Buffoon State
- Mike Dickey
- 8 hours ago
- 2 min read
"The German army was the best tactical instrument in the world, but it was employed in the service of a strategy of bedazzlement that was essentially lunatic.”
-Max Hastings
This morning's headlines included the whopper that the Department of Defense/War is about out of money.
How exactly does one run a trillion-dollar-a-year enterprise out of money weeks before the end of its fiscal year?
Oh yeah, you put someone like this in charge.
Way back when I was a rising company grade officer, we spent a couple months at Squadron Officer School learning the reality of what the military is all about. Hint: it's not holding that hill to the last man, or shooting down scores of bad guys in a hail of return fire.
Nope, it's beans and bullets, baby. The U.S. military is a massive, global enterprise with a footprint on every continent (well, I'm not sure about Antarctica) and supply chains that require planning and technical competence unmatched by any military organization on the planet. We engaged in group exercises that weren't about the exercise of airpower, not at all. We were given a finite amount of fiscal resources, and our wargames involved making the right procurement choices and establishing the logistical pipelines to allow the organization to fulfill its stated mission, "to fly, fight, and win".
So all this talk about lethality and showing no mercy and jacking up our over-30 soldiers with testosterone shows an infantile lack of understanding of what our military does every day, and why you see U.S. naval squadrons from the Sea of Aden to the Arctic Circle, but no corresponding Chinese or Russian equivalents. But like every other federal entity these days, the Defense Department has gutted its institutional leadership and replaced those folks with utter incompetents, selected solely for their loyalty to Dear Leader.
This isn't entirely bad news, folks. I mean, we're losing the Iranian War, are going to need to pass a basket to pay for more PGMs and drones, and are otherwise completely ceding the field internationally with a military that can't tie its own shoes. That's bad, to be sure.
On the other hand, these same people are making plans for ICE and that same defense establishment to go to war against "communists" at home, that tired old bogeyman that here means anyone who's not MAGA. As was the case with the Nazis, and the Soviets, the hope of free people lies in the fact that these guys could screw up a two float parade. Rounding up millions of one's fellow citizens for reeducation, deportation, or elimination is simply too big a task for them to handle.
So there's hope in that.