Dominic Cummings: evaluation

Transcript context

…The reason I’m especially curious about this is we’re seeing how this war in Ukraine is happening. I’m very curious about what this implies if there was a conflict in Taiwan. How easily could you take out an American or British aircraft carrier? Having seen the insight of how these things work, how confident are you in these war games and these projections? If there was an actual conflict in which Britain had to get involved, what do you think would happen? Well, in war games, if they’re dealing with any kind of serious peer opponent the British aircraft carriers immediately flee to the edge of the war game so that they don’t get sunk immediately. And the aircraft carriers are obviously a joke. I said that for the first time ten years ago. Five years ago, I had a lot of meetings about it in Number 10. Nothing persuaded me of anything other than that the whole thing was a sort of massive waste of money. And that’s just becoming more and more obvious. All over these systems in the west, people are now starting to face the music that a lot of these things that they’ve invested billions in are just totally vulnerable to asymmetric technology and asymmetric costs, where very cheap systems are going to be able to destroy platforms worth multiple billions. A lot of senior people who’ve talked a lot of shit about it obviously can’t admit any of these things publicly, but I think there is growing realization behind the scenes of what the reality is. But the situation in Ukraine should make us even more pessimistic in various ways. Because if you’d said in advance — Okay. Putin’s going to invade Ukraine. We are going to simultaneously encourage Ukraine to fight. Arm them and push Ukraine into a war of attrition. Simultaneously we’re going to ramp up, we’re going to ditch One China policy and aggressively ratchet up diplomacy against China on Taiwan and push the world’s biggest manufacturer into a closer relationship with Russia, whilst fighting a war of attrition against Russia, and then we are not going to actually have a defense industrial plan and a procurement change ourselves in Europe. “Even for you, Dominic, that would be just too ludicrous a scenario to happen. Nobody in their right minds would actually get themselves into that situation.” But that’s literally what we’ve done. We’ve pushed the world’s biggest manufacturer into alliance with Russia. We have escalated a war of attrition. And we have left a completely rotten dysfunctional procurement and manufacturing system for defense continue. The same set of people in charge of the decisions in the MoD and the Pentagon. Same set of bullshit pushed out about the advantages of aircraft carriers and blah, blah, blah the whole thing makes absolutely no sense at all What happens when we have to face the music and when does that happen? I don’t know. Maybe there’s a conflict and many personnel on the aircraft carrier drown. Or maybe not even with defense specifically. Just in general, all these different parts of the government are not only dysfunctional but are getting more and more dysfunctional. Is it just going to be a slow degradation or will there be another very clear inflection point like you had with COVID?…

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