗 wp.me/p9KpFA-5soC

    #Știri

  9. #Pentagonul cere industriei de apărare din 🇺🇸#SUA să accelereze producția de arme, pe fondul scăderii stocurilor.

    🔗 wp.me/p9KpFA-5soC

    #Știri

  10. Pentagon ruft Rüstungsindustrie zu schnellerer Waffenproduktion auf

    Durch den Iran-Krieg sind die Raketenbestände der USA Berichten zufolge massiv geschrumpft. Die Trump-Regierung bestreitet das - doch nun ruft das Pentagon die Rüstungsindustrie auf, schneller Waffen zu produzieren.

    ➡️ tagesschau.de/ausland/amerika/

    #USA #Pentagon #Rüstungsindustrie #IranKrieg

  11. #Pentagonul cere industriei 🇺🇸#Americane de apărare să accelereze producția de armament.
    Presa: Stocurile unor rachete critice au scăzut puternic după războiul cu 🇮🇷#Iranul.

    🔗 wp.me/p9KpFA-5snT

    #Știri #SUA

  12. "Pentagon urges faster US weapons production amid stockpile concerns"

    Given the current state of ineptitude of the people involved in this, I am looking forward to ordinance that "explodes in your mouth, not on the battlefield." :holdthepain:

    (Yes, that's a riff off an old M&M slogan.)

    aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/9/pe

    #USNews #USPol #Pentagon #weapons #ineptitude

  13. The #Iran campaign has forced the #Pentagon to rush ships, aircraft & air-defense units from across #Europe & #Asia to the #MiddleEast, an effort with cascading consequences for equipment maintenance & troop morale….The result is a significant erosion of #US firepower in those regions, a shift with long-term implications that are a growing concern in the military & intelligence communities, senior US & Western ofcls said.

    #Trump #Hegseth #idiocracy #kakistocracy #MilitaryReadiness #geopolitics

  14. China builds roads, railways, bridges, airports and the rest across Africa!!

    What does the US Imperium do? Engage in psyops!

    F*cking typical!

    “Collapsing Empire: US creates new African psyops unit”

    Kit Klarenberg in Al Mayadeen English

    @[email protected]
    @africacenter
    @[email protected]

    “The Pentagon has activated a new psychological operations unit targeting Africa, tasked with ‘expanding the military’s ability to influence foreign audiences’ across the continent. The heavily hyped launch occurs against a backdrop of dramatically and irreversibly waning Western influence and power in every sphere across the continent. As Africans steadily rid themselves of unwelcome foreign occupiers and oppressors, the US is forced to rely on strategies of manipulation to stem the tide, which have already failed spectacularly. They will surely misfire yet again”

    english.almayadeen.net/article

    #Press #SocialMedia #Journalism #US #Africa #Influence #Pentagon #Payops #Lies #Propaganda #Empire #Collapse #AFRICOM #Drongo

  15. Both your senators keep a constituent line answered by a twenty-four-year-old with a tally sheet. One question: your position on prosecuting sources who tell the public about readiness?
    Will yours say it out loud?
    #Politics #Democracy #News #Journalism #PressFreedom #Whistleblowers #Pentagon #Accountability #Resist #USPolitics #Military #FreePress ↳ reply: The arithmetic in full → twp.ai/4huedi
    4/4

  16. Then Monday the Pentagon announced deals to triple PAC-3 and quadruple THAAD production.
    Nobody quadruples production of a thing they have plenty of. Bullshit does not survive a purchase order.
    Strip the tough-guy cosplay off "hunted down" and what's underneath is a civil servant with a conscience and a mortgage about to get their phone records pulled. Not a spy. A GS-13.
    #Politics #Democracy #News #Journalism #PressFreedom #Whistleblowers #Pentagon #Accountability #Resist #USPolitics
    3/4

  17. In one thumb-typed paragraph he confirmed the reporting he meant to deny, at the hour the comms team had clocked out
    The reporting: CNN counted nearly 80% of the THAAD interceptor inventory expended and roughly half the Patriots. Reuters says the Army burned virtually all of ATACMS and PrSM. The Payne Institute counted almost 11,300 munitions in sixteen days
    #Politics #Democracy #News #Journalism #PressFreedom #Whistleblowers #Pentagon #Accountability #Resist #USPolitics #Military #FreePress
    2/4

  18. Midnight on Truth Social, the President did two incompatible things in one breath and noticed neither.
    He said the leakers of these treasonous statements are being hunted down and long-term jail sentences will be sought. He also insists the reports are false.
    You cannot hunt the leakers of a thing that never happened, and there is no crime in disclosing fiction. #Politics #Democracy #News #Journalism #PressFreedom #Whistleblowers #Pentagon #Accountability #Resist #USPolitics #Military
    1/4

  19. @kardinal691
    OMG, that seems reckless. Can’t anyone do arithmetic among those brass's left in the Pentagon? Understandable that Pentagon Pete can’t count, with all that testosterone swishing about, but what about the underlings, with less of the disabling testosterone? [sarcasm]

    #USPol #Pentagon #counting #Arithmetic #testosterone #reckless

  20. 🟢 Strategic Analysis | 8/10
    🇺🇸 🇮🇷

    US depleted precision missile stocks during Iran war — Russian military blogger
    During the war with Iran, the Pentagon burned through nearly all of its high-precision long-range weaponry, sparking a scandal in Washington. President Trump faces scrutiny as deterrence capabilities are questioned.

    #OSINT #NewsGroup #US #Iran #Pentagon #WeaponsDepletion

  21. 📰 | Wen interessieren schon die #Ufo-Akten, wenn doch Außerirdische einfach Dämonen sind?

    In den "Ufo-Akten" des #Pentagon steht kaum was Interessantes drin. Also müssen neue Phantastereien her, etwa "Ufos sind Dämonen".

    Im #SkeptixBlog fragt sich derweil Bernd: „Was zum Teufel!?“

    skeptix.org/2026/08/04/wen-int

    #ufofiles