I caught part of Secretary Hegseth’s speech yesterday.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
I can see where the whole “Make the military a military again” think might get liberals exercised – they tend to see the military as a social program with some regrettable weapons involved.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The part I heard sounded like it could have been an answer to Edwin Luttwak’s “Pentagon and the Art of War”, in which the historian noted that the Pentagon was overgeneraled, and heavily focused on maintaining a bureaucracy capable of re-fighting World War 2.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
Over generaled?\u00a0 At the height of the Cold War, the US millitary had roughly one flag rank officer (general or admiral) per 2,500 or so troops.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Today it’s close to one per 1,000.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
The parts I heard – re-instating\u00a0male-centered <\/em>standards for combat arms troops (infantry\/armor\/cavalry\/artillery\/combat engineering and the like) in particular – landed with this non-veteran.<\/p>\n Although I suspect the real audience was in Moscow and Beijing (Teheran caught the early show).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Now, Trump’s bit about sending the military to fight “in the city?”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Shiny new quarter says he knows it’s preposterous – but he’s trying to get Democrats to support criminals against, ahem, the US military as well as the citizens of those cities.\u00a0 Hard to see where that’s a bad ideal politically, even if it’s balderdash legally (outside the POTUS’s Article 1 Section 8 power to protect federal facilities and operations – which will no doubt get defined to a fine sheen in court).\u00a0<\/p>\n You can, of course, count on Big Left to get the wrong point…:<\/p>\n\n\n\n