Reality bats last — the US military has not been designed in the context of a Grand Strategy, nor has it been designed with any attention at all to Global Reality.
The US military is too slow, too heavy, too expensive, too complex, and spread too thin to be effective — it cannot deter, defend, or defeat. From the F-35 in the US Air Force to the USS Gerald Ford in the US Navy to the varied cancelled and cumbersome systems of the US Army, the US military is good for one thing and one thing only: enriching the military-industrial complex and the banks behind that complex.
GLOBAL REALITY comes in three slices: the military threat, civil-military operating conditions, and logistics choke-points. While the US has only two peer competitors (China and Russia), it is incapable of winning a war against lesser enemies for lack of integrity in the planning and programming of US Government capabilities, not only in the military, but in the civilian functions including diplomacy and development as well as commerce.
This short monograph, based on the original and never since replicated Marine Corps Study, Overview of Planning and Programming Factors for Expeditionary Operations in the Third World (Marine Corps Combat Development Command, March 1990), for which the author was the chief architect and study director, is — in combination with a Grand Strategy — a non-negotiable starting point for rebuilding America's ability to engage the world toward peace and prosperity for all.
The standard aviation day is hot and humid, not warm and not humid as the US military now assumes. This means that aircraft designed to these flawed assumptions can carry half as much half as far and loiter half as long. This is just one of many examples from this overview of Global Reality.
