This Is Not Your Dad’s Military
BY Herschel Smith
3 years, 8 months ago
Via David Codrea, this from American Thinker.
Americans need to understand that this is not their dads’ military. It’s not even the pre-2008 military. Barack Obama purged from the Pentagon anyone who was not with the new Democrat party. This Pentagon trend worsened under Trump, as people in the modern military resented the fact that he was not starting new wars and was drawing down troops. Trump’s peaceful ways may have saved lives and money, but they lessened opportunities for advancement within the military and shut down post-retirement sinecures in the defense industry.
With Biden’s ascension to the White House, the military has become an openly partisan, pro-Democrat, possibly anti-American institution dedicated entirely to turning itself into a social justice avatar for American society while maintaining endless small wars across the globe for the benefit of military officers. George Washington weeps.
And to the military men and women who read this and disagree, don’t attack me. Prove I’m wrong by becoming more of a fighting machine and less of a mewling college campus.
Yes, Obama purged 197 flag level officers in five years. But it even started before that. About as soon as my son’s battalion came back from its Iraq deployment, the senior enlisted officers, staff and field grade officers seemingly couldn’t do enough to purge anyone who had combat experience.
My son was one of the last in his battalion to leave (I think there were some dozen or two remaining combat veterans left). Of the newer Marines, they tended to complain bitterly when my son trained them like he was trained, knowing that a deployment to Afghanistan was coming up.
This has been going on for a long time.
On March 16, 2021 at 12:03 am, Ned said:
It appears that more people are noticing how cucked the military is. This was a Zerohedge: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2021-03-14/whens-last-time-you-btches-won-war?fbclid=IwAR0PrRo-kSM169Sz5wnlsoEdJI01EmdOao9qgqHmX_pTYcc46HzG4G-un_0
On March 16, 2021 at 8:08 am, Bill Buppert said:
I am hard-pressed to justify any use of American combat power since 1812-1815 although I do give a wry nod of approval to British exploits at the White House on 24 August 1814.
So I am sanguine about the feminization and institutional weakening of Federal military power because it does nothing but increase the chances of FREEFOR prevailing in the coming contest for liberty.
On March 16, 2021 at 8:31 am, George 1 said:
Also we note that a good percentage of the military today are foreigners Like Colonel Vindman. Many that are not official immigrants are first or 2nd generation “citizens.” They have no real roots in America and care nothing about liberty. It is not in their DNA. They will just follow orders without any remorse no matter what those orders are.
The usual qualification: I realize that their are exceptions. The exceptions are not the rule and are not statistically significant. I have seen this dynamic play out in person for a long time.
On March 16, 2021 at 9:49 am, revjen45 said:
1) So when the SHTF, would you rather the opposition be competent dedicated warriors, or CRT indoctrinated snowflakes? (Agreeing with BB above)
2) When the enemy is the equivalent of the Hessians we can bust a cap on them without any inner qualms about shooting our countrymen.
3) There are a lot of pre-Snowflake vets who have actual combat experience among the newly minted Tangos.
On March 16, 2021 at 9:53 am, Bram said:
Yep…
After my time in the Marines (1st Gulf War), I went back to the National Guard for a few years – Radio Operator in an Armor Battalion. We’d get new soldiers fresh out of training and be aghast at how undisciplined and poorly trained they were. My unit had a lot of Veterans including numerous Marines and guys wearing Ranger or SF tabs and combat patches. The nubies got straightened out quick during summer AT. Now I’m sure it’s all different. The tanks are gone and everyone got kicked out or retrained as military police.
On March 16, 2021 at 10:05 am, Bram said:
I think part of it was the military knew that most of their best people came from small town middle-America. That middle-America thing was the culture of the military and they preserved it to keep the recruits flowing in from those places. The city kids were expected to adapt to that culture.
Now it seems like military planners think their biggest pool of recruits will come from the cities and the country kids will have to adjust their beliefs and behaviors. I think it will backfire spectacularly and we will lose battles.
On the bright-side, if the military is used against U.S. citizens, it will be a pathetic shell of what it was 20 years ago.
On March 16, 2021 at 10:23 am, Matt Bracken said:
“On the bright-side, if the military is used against U.S. citizens, it will be a pathetic shell of what it was 20 years ago.”
This is true, if their plan was going door to door with CQB/SWAT Teams. They won’t. The Woke Left Snowflake Army will turn the war on domestic extremism into a drone/missile war. Based on network analysis etc, they will determine the “high value targets” in a given area, and drop a small missile through their roof. You can be a limp-wristed trans/gay/feminist and pull that duty, all while full of pride in wiping out evil Christian conservative white supremacists, that you never have to face in person.
2.75″ PRECISION LASER GUIDED ROCKETS
Posted by Matt Bracken | Mar 3, 2021
https://www.americanpartisan.org/2021/03/2-75-precision-laser-guided-rockets/
Next, folks will say, “Those drone operators gotta live somewhere…” etc. Problem is, the drone field might be over in a blue state, far from the targets, and defense of the airfield and base will be priority #1.
On March 16, 2021 at 12:59 pm, Fred said:
People everywhere keep saying that this is a good thing and makes the dot mil less capable against Americans but that’s simply not the case. What is the single most important aspect of military readiness? Dedication to the cause. 2 million fully committed people with an unlimited supply chain is a problem the likes of which you simply are not properly analyzing. It’s better to have 2 million committed, regardless of ability, than to have competent men not willing to fight for you.
This is the Revolution. They know exactly what they are doing, and they are very very good at it. Please don’t underestimate them.
On March 16, 2021 at 6:23 pm, Dov Sar said:
To support what Bracken said, I was on active duty when Waco happened, and asked a fellow pilot if he would have done an airstrike on the Waco compound (with men, women and children in it). He said “of course”. It is 100x worse now.
If you dehumanize a group with lies, you will have .mil lining up to kill them, and it may come in with a simple airstrike. If the former head of the CIA considers fundamentalist Christians or Libertarians to be terrorists, why not do an airstrike on them? Just run a few weeks of CNN lies about them first. You had pilots that would do it in the 90’s, you will have 10x as many who would do it now, after the media whips them into a frenzy with some BS. Government overreaction scares people into obedience.
On March 16, 2021 at 9:50 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ Bill Buppert
Re: “So I am sanguine about the feminization and institutional weakening of Federal military power because it does nothing but increase the chances of FREEFOR prevailing in the coming contest for liberty.”
There is another, less-sanguine scenario, to use your excellent word choice. While it is entirely possible that fed.gov is feminizing and thereby weakening its conventional military forces out of stupidity and wokeness-gone-wild, it is also possible that they are placing their all of their chips on technology to handle anyone or anything that gets out of hand. They are turning the legacy military into a social services experiment and job program because they believe they no longer need it. The autonomous drones, robots, and all of the rest of their 21st century gear will handle it. Plus the occasional use of high-end special ops (who will remain male where the metal meets the meat).
If the tech has reached this point, it could alter the calculus of future conflicts considerably. And there are news releases from DARPA which hint that such paradigm changes are in the offing.
A man I know, a military officer in his late sixties – an O-6 – who is supposed to be retired, but who keeps getting pulled behind the curtain for his expertise in drones and other advanced tech, once told me that the prospect of autonomous UAVs or “kill bots” frightened him. Whereas war has always been foremost a human endeavor throughout history, if self-directed robots (“Terminators”) ever become practical, humans may revert from being warriors to be just targets, on future battlefields.
There is a bright side even to that, however. The late Colonel John Boyd (USAF, ret.) was famous for reminding his colleagues at the Pentagon of the dangers of over-reliance on technology instead of people and ideas. Technology has changed war many times, but each and every advance has been met by counter-measures and new methods for dealing with the novel threat.
On March 16, 2021 at 11:22 pm, Bill Buppert said:
Georgiaboy61,
Indeed but all of us have seen that when the asymmetrical warfare practiced by alleged “goatherds” in Islamic insurgencies can’t be beaten even by the greatest military hyper-power on Earth; they get Faraday bags, emissions discipline and the power of the rifle culture. There’s not simply the Taliban but hundreds of insurgency organizations in AFG and the greater ME. India boasts over 300 separate insurgencies cooking in the subcontinent.
Islam has a power of conviction unmatched in western warfare, yet. And it is a force multiplier for them.
And inevitably, if you murder and maim enough women and children, a hallmark of drone and robot warfare in America’s misadventures overseas this century, you will never stop recruiting for the resistance. Once you take everything from a man, they can becoming exponentially more dangerous.
Having been a member of the brotherhood, the SOF forces during the coming spicy times will keep the commies up at night deciding whether to even allow them to leave garrison for missions domestically because some won’t return and that will be a consistent problem.
When I was training Afghan National Army commandos and special forces near the Uzbek border, we had entire A-Teams leave and not come back. Did they go rogue with the Taliban or Jundallah, who knows.
Nonetheless, your points are well taken.
Cordially,
Bill Buppert
On March 17, 2021 at 10:08 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ Bill Buppert
Re: “Having been a member of the brotherhood, the SOF forces during the coming spicy times will keep the commies up at night deciding whether to even allow them to leave garrison for missions domestically because some won’t return and that will be a consistent problem.”
And thank goodness for that! Members of the special ops community played a vital role in warning ordinary Americans of the frequent and almost-daily abuses of power engaged in by the Obama regime. At significant risk to themselves, in many cases. They were the ones who leaked info suggesting that the regime was doing ideological litmus testing of flag/general officer candidates, i.e., would they obey orders to fire upon the American people if such were issued? Patriots in the ranks were also the ones who sounded the alarm about purges of traditional Americans in the ranks of the military. And so on…
The recent ham-handed Biden-Harris “stand-down” and purge of special ops personnel who have innocuous tattoos and/or unit slogans, is just another example of how tone-deaf the left can be. Nothing like getting 90% of JSOC mad at you, is there? Never interrupt an adversary when he is making a mistake – write that one down!
“When I was training Afghan National Army commandos and special forces near the Uzbek border, we had entire A-Teams leave and not come back. Did they go rogue with the Taliban or Jundallah, who knows.”
With due respects to you and your colleagues, in my humble opinion, training Afghan National Army or other indigenous Islamic peoples in our most-advanced special operations/tier-one methods is beyond foolish… it is industrial-grade stupidity and willful blindness to the history of Islam and how Muslims fight.
The Koran speaks of Mohammed himself striking false-truces with the enemies of Islam, when circumstances call for such methods. It is the prerogative of Muslims to break such agreements at any time/place of their choosing, since a promise made to an infidel is not regarded as binding.
Even a reasonably-sentient child can figure out what happens next: The hajjis agree to help the infidels in return for being armed and equipped with the best weapons and gear we have – and receiving the best training we offer in the deal. Having squeezed all of the juice out of that particular orange, guess what comes next? The hajjis go over the nearest hill and rejoin the opposition, or they commit one of those “green-on-blues” we read so much about in the papers, decide to take some kuffirs with them on their way to paradise.
And if the published accounts I have read are at all accurate, even the hajjis that remain “loyal” to the central government and/or UN forces aren’t worth a whole lot anyway when it comes down to it.
The more one learns about Islam, the more apparent it becomes that no infidel – no non-Muslim (whether Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist or what-have-you) – can trust a true shahid (believer of Islam).
(From “The Religion of Peace” website)
The Hadith makes it clear that Muslims are allowed to lie to unbelievers in order to defeat them or protect themselves. There are several forms:
Taqiyya – Saying something that isn’t true as it relates to Muslim identity (i.e whether one is a Muslim or what that means). This is a Shiite term: the Sunni counterpart is Muda’rat.
Kitman – Lying by omission. An example would be when Muslim apologists quote only a fragment of verse 5:32 (that if anyone kills “it shall be as if he had killed all mankind”) while neglecting to mention that the rest of the verse (and the next) mandate murder in undefined cases of “corruption” and “mischief.”
Tawriya – Intentionally creating a false impression by saying something that is technically true, when knowing that the listener will interpret it in a different way. This practice has a broader application than taqiyya.
Muruna – ‘Blending in’ by setting aside some practices of Islam or Sharia in order to advance others.
There are Muslims who harbor no hostility to non-Muslims, but the dilemma for the non-Muslim is that there is no reliable means of telling them apart from their more-fanatical and violent colleagues.
Re: “Islam has a power of conviction unmatched in western warfare, yet. And it is a force multiplier for them.”
The social and other forms of cohesion apparent between Muslims and within Islam is indeed a formidable force-multiplier. I would argue that one of the reasons the “Red-Green Alliance” between the communists/Cultural Marxists and the Muslims has gone after Christianity so hard is to deprive the West (what was once known as Christendom) and Westerners of the strength and cohesion our civilization once took from Christianity.
Whatever else the Muslims are, they are not stupid, and they know the history of the 1,400 years struggle between Christianity and Islam very well indeed…. much better than most westerners, in fact. Perhaps one in a thousand, maybe one in ten-thousand westerners knows the significance of September 11-12th in Islamic history, but many Muslims know that those are the dates when the Siege of Vienna was broken and the Ottoman Sunni Muslim forces of Mustafa Kara were routed outside Vienna in September, 1683.