"Fear and Loathing in the Leviathan"

 

This ties in with my last post I did a week ago?  I wanted to get a post earlier, but "Meatspace" has been busy, between work, my son having  a medical condition that will require medical treatment over several months and with him being in his early 20's was a real shock.  I will 'splain in more detail when more time has passed so that has tied me up quite a bit.  I pulled this off "Bongino Reports"

     I totally agree with this panel, we have to clean out the rot or for first time we go against the Chinese, we will get our asses handed to us and with the speed of modern warfare, we don't have time to go through a spate of generals to find one that will fight and lead.

AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

Heh.

This tickles me to death.

I've written about Gen Mark Milley a million times. He is only the biggest, ugliest, most obvious public face of what's wrong with our military and its senior "leadership."

Former Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen David Berger, wrote a piece for Proceedings two years ago that identified his candidates as the main reasons in public perception why military recruiting was in the toilet and I included it in that post. 

It is still relevant today.

Gen Berger correctly believed that most of the blame could be laid at the feet of military officers, specifically senior leadership. 

Public Trust and Confidence
Of all the factors affecting young Americans’ propensity to serve, the most alarming is the steady decline of public trust and confidence in the military. According to Gallup’s most recent Honesty and Ethics Survey, Americans’ confidence in military officers has declined to its lowest level since the survey began in 2001. Further, in just the past five years, ten percent fewer Americans believe military officers possess “high ethics.”2Why? Based on my observations and interactions with a broad swath of citizens, I believe there are several reasons, including:

• The character of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan

• A growing perception of the politicization of the military and senior military leaders

• Reports of widespread sexual harassment and assault in the ranks

• A series of preventable mishaps across all the services that suggest a measure of professional incompetence

• Scandals and examples of poor leadership across the joint force

• A perception that the skills developed through military service are less relevant to private sector success than in the past

Generals like Berger (author of the highly controversial Force Design 2030, essentially a redesign of the entire USMC mission) and the perniciously woke Milley are only two names in a general officer cast of hundreds who have systematically moved our once feared and lethal American military from a war-fighting posture to a corporate structure.

Our current commandant, Gen Smith, is as guilty of woke thinking as any Air Force officer. Not only is he holding fast to the reviled Force Design 2030 concept, but he is also adding little flourishes where none need to be.

Marines will no longer buckle down to learn the list of the service’s leadership traits, as an “E” for empathy was added at the end of the famous phrase used to commit them to memory.

The Marine Corps mnemonic JJ DID TIE BUCKLE signifying the 14 characteristics of an ideal leader is now JJ DID TIE BUCKLEE following the Corps’ decision to add a 15th trait.

Announced in mid-August, the change was published in two Marine Corps materials, Sustaining the Transformation and Leading Marines.

The addition of empathy as a leadership trait for the Corps was originally reported by Task & Purpose.

It joins justice, judgment, dependability, initiative, decisiveness, tact, integrity, enthusiasm, bearing, unselfishness, courage, knowledge, loyalty and endurance.

I won't play favorites when it comes to this.

The Navy, besides drag queens in their recruiting videos and having petty officers do official educational spots in order to help their fellow sailors remember proper pronoun usage for what whoever next to them identifies as (Lord, that was excruciating), is also worried about racial harmony. The Chief of Naval Operations - an admiral - made sure instructional material suitable for learning how to curb such behavior was added to his recommended reading list.

...The Biden administration’s Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Gilday, decided last year to add Ibram X. Kendi’s book, How to Be an Antiracist—one of the leading sourcebooks on critical race theory—to his list of recommended readings. To give an idea of how radical Kendi’s book is, one of its famous (or infamous) arguments is that “Capitalism is essentially racist,” and that “to truly be antiracist, you also have to be truly anticapitalist.” 

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who has his own leadership issues and is himself a retired Army general officer (Hello), called military-wide stand-downs to search for bogeymen that did not exist.

...Last year, Secretary Austin alarmingly called for a one-day military-wide stand-down to address the so-called problem of “extremism” in the ranks, despite the fact that there has been no evidence presented—including in testimony by senior officials—that there is a problem of extremism in the military. Commanding officers were required to discuss the topic using a PowerPoint presentation that included Ted Talks asking the question, “What is up with us white people?”

The American public has had enough. The first clue came when the Secretary of the Army's reviled "warrior caste," which makes up the bulk of any recruiting class in most of the armed services, simply stopped showing up to raise their right hands to enlist.

Panic set in, but instead of pivoting to appreciating the tradition of service these families have going back generations - and yes, they are overwhelmingly middle-class whites - the administration doubled down on DEI approaches and woke ploys to attract the diverse troops they wanted (and whom they actually already had), but in the new and improved 72 gender categories that they could fly rainbow flags over.

Traditional patriotic Hispanic, white, black, and other families with a history of service were diverse, yes, but the cool factor was sadly lacking.

Needless to say, recruiting tanked.

The Marine Corps made their numbers this year by, like, 1.

What happened next was November 6th and a belief that President Trump and whoever his Defense Secretary turned out to be would go in with a firehose to wash the woke stench from the five-sided building and return it to its proper military bearing. This is going to happen and not a minute too soon.

They will be scrutinizing general officers for performance and booting those who do not meet the parameters.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that the Trump transition team is drafting an executive order to “create a board to purge general officers.” Such a board, the article’s subhead warned, “could upend military review process and raise concerns about politicization of military.”

 The Pentagon denizens are shaking in their boots and insisting it will be a catastrophe.

I think they protest too much.

While Pentagon officials are not willing to publicly weigh in on the emerging plans by President-elect Donald Trump to purge the military's ranks of many top officers, the Defense Department's spokeswoman says that removing a slew of admirals and generals would have serious impacts on missions and readiness.

"I'm not going to speak for the incoming administration or speak to any hypotheticals on what they will and won't do," Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters Thursday.

However, Singh did say that the idea of a sudden departure of multiple top leaders was something that the Pentagon already faced last year, when Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., held up hundreds of military promotions

It should work out great. It certainly did for Gen Marshall when he did the same thing - and do not let them try to tell you a review board is a Trumpian unprecedented step in history.

...Perhaps the most relevant example here is that of General George C. Marshall and his “plucking” committee. This was the informal name given to a panel, not dissimilar to the one described in today’s Wall Street Journal, that Marshall established in 1940 to reform and modernize the U.S. Army leadership in preparation for entry into World War II. The committee aimed to replace ineffective or outdated senior officers with younger, more dynamic leaders better suited to the quickly evolving demands of modern warfare.

The committee, established by Marshall, identified and “plucked” over 600 senior officers they deemed unfit or too old for command in wartime. Rather than basing their decisions on seniority, the committee focused on competence, leadership ability, and physical fitness. This process allowed Marshall to infuse the Army’s upper ranks with officers who could handle the pace and rigor of large-scale-maneuver warfare. While Marshall was blasted on the floor of Congress and in the press for allegedly gutting U.S. national security, the men who ascended key Army billets are now legend: Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, and Lightning Joe Collins, to name but a few. It was successful, but not permanent.

Sometimes, it's necessary.

Veterans Day 2024

  I will blog my opinions tomorrow about the elections....After Veterans Day.....Can't do that today on this day.....Wouldn't be right.

This day was created originally as "Armistice Day" after the "War to end All Wars" and people wanted to honor the veterans from that conflict.  The Day was set as 11/11/11/11th.  Or November which is the 11 month, the 11 day, the 11th hour and the 11th minute.  The day was called "Armistice Day" until after WWII, it then was called "Veterans Day."

There are 3 holidays that honor the United States Armed forces,
  We have Armed Forces Day that honors those that are serving
  We have Memorial Day that honors those that died in service or those of us that crossed over to Valhalla or Fiddlers Green.

 And Veterans Day to me traces its lineage to those of us that stood watch on the borders of our civilization since the days of the Romans standing watch on the Danube to guard the frontier so those of our people could sleep secure at night knowing that they were safe from the bad people.  Veterans like me and those like me presented a blank check to Uncle Sam to write in any amount including our lives if necessary.  We mustered out but we know many of us that didn't make it to this stage and that is where Memorial Day comes in and Veterans day honors those of us that did make it and this day honors us and those like us.  It is a unique category because the veterans in our society is a small segment like a warrior class and Veterans tend to come from family traditions, meaning that it is a father son, uncle cousins nieces, Aunts, moms kinda thing.  This Day humbles me to a great degree because of what it means and I will honor those of us that crossed beyond.  Our job as Veterans is to ensure that the traditions are not forgotten and passed on to the next generations.

"Wokeness is responsible for the Military Recruitment Crisis"

 I have a lot of "drama" going on "Meatspace", I will explain later when I have time to 'splain.  Also I am very happy with the election and I will post in a day or two on that.

I saw this on "American Spectator", and I totally agree with it.  Until recently Military service was a family affair, but now a lot of veterans are telling their kids and others, "don't bother", for several reasons.  Back when I joined, we knew that we were giving uncle Sam a blank check that he can cash up to the full amount which is our life, and we trusted our leadership not to squander "us" in bullcrap.  I trusted my Presidents, Reagan and Bush to be judicious and they were, although I blame ""Foggy Bottom for "Beirut Bombing" and the restrictive rules of engagement, and that won't be the first time that happened, it happened again in Somalia in 93 and during Obungler's time in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If our nation’s top military and civilian leaders want to understand why military recruiting in the all-volunteer force is at an all-time low, they need only look in the mirror. Few young people want to be like them. The sight of former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley waddling out into the political arena this election season is unlikely to convince many teenagers to join up.

In an insightful piece in the Wall Street Journal, Owen West and Kevin Wallsten explain how incompetent top-level leadership and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts are chasing away potential recruits, as well as the military’s historically best recruiters — veterans who have encouraged their kids and grandkids to follow in their footsteps. The decline of this kind of encouragement from senior veterans almost exactly parallels the decline in recruitment rates. Historically, 80 percent of recruits had a relative who had served. Today, 80 percent of veterans say they would not recommend military service under the present circumstances. This is not a coincidence.

The Biden administration and its senior civilian and military leaders are in denial. They blame poor education, increasing juvenile drug abuse, and the sedentary lifestyle of the smartphone generation for reducing the pool of eligible recruits. The reality is that there are still plenty of high school athletes, young hunters, and farm kids out there who would otherwise join. Their parents and grandparents — I’m one of them — are either actively discouraging or just not encouraging them to enlist. Worse, the young people themselves see two decades of military failure culminating in the disgraceful rout in Kabul. They wonder if they want to be led by senior officers who spent 20 years fighting a war and not adapting their strategy to bring it to a successful conclusion. 

Joe Biden holds that diversity is essential to success on the battlefield. That is not supported by military history. The army of the Persian Empire under Darius and Xerxes was the most incredibly diverse in history, but was trounced on the battlefield by homogenous Greek armies in two decisive battles. The Persian army was made up of drafted contingents from every nation in the empire — many of whom hated each other more than they hated the Greeks. Over a century later, Alexander the Great conquered the empire with an equally homogenous professional army. Likewise, the very diverse Austro-Hungarian army was a drag on its allies throughout World War I.

In addition, DEI initiatives have made military promotions a joke. Who wants to join a military where you are likely to be passed over because a man wearing a dress, or someone less qualified but of a different ethnicity, will get promoted over you because they come from an underserved minority? In 2022, the Air Force mandated quotas based on race for officer promotions.

But the administration’s policies have also eroded military service culture. Even the Marine Corps, once considered one of the world’s elite assault forces, has adopted a passive defensive mentality that is technology dependent. The Marines are making their recruiting quotas, barely, because their recruitment goals have gotten a lot smaller under the leadership of the Biden administration and two incompetent commandants. Both have actively encouraged the downsizing. (READ MORE: The Marine Corps Has Gone Off the Rails)

The Biden administration has been laser focused on DEI at the expense of military readiness. If Kamala Harris becomes president, we can expect her administration to double down on DEI; she is, after all, the ultimate poster child for the movement. Unlike Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, she has never earned her national security chops. Potential recruits will likely not be unaware of the fact that the Biden administration has overseen an unbroken series of military and foreign policy disasters.

I desperately want to support the armed services, but I cannot, in good conscience, encourage any young man or woman to serve under the likes of Kamala Harris and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. 

Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who served as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and as a civilian advisor in Iran and Afghanistan

"What are the Potential Drawbacks of eliminating the Electoral College and implementing a direct democracy for presidential elections."

 I got this question and Answer of "Quora" and it was pretty good I thought.  

A guy named "Jerry Bennett" provided the answer, so he got the props.

Still very busy at work and other things going on, once I get some more information, I will put it on here.

As they say, a picture can be worth a thousand words.

The basic rationale behind the Constitution's requirement that states elect presidents rather than the popular vote was that the framers of the Constitution favored a federation of states rather than a national ‘kingdom’ style of government. State’s rights were a guiding principle. In addition, at the time the Constitution was ratified, holding a popular vote in a timely manner was problematic (think Pony Express). So states were given the choice of how to present ‘electors’ to the election assembly (called the Electoral College) that would, in turn, cast two votes, one each for President and Vice President (no, there is no constitutional requirement that the president and vice president come from the same political party).

In our first 80 years as a nation, most state legislators, governors, and state influencers chose who the electors would be and who they would cast votes for. The number of electoral votes allowed from each state was governed by the number of state representatives in Congress (two senators + House Representatives).

This persisted until the late 1800s by which time most states adopted a ‘popular vote’ system within the state to determine the candidate the state electors would present to the college.

Tallying the popular vote within the entire country has always been a false exercise. The popular vote is only relevant within the state in which it is cast. The news media (press) invented a national popular vote and national polls—neither of which are germane to the presidential election.

In recent times, the Electoral College has been seen as a hedge against big city control of national political will. As can be seen, by the map graphic above, large US cities (predominantly Democratic in the last century) would likely control the administrative office of the federal government (Presidency) if not held in check by the Electoral process.

To go from a Federation of States to a Popular Democracy would mean the elimination of state sovereignty to some extent and a constitutional amendment that no Republican state would ratify. No Democrat has ever won the Presidency without also winning the popular vote. In contrast, Republican presidents lost the popular vote in four separate elections where they won the Presidency.

"A Crisis of Competence"

 

This was supposed to post almost a week ago, I had it in draft form, but I had a lot of stuff going on in "meatspace" and I got squirreled.

   I still think that people should have been cashiered for for that debacle that is called the "Afghanistan Withdrawal".   Back in the old days, the senior generals of the American Military would have resigned, the long gray line would have demanded it, going back in time thundering "Duty Honor Country"   I saw this somewhere and forgot where I clipped it.

Last month we marked the third anniversary of the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan—a poorly planned and executed retreat that capped a two decade-long policy that cost some two and a half thousand American lives, over twenty thousand American servicemen and women wounded, and an estimated $1 to $2 trillion—or between $150 million to $300 million a day for the duration of the conflict.[i]  Yet Afghanistan is but one example of the profligate expenditure of American blood and treasure post-Cold War—the wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria all failed to achieve their stated strategic objectives and cost the nation dearly.  The total price tag for the Global War on Terror post 9/11 is estimated to stand at up to $8 trillion.[ii]  The accuracy of such estimates is subject to debate, but in hindsight none of the overall goals that had been originally declared to justify the effort were achieved, nor did much of the bespoke “nation-building” or “democracy-building” we were promised come to pass.   And so, during the current election season, when debates about different strategies going forward oscillate between the “China first” and “pivot to Asia” on the one hand, and business as usual of American primacy—AKA hegemony—compete for the public’s ear, it is time we took stock of what happened during those three decades, and ensure we chart a different course going forward, one that no longer allows for the unsustainable profligacy in expending American blood and treasure.The first step to recovery is to recognize that one has a problem, and in the case of the United States foreign policy elite we seem no longer able to craft a workable strategy, operationalize and execute it to reach the proclaimed objectives. We need to ask ourselves a simple question: Why has the United States been routinely unable to win wars over the past three decades (the Desert Storm battle to dislodge Iraq from Kuwait a notable exception)—not in the sense of breaking the adversary’s military and destroying its government, but when it comes to achieving the strategic objectives we set out to accomplish?  Is it that we no longer have the resources to implement what we set out to do? Or perhaps it is that what increasingly passes for strategy is more reminiscent of a policy conversation in a self-contained echo chamber, rather than being grounded in the realities of the Darwinian ecosystem we call international relations?

 I submit that it is the latter, and here is why.The three post-Cold War decades were defined by a fundamental misreading of what the implosion of the Soviet empire meant, what caused it, and how long this strategic pause would endure. The Washington consensus was wrong that there was anything final or decisive about the decomposition of the Warsaw Pact, that Russia would somehow recognize that its path to empire had run its course, and that it would “accept its seat at the table” that we generously – so we thought – offered.  In reality, the end of the Cold War was more an end in the battle fought for the domination of the Eurasian landmass after 1945, but it was no more a period of peace than the breather between the First and the Second World Wars was anything but an armistice. American foreign policy elites celebrated the win as an existential victory, imbued with ideological meaning and “end-of-history” triumphalism when they should have understood that if anything, geopolitics were to be brought front-and-center, and that Russia’s weakness was likely to beget revanchism of the sort that seized Germany during the Weimar Republic.  In contrast to the strategists of the “Greatest Generation” who understood that caesuras in history happen only with tectonic shifts engendered by total defeats and victories, the post-Cold War leaders seemed to believe that our former adversaries would want to be “like us,” paying little attention to the extent of humiliation and anomie that defeat always brings forth.  It was this lack of strategic foresight that imbued American post-Cold War triumphalism with the crippling certitude that we could shape the world to our liking. Future historians will marvel that the United States frittered away so much power in just one generation, pursuing the chimera of “primacy” and the “unipolar moment,” instead of husbanding and preserving for as long as possible the unique power position it found itself occupying in 1991.In fairness, dramatic events also shaped our elite perceptions. The terror attacks on 9/11 were a true game-changer, as they wrecked America’s sense that it was entitled to live in a secure homeland—separated from the world by two oceans and neighboring on Canada and Mexico, two friendly countries that pose no threat.  The trauma of 9/11, and especially the failure of the George W. Bush administration at that point of dread to ask something of the nation beyond money and security measures at our airports, laid the foundation for the most breathtaking hubris in American history:  the belief that properly crafted institutions would in short order remake non-Western cultures, and that we would not be safe until we had transformed entire regions of the globe in our image.

  This folly was not so much a quest for empire as its critics posited; it was a borderline elite fixation enabled by the nation’s trauma wrought by a group of criminals who on that fateful day murdered several thousand American citizens. And so instead of capturing or killing Bin Laden and his co-conspirators to show to all that Americans may be gullible and sloppy at times, but that if you try to hurt them you will die, Washington launched on a breathtaking “transformative project” that cost trillions, exhausted the nation’s will, and in strategic terms achieved precious little.   The Kantian dream of “democratic peace,” whereby if all nations were democracies, the problem of war would be eliminated, in Washington’s rendition – Democrat and Republican – became a self-induced defeat. We have yet to fully appreciate how much damage GWOT and the attendant theories have done to American credibility, its good name, and the erstwhile belief that this country was being led by competent people who understood the harsh realities of state power and its limits in global politics.
The United States needs to rebuild its reputation as competent great power and its national credibility in a way that demonstrates to the American citizenry and to the world that we are still capable of thinking in pragmatic terms, and that the ideological normative flourishes of the GWOT and globalization eras that sapped the nation’s strength are a thing of the past.  Today Washington urgently needs to revisit the fundamentals of what constitutes a viable national strategy, one that can clearly articulate the irreducible national interests and objectives to be achieved, identifies the requisite resources to achieve them, and most importantly provides a trajectory going forward that will ensure the sustained support of Congress and the American people.  Most of all, our foreign policy establishment must demonstrate that it still has the competence to implement such a strategy, including real expertise when it comes to understanding different theaters, cultures, and polities.

If it cannot, we need to bring fresh blood into the policymaking and implementation process to ensure we never again fall prey to our ideological wishful thinking about how the world should be.  We must face head-on the realities of power and economics as they have always been and will remain going forward: a strong industrial base as the foundation of our defense industry and our military, and an economic policy that preserves and expands the opportunity and prosperity of the American nation. Then can we speak about rebuilding American credibility worldwide, restoring deterrence, and ensuring that the United States is not pulled unprepared into a wider war against our determined adversaries. Effective deterrence rests on capabilities and, most of all, on the genuine competence and will to deploy those capabilities in a way that communicates unequivocally that the nation will not go looking for the proverbial monsters to slay, but that it nonetheless remains resilient and determined to defeat decisively anyone intent on threating its security.  The clock is ticking, and to get there we need to relearn the fundamentals of great power politics that we seem to have forgotten since the end of the Cold War.