A letter-writer to Market Watch had this, even as she offered some money-saving tips that he thinks he’s found:
I found I may be in danger of spending close to $7,000 as a wedding guest this year—and that’s while I’m also trying to save up for my own wedding.
That’s just…foolish. Even for the several weddings aggregated that he plans to attend.
As long as enablers like these…guests…keep supporting deliberately ostentatious ego-trip weddings, those costs are only going to rise.
The opening two paragraphs lay out the question regarding the nature of warfare:
The way wars are fought is changing fast, as new technologies upend military doctrines on everything from procurement to executing operations.
But just how radical will this transformation be in years to come? And are the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested by the US, its allies and rivals in new tanks, planes and warships going to become the equivalent of buying horses and arrows on the eve of machine guns and howitzers?
Germany’s Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, General Carsten Breuer, added to the question:
The character of warfare is changing fundamentally. Armed forces must be able to adapt faster, integrate new technologies, and learn at speed. If we fail to adapt, we will not be able to prevail.
And Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington:
Revolutions in warfare are often declared but rarely arrive. Most military developments, like the current trends in the use of drones and precision strikes, are evolutionary. Nobody doubts the impact of gunpowder, but it was on the battlefield for hundreds of years, alongside knights and pikemen.
And this:
Military leaders, governments, and defense companies disagree on whether to call the current developments a revolution that warrants a complete overhaul of existing doctrines.
It’s a silly, time- and resource-wasting question. The situation neither demands nor holds unnecessary the idea of completely overhauling existing doctrines. It does, though, demonstrate—demand—the need to completely review, from the ground up de novo all existing doctrines and to do so periodically.
What matters, rather, is this constant: the need to manage and keep up with, even to drive, the pace of change, and that pace today is far faster than that prior rate of moving from pikes and trebuchets to rifles and cannons, far faster than the pace of weapons, logistics, tactics, and strategies during the world’s last major set-piece war, in the last century. The pace, rapidly accelerating, also is expanding into the constitution of warfare and the nature of war itself.
The question of whether we can make necessary changes across all dimensions of conflict, from political to information to economic to cyber to kinetic—and across the logistics and maintenance aspects of each of them—faster than our enemies can then becomes the Critical Item of national survival, as demonstrated from as far back as Alexander the Great and his weapons development and use and his tactics; the Roman way of war compared with that of the Greeks, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians; and the tactics change demonstrated by the Spanish tercio.
Each of these areas of pacing also has a Do Loop that must be capable of moving apace, from recognition of a situation; through decision regarding how to respond, or better, preempt; to acting on that decision. Our Do Loops—all of them—need to be capable of operating inside of—faster than—our enemies’. If they evolve and adapt faster than we do, then we lose, and they win.
Revolution vs evolution is an irrelevancy.
A letter-writer in the Sunday Wall Street Journal Letters section whined that his SUV has too many choices, too many buttons, switches, levers, and touch-screen options, and he’s too easily confused by them.
We’ve owned our SUV for more than a year and still don’t understand how to control many of the interior environment options.
I find myself not watching the road while I search for the correct button or icon to turn on the air conditioner or change entertainment. I put tape on some of the many buttons in order to locate them by touch. The digital display around the speedometer has a mind of its own, often spontaneously changing.
Has he considered reading his SUV’s operating manual? Those very clearly explain the purpose of all of those controls and how to employ them.
The digital display around my SUV’s speedometer occasionally changes, seemingly on its own. It doesn’t, though, change on its own; it’s always due to my bumping one or another button on my HOTAS—the two small collections of buttons and rockers on the left and right side of my steering wheel. The letter-writer should give some consideration to his handling of his own steering wheel.
It’s a baseless beef. My SUV, like any other modern car, has just the right number of buttons, switches, levers, and touch-screen options; neither more nor less. I could wish the touch screen options were replaced with buttons, switches, and/or levers, but that’s separate from the letter-writer’s plaint.
If this person is that easily confused or distracted behind the steering wheel, maybe he should consider hanging up his keys/fob.
Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Josh Shapiro wants our judges and Justices to be bound by popular assent instead of being bound by law.
I think we need radical reform that’s actually going to ensure that the voices of the people are heard from, that the voices of the people are represented in the three branches of government. We don’t have that right now.
Shapiro wants to pack the Supreme Court to address that, and Jonathan Turley was properly worried in his piece about Shapiro’s sharp turn to the extreme left with that remark.
I add this to that concern. This is another reason we can’t trust the Progressive-Democratic Party with control of our government. It has nothing to do with patriotism or integrity. It’s that so many Party politicians simply do not understand at all our Federal government or its structure.
Only two of the three branches of our government are intended to represent “the voices of the people,” those are the two political branches, and the granularity of that representation itself varies broadly across their elected roles. The politicians in our Congress’ House of Representatives represent, first, the voices of their district’s constituents, and second the voices of the citizens of our nation, since our Congress has national responsibilities as well as to its members’ districts. The politicians in Congress’ Senate represent, first, the voices of their State’s citizens, and second the voices of the citizens of our nation. The politicians in the White House, the President and Vice President, represent the voices of the citizens of our nation.
The judges and Justices of the third branch, though, represent no citizens’ voices. They represent our Constitution and the statutes that come before them and are bound by oath apply those laws without respect to persons and by the Code of Conduct for United States Judges to do so without fear or favor in order to facilitate the necessary political independence of our Judicial Branch and the judges and Justices within it.
Party politicians demanding that the judiciary represent the voices of the people is their demand for the subordination of judges and Justices to the vagaries of politics at the expense of their binding to law.
Greg Ip is worried that the checks and balances built into our Federal government by our Constitution are rapidly eroding due to President Donald Trump’s (R) unilateral actions. He’s badly mistaken. The erosion began long ago, and it accelerated starting in 2008. Trump has been resisting the erosion, for all the discomfort he’s causing a Leftist press too used to and too comfortable with that washing away.
FDR then tried to pack the Supreme Court; his own party revolted.
Ip ignored the rest of that story and its impact. Roosevelt didn’t get the additional Justices he wanted, but by 1943, he’d succeeded in getting appointed to the Court 8 Justices of his choice ou of the 9 comprising the Court. Our nation has been paying the price of that ever since, from Wickard which increased Federal economic power at the direct expense of the States, through Kelo, which increased Federal power at the direct expense of individual citizens and our property rights, and Chevron deference, which increased the power of Executive Branch agencies at the direct expense of both Congress and the President.
Shortly after taking office, he [Trump] fired the Democratic members of several independent agencies, including the FTC, effectively transforming them into executive departments.
On the contrary, this was Trump executing his constitutional authority as the head of the Executive Branch, and exercising his control over all of the Agencies and Departments of the Executive Branch. The Supreme Court, only recently restored to a body that adheres to what our Constitution actually says rather than what a Liberal, Roosevelt-esque-dominated Court want it to say, acknowledged that constitutional authority. The erosion here is from Congress, with its creation of an “independent” Federal Trade Commission in 1914 and subsequent further “independent” Agency creations. These creations were Congress’ unconstitutional attempt to create a fourth Branch of government by masquerading these creations as part of the Executive Branch.
The Supreme Court also took a step toward restoring Constitutional order in our Federal government by—finally—eliminating the knee-jerk deference to those so-called independent Agencies, and others properly constituted as subordinate to the President, when it rescinded that misbegotten Chevron deference and emphasized the importance of and constitutional requirement that Congress do its own legislative work, work it cannot pass off to those Agencies.
Regarding Trump’s unilaterality in particular, in one sense, he’s only following the examples set by ex-President Barack Obama (D), who infamously bragged about—and used—his pen and telephone to ignore or override Congress, and ex-President Joe Biden (D) who ignored so many of our nation’s laws in his attempt to virtually erase our southern border.
That unilaterality also is being reined in by a constitution-supporting and -applying Court. Trump can fire those Agency personnel. His unilateral application of taxing, via tariffs, has been severely curtailed. His efforts to cancel already-committed Federal grants have been successfully blocked.
Other of his unilateral actions, though, actually are moves back toward Constitutional order. His moves to greatly reduce Department of Education employment and to closely circumscribe DoEd authorities are aimed at getting rid of the Department altogether. This would be entirely appropriate, since the Department is a relatively recent Congressional creation done at the direct expense of the States, taking as it does, control over the education of our nation’s children away from the States, and in many ways away from the parents, and centralizing that control within the Federal government.
The erosion of our government’s checks and balances has been vast, but it’s not only due to a President overstepping his authorities or deliberately ignoring his duties. It’s also been due to Congress shirking its legislative duties and to a Court ignoring its own duties. At present, though, it appears as though the erosion is being slowed, and an increasing move back toward order is in progress.