I too plan on reading through Mr. Lind's "4GW Canon" eventually. Unfortunately I have far too big a reading list, there are just too many books out there. So much knowledge right at our finger tips and people would rather watch stupidity on TV.

Perhaps I must have missed it.. I'm new to this and my knowledge is extremely limited, but does Lind mention or do you have any thoughts on what the cause of this regressive trend from 3GW to 2GW is? Is it something as simple as human capacity for complacency, greed and all that other stuff? or is it something more complicated?

That, along with Mr. Lind's FMFM-1 field manual for the Marine Corps, which he referenced extensively within the On War collection.

BTW, if you liked that, I highly recommend Castalia House's transcription of his lecture, The Four Generations of Modern War. It's a superb summary of the 4GW philosophy and is a very quick read. I'm currently working my way through Mr. Lind's "4GW Canon" (admittedly somewhat out of order), and once you've read that set of books as well, suddenly the patterns of warfare seen in the last century or so will make vastly more sense to you.

These clowns in the Pentagon should be whacked over the head with Lind's tome. We'll likely be spending more money and losing more fights only to have the Pentagon demand more money because "last time, we lost because we didn't have enough money, so give us more this time"

Indeed. They never, ever, ever learn.

To be as fair as possible, part of the problem comes from the fact that not only is a 3rd-Generation military exceedingly hard to create out of a 2nd-Generation one- as the Marine Corps found out in the late 1980s- but keeping such a military is even harder. The Israelis are the perfect example. They used to be one of the most decentralised, flexible, and highly reactive militaries in the world. These days, they're almost as big on bright shiny toys and ossified central-command systems as their American counterparts.

Yeah, I know what you mean. There are large parts of that movie that I simply cannot watch anymore- that godawful bit where Maverick meets Charlie at her house for the first time comes to mind- but the sheer epicness of the dogfighting and aerial training sequences more than makes up for the rest of it.

Spent two years working at Circuit City (electronics store chain, now out of business), 3-4 days a week, and they had it on the TV's 75% of the time.

That said, the aerial sequences are still awesome sauce, even if the rest of the movie is thoroughly ruined.