There is a great scene in “the Raiders of the Lost Ark” in which Indiana Jones jumps on a horse to chase the Nazis in their big Mercedes Benz touring car, and he is asked: “What are you going to do?” Jones answers, in his insouciant, devil-may-care style: “I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go.”

Meanwhile…

It has been reported that the US – the White House – has now decided to give ATCMS to Ukraine.

ATACMS is a very capable missile, a 3,500 LB, 190 mile range missile with “on your doorstep” accuracy that can be quickly launched from a mobile launcher. This places all of Crimea, and the Kerch bridge, within striking distance from terrain held by Ukrainian forces.

One issue is that production ended some 8 years ago and there is as yet no follow-on weapon, but more on that some other time.

What is of interest is that over the course of the last 19 months the US has, to every request from Kyiv first said “No!” And then “Well, no, but we understand;” And then: “We are considering every option;” and finally “Yes.” Now, some have suggested that the US is deliberately dragging out the war (and why is also a subject that many have conjectured upon. Again, I’ll leave that to another time.”) Or, is it that the US simply is making this up as they go?

And then this:

This week, an order from Kyiv, directed at all woman with any medical or medical related skills (doctors, nurses, pharmacists, medical technicians, etc.) to register with the government for mobilization, barring them from leaving the county and charging them with being available for service. That suggests the casualty counts are growing.

And, this interesting (and horrifying) data point from Ottobock, a German prosthetics company, that there are 50,000 Ukrainians who have lost a hand or foot. The Associated Press reported they’d been told by Ukrainian medical personnel that there had been more than 20,000 amputees. I would tend to believe that Ottobock figure, given the Ukrainian hesitancy to give out any casualty figures, but it’s fair to assume that the number lies above 20,00 and may be as high as 50,000. (Ottobock suggests that the number is above 50,000 as accurate reporting tends to lag the incidents themselves.)

But how to place that – horrific – number in context? For all US combat operations from 2001 through 2015, US military personnel suffered 1,645 amputations with 6,800 KIAs and 52,000 WIAs (Congressional Research Service August 7, 2015); thus amputations were equal to 24% of KIAs or 3% of WIAs. This compares to some 15,000 amputations in World War II, which was a bit more than 2% of KIAs and a bit less than 3% of WIAs for the US Army.

Said differently, the better your MEDEVAC capability and your medical care, the fewer the number of people who receive severe wounds will die in combat. The US has been running a better than 7 to 1 ratio, wounded in action to killed in action; Ukraine, from what little reporting we have seen, has run a ratio of about 3 to 1; (Russia’s ratio is about the same). Amputations are a smaller ratio to KIAs as medical support declines.

So, how many amputations so far in Ukraine? Just for now, to be conservative, I’ll use the AP report – 20,000 – less than half of what Ottobcok stated. And rather than 24% of KIAs, call it 30% – which is very high (the number is more likely to be 20% or less). That would suggest 66,000 Ukrainian KIAs and 198,000 Ukrainian WIAs. TBIs and PTSD cases will be considerably more than that, with an additional – large – number of civilians added on top of that. Severe TBIs generally exceed KIAs.

The point here is that even as observers rightly laud the heroic defiance of the Ukrainian people, we need to be aware that that society as a whole is suffering a great deal of violence and arguably is being destroyed, and rebuilding will be a long and difficult process, far more expensive than the simple – but large – monetary cost.

Meanwhile, there is the question of the US National debt and the budget deficit. So far this year (as of July 1st), we’ve outspent ourselves to the tune of $1,613,000,000,000 – that’s $1.6 trillion, and we look to be headed to more than $2 trillion next year. And total national debt?

Well, that’s climbing too. While our GDP is going to reach some $27 trillion this year, the total national debt will pass $32 trillion.

Of course, there is more – more debt. The liabilities the US Government faces for social security and medicare – for which there are no real funds – hence these are unfunded liabilities, totaled $98.3 trillion, and when you add up all the debts (debts, liabilities, and unfunded obligations at the close of the 2022 fiscal year (last September 30th)) for the US government, the number is $135,487,000,000,000 – about $400,000 for every man, woman and child in the US.

Why do I raise these various issues together (besides the minor point that the providing of aid to Ukraine is adding to the debt – but in the grand scheme of things, just 4 or 5% for the year)? Because it strikes me that this is like Indiana Jones – we are making this up as we go along.

One of the hallmarks of decent planning is that there are few surprises and – especially – we know what to move, and when to move it. If you think we can’t do that, reflect on this statement by Fleet Admiral Nimitz shortly after the end of World War II: “The war with Japan had been enacted in the game rooms at the War College by so many people and in so many different ways that nothing that happened during the war was a surprise—absolutely nothing except the kamikaze tactics toward the end of the war. We had not visualized these.”

And the handling of “stuff” is the cornerstone of good planning. In every major operational plan there is a Time Phased Force Deployment Document – a TPFDD, pronounced “tip-fid” in DOD jargon. A full-blown TPFDD is thousands and thousands of pages long and, in the hands of master planners, an almost magical thing, for it not only gets the right stuff (ammo, fuel, medical supplies, food, toilet paper, etc.) to the right place at the right time, it can do it for hundreds of thousands of troops across a huge theater of war AND it has all sorts of small (and large) “branches” that allow for variations in the plan, for changes on the ground, for adjustments due to the actions of the enemy and the decision of higher headquarters (to include Washington) – as Nimitz said: no surprises.

In short, we can plan stuff when we really want to.

But what we have seen with Ukraine, which seems to eerily dovetail with what we see with Navy shipbuilding or the making of artillery shells, or any of a dozen major weapon systems procurement, or the ham-fisted response to the fire in Maui or dozens of other goofy responses – and finally to a growing debt for which there is simply no actual plan to do anything about it, is, at best, a huge, lumbering bureaucracy that is making it up as they go along, making more and more mistakes, and leaving an ever growing mess in its wake.

There are all sorts of reasons not to trust government. At its root, the idea of a constitution and clearly defined limits on government is based on the notion that government, and people in power, are by their very nature not to be ever trusted. But added to that is this simple observation: the government as it is now operating seems to no longer know how to plan ahead.

There is no long term goal, there is no planning, there is no management of the plan. There is no plan on what to do about Ukraine, there is no plan to fix our shipyards. There is no plan to fix our power grid. There is plan to fix our dependency on China’s rare earths. There is no plan to fix health care. There is no plan to fix the debt. There is no plan…

Like Dr Jones, every office seems to be making it up as they go along, even as they stick their fingers deeper and deeper into the pie. But unlike Indiana Jones, they are neither charming, clever, charismatic, nor capable; they are simply fumbling along and it is getting worse.

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