Today's Assignment

... learning about grand strategies, why they're vital to the success of any nation, and why empires fall when autocrats double down on bad decisions instead of building up institutions.

Dr Sarah CM Paine, US Naval War College:

For me, there's nothing better than listening to smart people explain things to me.

Bookmark it, and come back later if you have to, but this shit is important.

The Whole Standing Army Thing

The debate had begun to rage as I entered high school - All-Volunteer vs Conscription-Augmented.

We're seeing the reality of what both the Founders and the Wacky Hippie Alarmists tried to warn us about.

The Brookings Inst:

The gap in civilian and military experiences in the United States over the 17 years since 9/11 has led to persuasive, persistent, and unrealistic myths that have eroded faith in civilian leadership of defense policy. Among these myths are the superior virtue of military over other kinds of public service; that battlefield experience is the most authoritative source of military policy expertise; and that an exclusively civilian background is inadequate for strategic defense leadership. In the United States, these myths are nurtured and perpetuated by both military and civilian communities and affect general public opinion as well as the attitudes of national security professionals. These myths are also corrosive. Unless they are acknowledged, addressed, and challenged, future civilian leaders may struggle to control the use of force—a profound problem for a democratic system. Downgrading civilian leadership will weaken U.S. national security and the military itself.


It's easy for a Boomer like me to have a knee-jerk reaction against reinstating the draft.  "My war" was Viet Nam, and by the time it was my turn to sweat the lottery, I knew it was already very unlikely that I'd ever be anywhere near the joint, even if I hadn't beaten the 4-1 or 5-1 odds against being selected in the first place (my magic number was 239 in a year when they were "only taking" 1-95).

Anyway, fast forward to other wars of choice - Afghanistan and Iraq - and we see a very familiar variation on the theme of how fucked it all gets if we're not careful. 

During Viet Nam, the draft system got totally corrupted because the "privileged white" kids who had access to lawyers and doctors and other influencers could practically opt out of the draft while the poorer kids - ie: black kids, and others from the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder - ended up being way over-representated.

In the 2000s, you start out with a really solid military - fairly representative of the American society as a whole. But once it's clear that Afghanistan and Iraq are turning sour, the military starts to run dry (because people do wise up eventually), and we get a lower quality product as a result of the same piss poor management that gets us into stoopid-ass wars to begin with.

I won't recount all the shitty things we've done to our people in uniform (and continue to do to them). Suffice to say that I hope we've relearned the lessons of the founders - that we understand that it's a bad idea to let anybody with guns and tanks and airplanes have too much unchecked power to make the decisions on how they use all that shit.

And the draft? No matter how you try to unrig it, there will always be major problems with a conscripted military. But if we allow the military to be part of a Plutocratic system of government (that a professional military always pushes towards), we let ourselves in for problems that pose the same level of existential threat to the democracy that having no military at all would pose.

Any professional military - standing army or otherwise - is a danger to democratic self-governance.

I think it all goes back to the basics of how we build in the checks and balances. The system that makes sure we maintain the appropriate separations of power. 

And all of that depends on a well-informed public.

How They Die

According to Pentagon data, more than 6,800 troops have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11 and more than 3,000 additional service members have taken their lives in that same time

Closing in on 10,000 dead uniforms.

And in 2012 and 2013, for the first time ever, suicide caused more military deaths than anything else.

Can we stop handing these kids every shitty problem that we don't feel like dealing with?  And cops too btw, now that I'm thinking about it.

We have to get back to some reasonable facsimile of sanity, and start figuring out how to deal with our shit without always bashing each other over the head with sticks and rocks.

We can't kill our way out of every fucking problem that comes along.

A Question

Are we creating terrorists faster than we're killing them?

The key question after a mission like last week in Yemen: Are we creating terrorists faster than we're killing them? https://t.co/PcndhFLC7f

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) February 3, 2017

Here's another question: What kinda fucked up world we got here when that's a valid Policy Question?

You kill your way into problems, not out of them.

But Then This

Just wondering if there would be a circumstance under which I'd support religion getting in the way of government employees doing their jobs.

And the answer is actually pretty simple.  Yes, but as with all Civil Disobedience, I can be on your side only as long as you're going to accept full responsibility and you're ready to pay the price in terms of arrest, jail and fines.  

Then we'll work on changing the law - and we'll be doing it right.  We won't flat out disobey, rationalizing it with god-knobbery, and expecting total impunity because we have friends with large weapons and small vocabularies.

Nice Work If You Can Get It

Per military.com:

At least 184 Humvees, 58 tanks and nearly 700 other vehicles have been destroyed or damaged in the more than 1,600 airstrike missions that have hit more than 3,200 ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria since bombing began last Aug. 8, the U.S. Central Command said Wednesday.

In addition, a total of 26 MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles and armored personnel carriers, 79 artillery and mortar positions, and 673 infantry fighting positions were destroyed, CentCom officials said.

An unknown number of Humvees, M1A1 Abrams tanks and MRAPs were captured by ISIS when Iraqi national security forces fled and abandoned their equipment as ISIS swept into Iraq last June.

The formula for success in American Capitalism is pretty simple - at least it is in certain sectors of our economy, and once you've managed to put in place the basics of the incestuous Revolving Door setup that's been cultivated since before WW2:

Military Brass at the Pentagon recruited and groomed for executive positions at Big Defense once they "retire"

plus

Lobbyists who are almost invariably former and/or future Staffers at the Pentagon or in Congress

plus

Coin-Operated Politicians who collect monster campaign donations from Big Defense in return for their influence when it comes time to "appropriate" the Tera-Bucks for all the National Security shit we need in order to fend off invaders from anywhere from Ulan Bator to Alpha Centauri.

plus

The Press Poodles necessary to keep us confused as to who should be held responsible for fucking us with our pants on - paralyzing us in the middle with the Both Sides Narrative

But once in a while we hear the story I quoted above, and it gets a little clearer that some of these jokers are playing an even simpler and much shorter version of the game.

1) Sell large quantities of materiel to the Federal Government in order to supply "our friends" (Iraq, Syria, etc) with the means to defend themselves, making sure of course all that gear is not the latest and greatest.

2) Wait for "our friends" to lose all that gear to ISIS (eg) - we all knew that was gonna happen, but hey, how do we just sit around and do nothing blah blah blah.

3) Send in the air strikes that destroy the gear, which makes it necessary to supply more gear, which makes it necessary to destroy more gear as it falls into the wrong hands - and which also makes it vital to develop even better gear for ourselves, because - remember(?) what if that gear falls into the wrong hands!?! (and then begin again at #1 above).