Tag Archives: win

Current Events, Recent Posts

China VS U.S.

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Received the following from a highly resected Brother Marine referred to as “Mustang,” which many of you know what that moniker means. Anyway, I don’t watch TV except Netflix and Amazon Prime. Would enjoyed watching this episode however. Enjoy and thank you Mustang, it is definitely blog worthy! Really there isn’t much to enjoy as it is all so true and scary as hell.

 

“Real-Time” host Bill Maher closed his show Friday night by sounding the alarm on China’s growing dominance over the United States. Why are Americans sleeping?

 

We aren’t sleeping, we are spending our time teaching and assisting little boys how to become little girls! And, if we aren’t busy doing that we have the Sec of Defense, responding to an order from the ‘commander’ in chief, designing stylish new uniforms for pregnant ‘soldiers’.

 

“You’re not going to win the battle for the 21st century if you are such silly people. And Americans are all silly people,” Maher began the monologue, alluding to a “Lawrence of Arabia” quote.

 

Do you know who doesn’t care that there’s a stereotype of a Chinese man in a Dr. Seuss book? China,” he said. “All 1.4 billion of them couldn’t give a crouching tiger flying f— because they’re not silly people. If anything, they are as serious as a prison fight.”

 

Maher acknowledged that China does “bad stuff” from the concentration camps of Uyghur Muslims to its treatment of Hong Kong. But he stressed, “There’s got to be something between an authoritarian government that tells everyone what to do and a representative government that can’t do anything at all.”

 

“In two generations, China has built 500 entire cities from scratch, moved the majority of their huge population from poverty to the middle class, and mostly cornered the market in 5G and pharmaceuticals. Oh, and they bought Africa,” Maher said, pointing to China’s global Silk Road infrastructure initiative.

 

He continued: “In China alone, they have 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail. America has none. We’ve been having Infrastructure Week every week since 2009 but we never do anything. Half the country is having a never-ending woke competition deciding whether Mr. Potato Head has a dick and the other half believes we have to stop the lizard people because they’re eating babies. We are such silly people.

 

“Nothing ever moves in this impacted colon of a country. We see a problem and we ignore it, lie about it, fight about it with each other, endlessly litigate it, sunset clause it, kick it down the road, and then write a bill where a half-assed solution doesn’t kick in for 10 years,” Maher explained. Then the half-assed bill is forgotten.

 

“China sees a problem and they fix it. They build a dam. We debate what to rename it.”

 

The HBO star cited how it took “ten years” for a bus line in San Francisco to pass its environmental review and how it took “16 years” to build the Big Dig tunnel in Boston, comparing that to a 57-story skyscraper that China constructed in only “19 days” and Beijing’s Sanyuan Bridge, which was demolished and rebuilt in “43 hours.”

 

“We binge-watch, they binge-build. When COVID hit Wuhan, the city built a quarantine center with 4,000 rooms in 10 days and they barely had to use it because they quickly arrested the rest of the disease,” Maher said. “They were back to throwing raves in swimming pools while we were stuck at home surfing the dark web for black market Charmin. We’re not losing to China, we LOST. The returns just haven’t all come in yet. They’ve made robots that check a kid’s temperature and got their asses back in school. Most of our kids are still pretending to take Zoom classes while they watch TikTok and their brain cells fully commit ritual suicide.” Our teachers unions are finding every single way to keep themselves on the payroll, but keep students out of the classrooms. WAKE UP AMERICA! That means ALL of YOU.

 

Maher then blasted New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, accusing him of degrading school standards by eliminating merit and substituting a lottery system for admittance to schools for advanced learners. Our country is going down the toilet.

 

“Do you think China’s doing that, letting political correctness get in the way of nurturing their best and brightest?” Maher continued. “Do you think Chinese colleges and universities are offering courses in ‘The Philosophy of Star Trek, ‘The Sociology of Seinfeld,’ and ‘Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse’? Can this be real? Well, let me tell you, China is real. And they are eating our lunch. And believe me, in an hour, they’ll be hungry again.”

 

A somber message, isn’t it? But, where is Maher wrong? I guess the good news is that unlike the Chinese our young people have free text messaging and iPhone games.

Current Events, Recent Posts

A Little History

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Failure in Afghanistan Has Roots in the All-Volunteer Military

For the past three decades, careerism among senior officers coupled with the disconnect between the American public and the All-Volunteer Force have led to failed and unnecessary overseas military interventions.
By Paul Cavallo

September 2021
Proceedings
Vol. 147/9/1423

The tragedy that unfolded over the past several weeks in Afghanistan began with the creation of the “all-volunteer” military in 1973 and the self-promoting careerism that has stalked the Pentagon ever since. Too few leaders have been willing to speak truth to power and say no to overseas military adventurism that had little bearing on the safety and security of this nation. And it goes without saying that those in charge when the war begins are never those who have to finish it.

We saw this most clearly when, in 1990-91, America sent its young warriors into the deserts of the Middle East. We called it “The Gulf War” and “Desert Storm,” but it was, in reality, America’s first mercenary war. The Bush administration cut a deal with the Saudis and Kuwaitis: our men, their money. Kuwaiti “princes” lived large in hotels from Saudi Arabia to Paris while our young soldiers and Marines dug fighting holes in the desert under a searing sun.

U.S. Marines in Desert Storm
U.S. Marines in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. (Naval Institute archives)
The peacetime, all-volunteer military, after all, was a good job with benefits and perks. And that “war” went relatively well and quickly with few American servicemembers killed or injured, to the high praise of the U.S. public who were entranced, awed, and seduced by the lethality, performance, and accuracy of our high-tech weapons, while forgetting that the troops on the ground, in the desert, held it all together and made the irrefutable success of the war possible. Yet it was also the start of the forever wars. Saddam Hussein remained in power after the war and the U.S. military remained in the Middle East—enforcing no-fly zones and oil embargoes on Iraq with naval forces in the Persian Gulf and air and land forces based in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia.

While it might be a “chicken or the egg” argument, it is hard not to see that the permanent increase of U.S. military presence in the Middle East went hand in hand with the rise of militant Islam and anti-American terrorism. How many Americans remember the 1996 terrorist bombing of a U.S. Air Force barracks in Khobar, Saudi Arabia? Nineteen U.S. servicemembers were killed and 498 wounded. Two years later, the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya killed 12 Americans and hundreds of civilians and wounded 4,500 people. Then came the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole (DDG-67) in Aden, Yemen, killing 17 sailors and injuring dozens of others. Less than a year later came the 9/11 attacks, answered shortly by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. A little over a year later, under the false pretense that non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction would be used against the United States, came the invasion of Iraq.

Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 in Saudi Arabia
The 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia killed 19 U.S. servicemembers and injured nearly 500 more. 

By the end of 2003, U.S. special operations forces had completed much of their mission in Afghanistan to capture or kill senior leaders and high-value targets within both al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The Pentagon, however, rather than putting their “swords” away somehow decided to “nation build” a medieval land of warring tribes into a Western-style democracy, ignoring the fact that our democracy took centuries and many great wars to achieve.

For the past 31 years, the brunt of the cost has been borne by the all-volunteer force. The majority of American citizens have not served (none were required to), and most know few who have. A few dozen—or even a few hundred—servicemembers killed per year was the cost of doing business. But where were the generals and admirals who should have stood up to the civilian leaders, without compromise, to say “enough,”—that foreign wars too often leave our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines dead and forgotten, and for what? Were the military’s senior leaders just following along in-line, waiting for their moment, their chance for another star, or a richly coveted post-retirement job with a “vendor.” Were they just inured to the burdens of the profession? Unable to see the giant machine in which they were cogs—the failed foreign policy that resulted in the spilling of blood and national treasure for questionable (if any) gain.

It is no surprise that the “war” in Afghanistan eventually became a bottomless money pit. More than a trillion dollars was spent; did it make our nation safer, or did it just make Washington-connected corporations rich? Some of that money was funneled back to Congress through campaign donations and favors, all the while young Americans were being killed and wounded. Walk into any Veterans Administration hospital and see first-hand the reality that was brought home.

So, with the most recent deaths and injuries at Kabul International airport—clearly caused by a lack of planning, foresight, and courage at the top—we witness more evidence of the ongoing tragedy and travesty that is American “foreign policy” and the willingness of senior military leaders to go along with it. Will we ever learn? History suggests, no.

Postscript: While some commenters on the  actual article disagree with the author, I do not. I understand where he is coming from and follow his line of thought completely. The disconnect between the American public in general and the military and their assigned missions is indeed relevant. A quick “war story” if I may.

Serving as a temporary Chief of Staff at a command when the actual made a quick decision to retire, I had to handle my job as well for a few months while the Corps had to find a colonel for the billet. After a few months of this double duty my general, a fresh-caught BG, comes in my office with a cup of coffee to shoot the bull. Out of the blue he calmly says, Jim you know you will never make general.” To which I laughed telling him all I ever wanted to be was a Gunny. He asked if I wanted to know why, and of course I knew he wanted to tell me so I said yes.

He told me he knew several generals who would jump at having me as their COS because I had a knack of letting seniors (and juniors) know that if they cannot handle your answer they should never ask me the question. He said generals cannot do that. They must always speak the party line or they will never move above one star, which is why so many generals retire as a BG. They spoke outside the party line once and were passed over, or they  want nothing to do with it and retire.

Personally, I took his comments as compliment as that philosophy helped me to rise from private to colonel, and I was not about to change it. When a general speaks, understand he is never telling you what he truly believes in his heart. He is simply a mouth piece for the admisntration at the time.