I agree

freyasman

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Apr 1, 2020
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Our military has some truly great people in it, but almost none of them are lifers.
It's not just Generals who are worthless and actually causing damage, rather than serving our country.
From the link;
"This is what $693 billion a year buys you: unbridled arrogance from the leaders of a military that can’t win against third world tribesmen armed with small arms and homemade explosives. A significant portion of our military leaders, like General Donahoe, are totally detached from reality. They face no consequences for losing wars or losing troops to preventable suicides. Many of them don’t really command anything at all. They are so ensconced in layers of bureaucrats, staff, operations and logistics shops, briefs, intelligence reports, public affairs officials, and aides that there is usually no danger of the public uncovering their true character, lack of leadership, or empty careers.

Twitter, for all its many flaws, provides a direct line into the thought process and values of the military’s elite class. Too often, the minds of our great and courageous “warriors” are filled with nothing more than anodyne policy statements, automatic deference to other members of the elite expert class, and received wisdom from the mouths of MSNBC hosts. A painful lesson for patriotic citizens, perhaps, but a necessary one.

As these leaders spend their days scrolling twitter in the twilight of their careers, waiting to secure their pensions and post-retirement defense contractor gigs, they deserve to feel some heat from the people they allegedly serve. Getting “ratio’d” is, for many of them, the worst consequence they’ll ever face for overseeing institutional failure. Still, that discomfort isn’t nothing. Feeling some modicum of pain for the lives lost and the money wasted under their command is a good thing.

The American people need to demand more from their leaders. They need these heroic defenders of freedom to account for their lost wars, failed policies, and ideological radicalism. Twitter gives the people the perfect avenue to do so.

Americans are beginning to realize that their military leaders are failing them. Even if politicians fail to demand better of them, we can and should still make our opinion known. Our generals are, far too often, soft, coddled elites and unthinking ideologues. It is time for the American people to start cyberbullying their generals."
 
Many of the Top Officers are political appointees, which they have always been anyway, it's just that now they appoint top Officers who are on board with transforming the country into a Red Chinese puppet state.
 
You ignore the obvious about the U.S. military being "unable to win wars".

The U.S. military doesn't win wars because the United States never actually tries to win wars (at least since World War Two).
 
Our military has some truly great people in it, but almost none of them are lifers.
In the modern era, it is also increasingly hard to be a "lifer". With the demands for "up or out" and constant upsizing and downsizing, a great many simply see it as a very unstable career choice.

Almost every decade or so sees large reductions in the number in the military, and this tends to hit the "mid-range" forces the hardest. Those at roughly 10 years of service. That is only half way to retirement, and a great many at that point due to troop cuts see their careers cut short through no fault of their own. And today with the elimination of the traditional "20 year retirement" system, there is little reason for most who are younger to consider staying in longer than a single term.
 
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In the modern era, it is also increasingly hard to be a "lifer". With the demands for "up or out" and constant upsizing and downsizing, a great many simply see it as a very unstable career choice.

Almost every decade or so sees large reductions in the number in the military, and this tends to hit the "mid-range" forces the hardest. Those at roughly 10 years of service. That is only half way to retirement, and a great many at that point due to troop cuts see their careers cut short through no fault of their own. And today with the elimination of the traditional "20 year retirement" system, there is little reason for most who are younger to consider staying in longer than a single term.
Elimination of the 20 year retirement?

I didn't hear about that.
 
The U.S. Military could have annihilated the entire sorry assed tribes in Afghanistan in a couple of days with conventional weapons. Don't blame the military because they failed to do so. The military works for the politicians and the politicians haven't been willing to fight a conventional war since Iwo Jima.
 
In the modern era, it is also increasingly hard to be a "lifer". With the demands for "up or out" and constant upsizing and downsizing, a great many simply see it as a very unstable career choice.

Almost every decade or so sees large reductions in the number in the military, and this tends to hit the "mid-range" forces the hardest. Those at roughly 10 years of service. That is only half way to retirement, and a great many at that point due to troop cuts see their careers cut short through no fault of their own. And today with the elimination of the traditional "20 year retirement" system, there is little reason for most who are younger to consider staying in longer than a single term.

Elimination is a poor choice of words. Modification is what truly happened and that was many years ago when I was still on active duty.
 
The U.S. Military could have annihilated the entire sorry assed tribes in Afghanistan in a couple of days with conventional weapons. Don't blame the military because they failed to do so. The military works for the politicians and the politicians haven't been willing to fight a conventional war since Iwo Jima.

This is true. A number of things happened in Afghanistan and the current "modern wars" that have worked against the guys actually fighting the wars. In Afghanistan specifically

1. Mission creep. We went there to get Bin Laden and AlQaeda leadership. We ended up nation building, fighting a drug war, trying to change a culture, etc. None of that had anything to do with the GWOT.

2. The British Empire. When the Brits left the ME they caused all kinds of problems. The arbitrary (or maybe not so arbitrary) drawing of national border lines with little to no consideration of cultural lines caused a crazy amount of problems.

3. The Indian/Pakistan conflict. India was dumping tons of money into Afghanistan. Pakistan didnt/couldnt allow a stable Indian influenced Afghanistan to exist. So they allowed their northern border area (mostly Baluch lived there) to be used as a staging point for anyone wanting to cause chaos in Afghanistan. See #3

4. There are 2 basic ways to fight a COIN war. 1 Make the population love you more than they fear the insurgency (this takes generations and tons of blood and treasure) or make them fear you more than the insurgency this takes a level of brutality that we as a nation can no longer stomach and maybe we never could. Read about what Ghengis Khan and Alexander the Great did to subdue the region.

Everyone needs to remember that all wars are political. War is an act of politics it's just the violent arm of politics....
 
Harry Truman was afraid of his own general in Korea and he turned victory into a 3 year stalemate that cost the lives of anywhere from 35,000 to 50,000 Troops. LBJ set the rules so that we could win every battle in Vietnam and still lose the war. General Schwarzkoph's strategy in Iraq was the best example of conventional warfare but (mostly) the left hated it. Left wing politicians tried to court martial a hard charging Marine officer for pissing on an enemy corpse and Obama invited the parents of a deserter to the W.H. How screwed up can it get?
 
The U.S. Military could have annihilated the entire sorry assed tribes in Afghanistan in a couple of days with conventional weapons. Don't blame the military because they failed to do so. The military works for the politicians and the politicians haven't been willing to fight a conventional war since Iwo Jima.
We probably should have just dropped our smallest nuke on Tora Bora back in 2002, and then walked out.
Actually, I was there in the beginning of 2003 and those jihadis were beat the fuck down..... they didn't have shit left.
We could have declared victory and gone home right then, and it would have gone down as us dishing out an "educational beatdown" to the Afghans for harboring our enemies and it would have been a win for us.

But all the war-profiteers smelled money so we had to do a bunch of "nation-building", and that gave them the time, money, and space they needed to come back at us and eventually grind out a win. We got so tired of punching them we finally tapped out.
 
The WW2 strategy was to bomb and kill civilians for as long as it took to convince the maniacs to surrender. Bill Clinton used essentially the same strategy in his bombing campaign in Yugoslavia and the media loved it. In the last decade American Troops could face court martial if a civilian was killed in a crossfire. American Troops had to ask permission to fire a shot in anger in Afghanistan.
 

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