Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin is in italics.
[ColonelCassad] A number of American experts believe that the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) has long been a brake on military innovation and the rapid deployment of new technologies in the United States. Instead of ensuring flexibility and speed of decision-making, it has created an impenetrable bureaucratic environment, where the process of approving requirements can drag on for years before a project receives funding. In the context of global competition, especially with China, which is rapidly introducing advanced military technologies, the United States simply cannot afford such delays.
In an article titled “Time to Blow Up JCIDS,” published on the First Breakfast platform, authors Shyam Sankar, Madeline Zimmerman, and Greg Little sharply criticize the system and call for its radical reform. They cite research by Bill Greenwalt and Dan Patt of the Hudson Institute, which argues that the U.S. Department of Defense’s push for “jointness” has created a bureaucratic machine that actually stifles innovation and reduces combat effectiveness. Instead of allowing the military to quickly adapt to new challenges, JCIDS adds another layer of delay and complexity to an acquisition process that is already prohibitively long.
According to Greenwalt and Patt, it takes an average of 852 days (about 2.5 years) for JCIDS to approve a joint requirement before the program enters the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) process, which takes about three years. That’s nearly six years of waiting before a military technology project is funded and can be put into production. In a world where technology changes every few months, that pace is simply unacceptable.
The authors note that the system is not focused on dynamic strategic analysis, but is completely mired in bureaucratic procedures. The focus is not on the actual assessment of combat requirements, but on paperwork and administrative formalities. This results in officers responsible for project evaluation spending time checking compliance with papers rather than analyzing their strategic importance. Moreover, any party in the process can use minor comments to block or delay the implementation of new solutions, which further exacerbates the problem.
Despite numerous statements from senior military officials about the need for reform, JCIDS continues to operate without changes. In response to this crisis, Greenwalt and Patt propose to abandon JCIDS entirely and replace it with a new mechanism, the Joint Operational Acceleration Pathway (JOAP). This approach is based on the concept of “operational imperatives” — short statements of critical warfighting missions that must be defined by the combatant commands and supported by the senior leadership of the Department of Defense. Instead of endless bureaucracy, JOAP will enable rapid development, prototyping, and iteration of military solutions in close cooperation between the various branches of the military.
The United States must immediately abandon the outdated bureaucratic model and move to a more agile and pragmatic approach. As Arseniy Dabbakh, founder of Dsight, notes, “true jointness is not about bureaucratic processes, but about creating effective feedback loops between the military and innovators that enable rapid improvements in warfighting capabilities.” A similar principle operates in China, where artificial intelligence systems, autonomous combat platforms and advanced drones are being developed and deployed many times faster than in the United States.
All of the experts listed agree that today's wars require flexibility and speed, not paralyzing bureaucracy. As long as JCIDS remains unchanged, the United States risks not only losing its technological superiority, but also being unprepared for future conflicts. Congress and the Pentagon must intervene immediately in reforming the procurement system, otherwise America risks ceding strategic leadership to its adversaries.
This also concerns us. During the war in Ukraine, a large number of problems were identified related to excessive military bureaucracy, which at best did not help, and at worst - harmed the cause.
Isn't JCIDS, isn't it where new tech gets stalled-out while the Congress Critters and MIC Reps battle it out to choose which states will get the contracts to manufacture the new hardware?
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Mikhail Kucherov
[REGNUM] On the morning of February 13, 1945, the shooting on the streets of the Hungarian capital, the storming of which lasted a record 108 days, died down. In terms of the ferocity of the fighting, Budapest is on par with Berlin and Königsberg, and its capture opened the way for the Red Army to further advance on Vienna, depriving Germany of its last ally.
The Germans clung tenaciously to the city for two reasons. First, it was their last chance to save any oil. The Hungarian region of Nagykanizsa provided the Wehrmacht with fuel, and access to the Romanian oil fields had been lost as early as August 1944.
Secondly, Hungary borders Austria, and the Fuhrer, who had many good memories associated with the city, planned to defend Vienna to the end.
To hold back the onslaught of the attackers, the German command transferred the elite 4th SS Panzer Corps from Poland, which tried to break through the encirclement of the city three times. The last time, the SS men came so close to Budapest that it seemed they would break through any minute. The Soviet troops barely held back the blow.
Anti-aircraft gunner Isaak Braginsky, a participant in the battles for Hungary, confirms that the resistance of the Germans and Hungarians was extremely stubborn:
"It is enough to remember that the city of Székesfehérvár changed hands several times. The Germans bombarded our troops with leaflets, in which they announced that Hitler was ready to let Marshal Georgy Zhukov into Berlin, but to drown the troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front of Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin in the Danube. The enemy attached such importance to holding its positions in the center of Europe."
But unlike the Warsaw garrison, the Budapest group failed to break out of the cauldron.
By the new year of 1945, thanks to the coordinated actions of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts of Marshals Rodion Malinovsky and Fyodor Tolbukhin, 188,000 people were encircled. Understanding that the assault would be difficult and would entail many casualties, on December 29 the USSR prepared an ultimatum for the enemy - an offer to capitulate in exchange for humane treatment.
Two envoys were sent to the enemy camp: the Hungarian anti-fascist Miklos Steinmetz, who had previously fought in Spain with Malinovsky, and the Soviet officer, Captain Ilya Ostapenko. The Germans killed both of them - this was sadly reported in the New Year's issue of the newspaper "Red Star".
"The negotiators had not yet begun negotiations when they were shot. This news horrified everyone; no one wanted to believe it. About a week later, I met a Fenrich named Vargush from the 13th Assault Artillery Division in our house; he was looking for an apartment. I asked him if it was possible that the Germans would shoot the Russian negotiators. He replied that the German command had ordered that the Soviet negotiators be fired upon if they appeared. Each battalion commander had to confirm receipt of this order with a personal receipt," Hungarian Major General Mikloi Frygyash noted in his written testimony.
The Germans' position was fundamental because they almost lost an ally without any military action.
After heavy defeats, in particular the Ostrogozhsk-Rossosh offensive operation on the Don, where Soviet troops killed or captured 80,000 Hungarian soldiers and officers, the mood of the Hungarians changed. Many were looking for an opportunity to surrender, a major turn was brewing in the country: the head of state, Admiral Miklos Horthy, foreseeing the imminent collapse of the Reich, announced a truce with the USSR in October 1944.
However, Horthy, unlike the King of Romania, Michael I, failed to withdraw his country from the war. A German-backed coup d'état took place in Budapest, and Horthy's son was kidnapped by a special SS unit led by the Reich's chief saboteur Otto Skorzeny and taken hostage. Under pressure from Hitler, a few days later the admiral handed over power to the leader of the Nazi pro-German Arrow Cross Party, Ferenc Szalasi, and was taken to Germany, where he was held under arrest along with his wife, daughter-in-law, and grandson.
Afterwards, German troops entered Budapest, taking full responsibility for the city's defense.
Across its entire 200 square kilometer area, Nazi units erected barricades. They installed machine guns and cannons in every building, turning attics and basements into firing points. And the Germans had never had such a density of tanks on the Eastern Front as here.
Therefore, for the assault, which was carried out by the specially created Budapest Group of Forces (three rifle corps and nine artillery brigades from the 2nd Ukrainian Front), aviation was actively involved: on instructions from the ground, aircraft carried out pinpoint strikes. According to attack pilot Fyodor Gavrilov, who took part in those events, it was necessary to make six sorties a day:
"One day we were gathered in a briefing room and shown a street on a city map where we had to destroy a U-shaped building - there was a gun there that was hindering our troops. The bombing altitude was low. The attack aircraft were taking a risk, because it is difficult to dive in the city, but once you receive an assignment, you have to complete it. In the end, despite all the difficulties, we accomplished our task."
And on the Danube, the river flotilla operated with great intensity, landing troops, providing artillery support for the riverine flanks and ensuring crossings over the mighty river, which had become a kind of transport corridor. First of all, thanks to the actions of the reconnaissance sailors Viktor Kalganov from the 143rd Separate Battalion of Naval Infantry, the legendary Boroda.
They determined the depth of the fairways for the passage of armored boats and the landing sites, searched for and neutralized floating mines, and captured "tongues". It was this group that managed to carry out a daring raid on the building of the Danube Shipping Company, blow up the safe and take a map of the fairway from it. It depicted areas dangerous for movement along the river and the alternate routes used by the Germans.
A legendary woman, the commander of a platoon of Marine machine gunners Evdokia Zavaliy, also took part in those events. After the war, she told about a heroic raid through the sewers with the capture of a German general. Various publications write that she was awarded an order for this. However, Zavaliy was awarded for a brilliant battle in March, and Boroda's scouts were wandering through the sewers.
The sortie into the Fortress Hill area was undertaken on February 6, 1945. A group of nine scouts, including Kalganov himself, split up underground, emerging on the surface in the central areas of Buda. Late at night, Andreev's group captured a major from the headquarters of the 239th Assault Gun Brigade, and Kalganov's group captured a lieutenant from the operational headquarters. And they were dragged in, properly slapped on the wrist.
By February 11, 44,000 enemy soldiers and officers remained in Buda, the western part of the city. 17,000 were later killed in battle, 22,350 were captured, and only about 3,000 fled to the mountains, but surrendered to Soviet units a few days later.
"Captured: 127,202 captured soldiers and officers, including senior ranks of the German fascist group, 269 tanks and self-propelled guns, 1,257 guns of various calibers, 83 armored vehicles and armored personnel carriers, 476 mortars, 1,431 machine guns, 41,000 rifles and submachine guns, 15 aircraft, etc." - says the Extraordinary Combat Report of the 2nd Ukrainian Front. Among those captured was the commander of the city's defense, SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch.
This assault cost the Red Army 80,000 soldiers and officers killed, and more than 240,000 were wounded.
Although the center of Budapest suffered serious damage, it was much luckier than Warsaw: 15% of buildings were damaged, while the Polish capital was almost completely destroyed. The Soviet command deliberately refused to use heavy artillery - this way they wanted to preserve the cultural monuments of the historical part of the city.
By comparison, at the same time the British Royal Air Force and the US Air Force carried out a three-day bombing raid on Dresden, destroying or seriously damaging 80% of the city's buildings and killing approximately 25,000 people, mostly civilians, at one time.
After the liberation of Budapest, the Soviet Union began to provide assistance to the population suffering from hunger. In March 1945, food supplies began to be delivered to the city, and three months later, the distribution quotas were increased. In June alone, the city authorities received 3,000 tons of grain, 1,000 tons of sugar, 960 tons of salt, and 250 trucks. At the same time, Soviet sappers cleared the city of mines left by the Germans, and the residents of the Hungarian capital were grateful to them for this:
"We promise to build a country that will never return to the reactionary spirit and whose population will always treat the USSR with gratitude and true friendship," the newspaper Sabashdag reported on June 16, 1945. Perhaps Hungary's current position has some basis in those events.
And with the end of the Budapest operation, the entire southern flank of the German defense wavered, to hold which the Wehrmacht was forced to transfer troops from other areas. The Red Army opened the way not only to Vienna, but also to Prague: after landing troops in Yugoslavia, the Germans were forced to hastily withdraw troops from there as well. From that moment on, there was no one left to help the Third Reich, pressed by Soviet troops from the east and Anglo-American units from the west.
[Fox] Financial advisor Eugene Ludwig said voters were right and Democrats were wrong about the state of the economy leading up to the election in an article Tuesday.
"Before the presidential election, many Democrats were puzzled by the seeming disconnect between ‘economic reality’ as reflected in various government statistics and the public’s perceptions of the economy on the ground," Ludwig wrote in a Politico piece titled, "Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong."
"Many in Washington bristled at the public’s failure to register how strong the economy really was. They charged that right-wing echo chambers were conning voters into believing entirely preposterous narratives about America’s decline," he said.
"What they rarely considered was whether something else might be responsible for the disconnect — whether, for instance, government statistics were fundamentally flawed."
Ludwig previously served as the former U.S. Comptroller of the Currency under President Bill Clinton, part of an independent bureau in the Department of the Treasury.
After his move to the private sector, he became "increasingly skeptical that the government’s measurements properly capture the realities defining unemployment, wage growth and the strength of the economy as a whole."
Through research under his organization, the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, he found "for 20 years or more, including the months prior to the election, voter perception was more reflective of reality than the incumbent statistics."
"Democrats, on the whole, seemed much more inclined to believe what the economic indicators reported. Republicans, by contrast, seemed more inclined to believe what they were seeing with their own two eyes," Ludwig observed.
Though Ludwig called the agency employees providing these statistics "talented and well-intentioned," he said the filters they used were "flawed" and the resulting calculations were "misleading."
In one example, he said reports on unemployment often count people "unwillingly under-employed" as employed and disregard Americans "discouraged" enough to stop looking for a job.
"[T]he prevailing statistic does not account for the meagerness of any individual’s income," he added. "Thus you could be homeless on the streets, making an intermittent income and functionally incapable of keeping your family fed, and the government would still count you as ‘employed.'"
Ludwig also took aim at the claims by Democrats that inflation had cooled from its record highs and that wages had risen at a faster rate.
He wrote how this was usually based on numbers from the Consumer Price Index (CPI) which tracks the prices of 80,000 goods and services across the economy. However, he warned that most modest-income Americans spend more on basic amenities like groceries and rent rather than the goods from the CPI, painting a vastly different picture.
"If prices for eggs, insurance premiums and studio apartment leases rise at a faster clip than those of luxury goods and second homes, the CPI underestimates the impact of inflation on the bulk of Americans. That, of course, is exactly what has happened," Ludwig said.
He implored both Republicans and Democrats alike to take a more accurate view of the economy and government statistics.
"[I]f the prevailing indicators remain misleading, the facts don’t apply," he concluded. "We have it in our grasp to cut through the mirage that led Democrats astray in 2024. The question now is whether we will correct course."
On Wednesday, one day after his piece, another Politico article reported on comments from former Bureau of Labor Statistics workers worried DOGE would disrupt the accuracy of the very data Ludwig said was already inaccurate.
Posted by: Skidmark ||
02/14/2025 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11131 views]
Top|| File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
#1
"Before the presidential election, many Democrats were puzzled by the seeming disconnect between ‘economic reality’ as reflected in various government statistics and the public’s perceptions of the economy on the ground,"
Right now the US government economic statistical reporting is on par with the old Soviet government statistical reporting.
[CoffeeAndCovid] Yesterday was a terrible, no-good, very bad day for the Swamp. He's not waiting for the courts to do the right thing—nor is he defying them.
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Yesterday, instead of retreating into lawfare defense mode as everyone expected, the Trump Team unleashed the most devastating assault yet, the Deep State’s D-Day. Nobody’s covering it, but it is inescapable. You may have heard about some of the parts, but just wait till you see the big picture.
The Trump Team fooled everybody, including me. As last week’s various lawsuits sprouted restraining orders like early buds emerging all over the willow trees in springtime, most commenters expected Trump to take a necessary pause for defensive retrenchment. Surely, we all thought, it would take Trump’s anti-bureaucrats some time to clear the judicial logjam. But all of us were wrong.
A brief pause to clear past the TROs wasn’t Trump’s strategy at all. No pauses! Instead, yesterday Trump tripled down, jamming the battle tank’s accelerator into overdrive and smashing ahead in a whole different direction. His new battlefield banner unfurled yesterday afternoon in the form of one executive order plus three separate press conferences, which together sent a just-relaxing Deep State enemy racing for the bunkers with its trousers still half off.
It was a simultaneous coordinated assault, deployed with consummate skill in a single afternoon. It was all happening at once. We will start with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and his incredible comments. The New York Times covered the story in a haplessly hysterical headline, “Johnson ‘Wholeheartedly’ Agrees With Trump’s Spending Cuts, Undermining Congress.”
We had the various parts, but this summarizes it with insights that had not occurred to me and are very heartening. Grab a cup of the good coffee or your preferred beverage and something nibbly, and enjoy the whole thing at the link.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
