360° Financial Trend Detection
360° Financial Trend Detection
Okay, so Army Secretary Dan Driscoll went on "Face the Nation" and started flapping his gums about Venezuela. Reactivating the jungle school in Panama? Seriously? It's 2025, and we're still doing the "boots on the ground" thing? Give me a break.
What's the play here? Are they telegraphing a future invasion? Or is this just the Pentagon trying to look tough after that whole shutdown fiasco? Driscoll says it'll take "months" to recover from the shutdown's impact on Army families. Months! And now they're gearing up for… what, exactly? Another forever war in the tropics?
Then there's the drone obsession. Apparently, the Army's now in charge of the counterdrone threat for the entire Pentagon. A "flying IED" is how Driscoll describes them. Cheap, 3D-printed, crossing borders like it's nbd. And the solution? To "know what is in the sky at every moment across the country." Sounds like a privacy nightmare waiting to happen. Who gets access to that data? Are we talking about a military-grade surveillance state disguised as "national security"? Offcourse we are.
"Ukraine is the Silicon Valley of warfare," Driscoll says, because they blew up $10 billion of Russian equipment with a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of drones. Cool story, bro. But last I checked, Ukraine's fighting for its survival, not playing war games. Comparing a desperate fight for freedom to some shiny new tech demo feels... tone deaf, to say the least.
And China's cranking out 12 to 14 million drones a year. So what? Are we supposed to be impressed? Scared? Motivated to buy more Raytheon stock? I'm not seeing the connection here. It's like saying, "They have more pencils than us! We must build more pencils!"
SkyFoundry. Sounds like something out of a bad sci-fi movie. The Army's working with Congress to invest in drone components and "empower the private sector." Translation: tax dollars funneled to defense contractors, who then sell the same stuff back to the government at a massive markup. It's the circle of grift, folks. We're paying for it, and they're laughing all the way to the bank.
Oh, and Driscoll invited 15 top CEOs to an Army AI war game to help with "data in contested environments and logistics." Because who better to advise the military on matters of life and death than a bunch of corporate overlords? What kind of data are they even talking about? Consumer data? Market research? Are they planning to A/B test different invasion strategies based on focus group feedback? Maybe I'm being too cynical here... nah.
So, what's the real takeaway? The Army's got a hard-on for drones, a boner for interventionism, and a bottomless pit of taxpayer money to play with. They expect us to believe this nonsense, and honestly... I'm just tired.