What's Happening?

I have a whole boatload of problems, just like you, me and everyone else. Some are unpleasant and some are annoying, but hey, that's life, you deal with it. So I got plenty to think about, so why do I keep going back to the debacle in Ukraine? Do I have valid reason to focus on it, or is it just some quirk of my personality? Near as I can tell it's because our support of war in the Ukraine doesn't make any sense. 

We went in there and started poking the bear at least eight years ago. That it's taken this long for Russia to react tells me this is a measured response. Putin knows exactly what he is doing. It may not all go as well as he'd like, but it's starting to look like he going to achieve his objectives. A solution we could probably have achieved years ago through diplomatic channels, if we had wanted to. Obviously we didn't.

Could this be the act of some rogue faction in the Pentagon that wants to wargame a conflict with Russia, but with real people, real weapons and real carnage? People worry about the influence the big drug makers have on Congress, but I suspect the real king of the hill is the Military-Industrial Complex.

The whiz kids keep coming up with new, exciting ways to kill people, and the military, once they've seen these weapons, they want them. Whiz kids are expensive. Being able to destroy your enemy? Priceless.

Weapons have been advancing at a rapid pace. Faster computers, better sensors, better algorithms have made them much more efficient at being deadly. But many of these weapons have never been tried in combat. Are they really worth making more of them? Well, how bout we gin up a little war someplace, someplace where we can't get involved, but against somebody with some power. Hey! I know! Ukraine! We can subvert the government and then proceed to poke the bear. Eventually Vlad will have had enough and he'll wade it, and we'll have our war. And then we get to see if any of these new-fangled weapons are any good.