Not being a veteran, a military scholar or a person with any knowledge of defense beyond what I read in the newspapers, I’m going to accept what David Brooks says as fact. We are screwed. (Please forgive the lengthy quote.)
- The secretary general of NATO, Mark Rutte, has said that the West is not prepared for the challenges that will come over the next five years and that it’s time to “shift to a wartime mind-set.” Kori Schake, who directs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, writes that while World War III has not begun, “a world war is approaching.”
- Recent American defense strategy has been based on the optimistic assumption that we will have to fight only one war at a time. But the closer cooperation between China, Russia, Iran and North Korea make a coordinated attack more likely, meaning we may have to fight three or four regional wars simultaneously.
- The weak U.S. industrial base has hollowed out American resilience. China’s shipbuilding industry has a capacity more than 230 times greater than that of the United States. When experts recently conducted war games with China, the United States ran out of long-range anti-ship missiles within three to seven days.
- The Chinese are building gigantic amphibious landing craft of the sort they would use for an invasion of Taiwan. They have developed a powerful microwave weapon that has the intensity of a nuclear explosion and can disrupt or destroy electronic components of our weapons systems. H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser, recently said, “I think China is laying the groundwork for a first-strike nuclear capability against the United States.”
- In 2023, the RAND Corporation issued a report on U.S. military “power and influence.” Here’s how it opened: “The U.S. defense strategy and posture have become insolvent. The tasks that the nation expects its military forces and other elements of national power to do internationally exceed the means that are available to accomplish those tasks.”
I’m unsure how we got here, particularly given the huge amounts of money the United States pays for cool new planes and weapons systems, or whether focus on some issues, such as women, gays, etc. in the trenches, had anything to do with the lack of focus on others, such as being prepared to fight wars if necessary. But it would seem that the problem extended across multiple administrations by presidents and congresses of both parties, and has left us in an untenable situation given the coalition of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, whose designs on the world may differ from ours.
And we’re going crazy about gays in the military? We’re losing our minds about women in combat? And that’s the big problem with this guy Hegseth, whose experience and competencies are so stunningly inadequate to the very survival of a nation should China decide to prove McMaster right?
In his column, Brooks blames the Democrats for squandering the majority of their capital on Hegseth’s personal conduct, the titillating sort that gets the blood of the unduly passionate boiling.
We live in a soap opera country. We live in a social media/cable TV country. In our culture you don’t want to focus on boring policy questions; you want to engage in the kind of endless culture war that gets voters riled up. You don’t want to focus on topics that would require study; you focus on images and easy-to-understand issues that generate instant visceral reactions. You don’t win this game by engaging in serious thought; you win by mere attitudinizing — by striking a pose. Your job is not to advance an argument that might help the country; your job is to go viral.
He’s not wrong to make the point, given Hegseth’s harping on warfighting warfighters lethally fighting warfighting lethality.
Pete Hegseth is of course the living, breathing embodiment of this culture. The world is on fire and what’s his obsession? Wokeness in the military.
And to Brooks’ credit, he notes that some Democratic senators did ask deeper, more salient questions.
The hearings got better as they went along and more junior senators got to speak. Senator Mazie Hirono was excellent, asking substantive questions: If the president ordered you, would you order troops to shoot protesters in the legs? Would you follow an order to use the military for mass deportations? Senator Tammy Duckworth was outstanding, too, asking about the big responsibilities of the job: Does Hegseth know anything about the ongoing international negotiations? Does he know which countries are in the ASEAN bloc? (The answers are no and no.)
When Mazie Hirono gets it right, you know something is very wrong. But even these questions, serious though they may be, fail to address the big question of whether Hegseth has any clue as to what the United States military is facing in the near future, and what will be needed to defend our nation and allies should, as Brooks contends, the shit hit the fan. We have inadequate shipbuilding capacity? We have five to seven days worth of long-range anti-ship missiles? And yet this wasn’t sufficiently interesting or titillating to be worth raising?
But the failure of Democratic senators to raise these problems is secondary to the fact that Trump, obsessed with loyalty uber alles, nominated a person so wholly unqualified to be Secretary of Defense. Elections have consequences, and Trump gets to decide who he wants in his cabinet, including defense secretary. Is there no one who is both competent to do a job upon which the nation depends and is acceptable to Trump, or does he care about nothing but the soap opera version of running a nation, leaving loyalty as the only litmus test?
I hope Brooks is wrong about all of this, and the greater madman theory of international relations will protect us from war, but should the missiles start falling, will you care more whether the person beside you is gay or whether you have enough missiles to make it for more than a week? They say there are no atheists in a foxhole. Are there any woke people in a wooden ship under attack?
“But the failure of Democratic senators to raise these problems is secondary to the fact that Trump, obsessed with loyalty uber alles, nominated a person so wholly unqualified to be Secretary of Defense. Elections have consequences….” The Democrats didn’t fail to raise substantive questions about national defense because they wanted to focus on the soap opera qualities of politics. Nearly all the Democratic senators failed to raise substantive questions because they are as clueless about the substance of matters of national defense as they tried to make Hegseth appear.
I just hope we can make it to 2028. At that point, I’ll gladly stump for the candidate who channels Ed Koch and runs on ‘After eight years of chaos and four years of the Memory Care Facility, why not try competence?’ Then again, the Best and Brightest can be mid and dim themselves. (As Steven Wright’s daddy used to say, “If worst comes to worst, we’re screwed!”)
Does Trump know or understand the challenges facing our military? It’s as if none of this is real or serious, and this is just another reality show searching for ratings.
Last March, a lot of ink was spilled over mission to build a floating pier in Gaza. But if you paid close attention just to the process of getting that construction fleet in place, it revealed a great deal about our logistical readiness. 7 ships were originally sent to build the pier. 2 were navy ships, the John Bobo and the Baldomero Lopez, and 5 were army – the Frank Besson, James Loux, Wilson Wharf, Matamoros, and Monterrey.
The Bobo had serious engine trouble right out of Norfolk and had to return. It never made it to Gaza, the Benavidez was substituted in its place. Wilson Wharf got as far as Tenerife, where it was held up for weeks for unspecified mechanical trouble. James Loux was held up on Crete briefly for reasons I never discovered. Of the original 7 ships, 4 reached the AO as scheduled. That was a peacetime mission with nobody shooting at us.
Based on the performance of “experienced” secretaries like Austin and Mattis, maybe it’s time to try an outsider. Being better than these two is a very low bar. If he keeps his promise to end the woke cancer afflicting our military, that alone would be a major improvement.
The problem isn’t that he’s an outsider, but that he’s incompetent. That’s a very different problem.
Incompetent, compared to whom, and by what criteria? If the criteria requires having spent many years serving time in the Pentagon bureaucracy, maybe that’s not a valid criteria.
Seriously…Wokeness? The latest in a long line of conservative created boogeymen that have very if any relevance in the real world.
Nonsense. Many democrats are now coming out against wokeness. For example:
James Carville:
“Wokeness is a problem and we all know it”
Rep. Ritchie Torres:
“Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like “Defund the Police” or “From the River to the Sea” or “Latinx,”
former Congressman Mondaire Jones:
“I do think that Democrats need to be more thoughtful and less condescending in the way that we talk about any number of complicated issues, including trans kids in sports,”
The dictionary definition of “war” should be something along the lines of “losing thousands of lives in combat until finally realizing you have no idea what the hell is going on, scrapping your preconceptions and reacting to facts as they are on the ground.” It has been so since before our own war for independence which was, in my opinion, a prime example of that definition.
To my knowledge the United States has never truly been prepared for any war with the possible exception of the Spanish-American dalliance.
To me, Brooks is a pseudo-conservative whiner who makes a good living stating the obvious and then offering more of the same by the same players as the perfect solution.
Rant over.
Actually the Spanish-American War pointed out the ballistic deficiencies of the U.S. Springfield Model 1899 Krag-Jorgensen rifles and carbines as compared to the 7mm Mauser variants fielded by the Spanish troops, and did so with stacks of American bodies. So, I was incorrect in using that as a counter-example.
Give a listen to Nellie McKay’s version.
Speaking as a retired Nam-era vet, I have to say that there is a lot of truth in the article.
Like it or not, the real function of a military is to break things and kill people at the direction of the political masters. It is not something like the article written M. L. Cavanaugh, “The Military’s Purpose is Not to Kill People and Break Things.” He is wrong and it will get people killed.
From all times past, any military functioned as a team, no matter who was at your side. The current woke crap destroys unit cohesion and leads to a breakdown in unit effectiveness.
We should be training how to fight, not how the white man stole the land, how white privilege keeps others down.
In order to get promoted to senior rank, you have to play the political game and worship wokeness. We have a bunch of weak-willed bureaucrats wearing stars who are more concerned about getting promoted than building a fighting force.
Outgoing Def Sec Austin, according to an article by National Review and a report by MSN, was in the hospital multiple times and prescribed drugs that impaired his functioning. His deputy knew he was in the hospital but not why and the White House at times didn’t know he was out of the loop.
Our fighting forces has been degraded by lowering standards. I’m sorry, but if a woman infantry grunt can’t drag me out of the line of fire after I get shot because she isn’t strong enough and she had a different PT standard, I don’t want her in my fox hole. The weak males get washed out. If she can meet standards, that’s one thing. Ask the pilots and rangers with boots on the ground and they will tell you the truth. Women and minorities were passed because the brass told them to fudge grades.
Fighter pilots by race? I want my air support on time and on target. I want the pilot and Forward Air Controller chosen because they were the best at their job, not because of their skin color, as the Air Force is trying to do now. Look up EXCLUSIVE: New Docs Shed Light On Air Force’s ‘Goal’ To Reduce ‘White Male Population’ Joining Officer Ranks.
If we get in a real war, not the actions we have been involved in, where is the population for the units? Given the way the schools teach anti-patriotism now a bunch will run to Canada.
Building capability? What, where? We don’t have a plant that can provide enough steel to build the SF bridge. There is no way we can get the rare earths and copper we need for current weapons.
We don’t have the infrastructure or time to build our forces if we get in an all-out war. Tiawan will be lost. South Korea will take a beating but defeat North Korea. Russia will roll over NATO forces and expand their empire.
Pardon my rant. I keep tabs on the forces and even the Tier One forces (Delta Force, Seal Team 6) have become paperwork bogs requiring permission to do their mission.
If there is a world war, we will abandon our allies and huddle in our increasing lower standard of living because we became a nation of woke idiots. Asymmetric warfare will come to us with cars driven into crowds, cities set on fire, electrical grids and water supplies attacked.
Can it be turned around. I don’t think so because the rot has festered too far into our society and the military is nothing more than a reflection of our population.
God help my grandchildren.
DoD corruption is an unfettered shape-shifter. The oligarchs do not care about winning and losing wars. They get paid either way. From the Boeing Corp. to Littoral combat ships to Fat Leonard, the DoD is significantly more interested in helping contractors fleece the Nation.
Truly embarrassing to see a civilian propagandized to the point of slipping the word “woke” into the discussion.
How did we get to this point? There’s a military history axiom, militarys are always preparing to win the last war, not the next one. Or in this case, better stated as winning the last style of war. We’ve set ourselves up to win small-scale insurgencies and wars, not a massive conflict that’s posited here. That’s as much on politics of various sorts as on the top commanders, and politicians generally don’t grasp military history and theory, let along strategic significance regarding the future.
And while current production is an issue, especially regarding missiles and the humble 155mm artillery rounds, I’m not so sure that the benchmarks used in these studies are up to date enough on how war is evolving right now. The war in Ukraine has evolved rapidly in a strategic eye blink, relatively speaking, so analysis based on previous expectations is necessarily going to be less accurate than the estimate might have been previously .
This isn’t going to go away, but there are things we can and should do to lay the groundwork for scaling up production of a number of key logistics trains, and ounce of preparation being better than a pound of desperation. Planning and preparing is cheaper than upgrading to full readiness, and that preserves flexibility to cope with further evolution as it inevitably develops.
But scaling up the 155mm production capacity’s a good place to start, since the current rate seems to be inadequate to supply Ukraine’s current needs, even giving 100% of the production to them. Unfortunately, these moves aren’t the flashy, headline-grabbing stuff that current politicians and press demand to get to work doing anything useful about them, so I can’t say as I have any answer, just more questions.
All the worry about Hegseth? Crocodile tears. The top guy sets policy. The undersecretaries do all the real work.
The “real problem” with Hegseth is that he was nominated by Trump. If Trump has nominated Dwight David Eisenhower, we would hear the same cries from the same people.
My real worry is the Left writing commentary that the military should disobey orders from a lawfully elected president.
Being ask to recite from memory the members of ASEAN is a silly TV question that has nothing to do with competence or judgement.
The top guy has a an aide that can whisper the answer in his ear if needed.
Both parties play this silly game.
For awhile now, I’ve been pondering whether I am old enough to die my way out of this mess before the politicians lose the whole country.
I guess this won’t get posted. But as someone who grew up in the shadow of the Cold War I have an obligation to bear witness to the madness before it envelopes us again.
The exaggeration of the Chinese military threat by neo-con and neo-liberal pundits and think tanks like Brooks and Rand reminds me of the cold war hysteria when JFK defeated Nixon by promising to close the nonexistent missile gap. Eisenhower had Kennedy and Johnson briefed on the real sorry state of the Soviet ICBM program but Kennedy couldn’t let go of the cold war rhetoric, and Eisenhower didn’t want to go public with the U2 photographs that showed the Soviets had about ten missiles that each needed to be refueled every 30 days.
Today the US has 128 overseas bases while the Chinese have one. The US has ten times as many nuclear warheads as China. China has no military alliances except with North Korea.
China has not been involved in a war since its 28 day punitive expedition against Vietnam in 1979. Since 1979 China’s per capita GDP has risen from $184 to over $12,000. The CCP recognizes that peaceful competition with the US and the G7 has been good for China. The Chinese want to avoid war with the US.
Brooks and the Rand Corporations are shrills for the military industrial complex that will profit from accelerated military spending . Eisenhower tried to warn us. But here we go again!