Daily Archives: 16 May 2022

Inflation Ain’t Joe Biden’s Fault

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Illustrated in two graphs. The first is the overall Producer-Price Index performance over the last 11 years.

The second breaks out services from goods, the latter absent food and energy.

Now certainly, in addition to the immediacy of expectations, there are lags of some weeks to months in our economy, and it can take time for policies to have impact.

Oh, wait—notice those periods before the current inflation began spiking: the PPI was declining through the year-and-a-half before President Joe Biden (D) won the election. The PPI began its sharp rise right after that on expectations of Biden’s policy implementations, and it continued unabated as those expectations were realized and began their material impact on our economy.

Look, too, at the steadiness of the PPI rise. Neither supply chain disruptions nor Putin’s war have had any impact on the inflation rise. Look again at the 18 moths preceding Biden’s election. The pandemic, too, is wholly irrelevant to this hard rise.

This round of inflation really is Joe Biden’s fault, no matter how deeply he ducks under his desk, or how many times he scurries off to Delaware to avoid facing us average Americans.

Force Ratios

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But ratios of what? A simple ratio of three attacking soldiers vs 1 defending soldier is too narrow and dangerously misleading, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is demonstrating.

Soldier equivalents of a number of other factors apply, also, and “force ratios” of the following, at the least, must be included in developing the operational force ratio:

  • quality of soldier training
  • quality of commanders, officers, and NCOs
    • their ability to function in fluid, information-foggy environment
    • quality of intel available to them
  • quality and condition of equipment
  • technology of equipment
  • impact of other avenues of attack
    • cyber
    • space
    • propaganda
  • what’s being defended
    • home territory from invader
    • invader territory from counterattacking defender
  • who’s defending
    • attacked nation defenders
    • attacking nation now defending
    • attacker position on invaded territory
    • attacker position in attacking nation’s territory
  • who’s attacking
    • defending nation against attacker’s position in attacked nation
    • defending nation against attacker’s position in attacker’s nation

All of that disregards the nature of the terrain being defended/attacked, but terrain merely informs the level of required force ratio: 3:1 to 7:1, the upper bound of what’s nominally considered attackable or worth the cost to attack, or somewhere in between.

It may be that a 3:1 ratio of attackers to defenders is a valid minimum ratio for a successful attack. However, all of these factors have to be converted into their own weights on force-on-force—however hazily the estimated conversions might be—and included in the ratio calculations.

It’s especially critical, too, that cold-blooded, wholly objective estimates of the quality of one’s own soldiers vs the enemy’s be made. “The enemy is ten feet tall,” or “We are,” serve only to get friendly soldiers killed, and the attack likely defeated, regardless of the other factors incorporated into the final force-on-force estimate.