Still Fighting the Wrong Wars
By KIM BELLARD
What do the coronavirus
and Navy ships have in common? For that matter, what do our military
spending and our healthcare spending have in common? More than you might
think, and it boils down to this: we spend too much for too little, in large
part because we tend to always be fighting the wrong wars.
Photo by STR/AFT via Getty Images
I started thinking about this a couple weeks ago due to a WSJ article about the U.S. Navy’s “aging and fragmented technology.” An internal Navy strategy memo warned that the Navy is “under cyber siege” by foreign adversaries, leaking information “like a sieve.” It grimly pointed out:
Our
adversaries gain an advantage in cyberspace through guerrilla tactics within
our defensive perimeters. Once inside, malign actors steal, destroy
and/or modify critical data and information.
This is the Navy, after all, that proudly tried to modernize by installing touch screen technology on some of its ships, only to have the disaster that hit the USS McClain. Its vaunted Integrated Bridge and Navigation System was, ProPublica found, “was a welter of buttons, gauges and software that, poorly understood and not surprisingly misused, helped guide 10 sailors to their deaths.” And that wasn’t the only technology-enabled naval disaster in recent years.
But don’t j...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Christina Liu Tags: Health Policy coronavirus COVID-19 Kim Bellard military spending public health US Navy Source Type: blogs
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