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this website is supposed to benefit American military academics and by extension the interests of the United States. But posting these lessons and insights publicly advances all nations equally, including our enemies. Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep all this stuff within the US military?


Some armchair philosophy (I have absolutely no valid credentials to justify the following points, but might be interesting to consider):

Similar could be said about allowing the free press to report on the government's deficiencies (Presidential scandals, bureaucratic mistakes, internal strife, Snowden, etc.)

One of the founding principles of a liberal democracy is that freedom to access information enables far more people to make far more attempts to innovate and invent new strategies/tactics/products that can help defeat the status quo. Even though your enemies may be able to access that information, the information is useless without brilliant minds capable of interpreting it and acting upon it. Hence the important role of public education / immigration within a democracy, ensuring that your citizens are the ones who e.g. come up with nuclear weapons before anyone else does.

The mistake you are making here is the same that North Korea makes when it allocates a majority of its budget to military operations. Sure, you can acquire shitty second hand tanks and submarines and guns, but the real winners - the quick thinkers, commanders, tacticians, improvisionists (all of whom are just as needed on the field as in the war rooms) - can only end up at your service if you build a society that provides prosperous education opportunities and also takes care of all basic needs to enable citizens to focus on their education. It is with this system that you can end up with great soldiers, great generals, and great supplying organizations (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, etc.) all under one flag.


That's been standard policy for some twenty four centuries now, as laid down in Pericles' Funeral Oration by Thucydides:

"Our city is thrown open to the world, though and we never expel a foreigner and prevent him from seeing or learning anything of which the secret if revealed to an enemy might profit him."

http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/education/thucydides.html

(It mostly works, especially allowing for some, or a lot of, bending of truth in advertising.)


It might make the armed forces less insular in their thinking and help with recruitment.




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