On The Cheap

h/t WRSA

Reference this bit of claptrap:

To what end?

Goobledygook in search of a coherent thesis.

This is from the same guy who told us we didn't hit anything when Trump shellacked the Syrian airbase, only to find out we'd actually blown the shit out of 1/3 of the extant Syrian Air Force equipment and capability?
Sh'yeah, tell us another fairytale, Comrade.

The facts are that we committed no ground forces in Kosovo (because Clinton hadn't the will nor power to do so, nor was there any point whatsoever in service of American interests in so doing), and that things were vastly better in hand in both Iraq and Afghanistan then versus currently, until the reins were handed over to pro-jihadi HopeyDopey and paid idiots at DoState Shrillary and Lurch, who promptly abandoned all prior efforts precipitously, and proceeded to clusterfuck the Middle East, with vigor and malice aforethought, from Afghanistan to Libya, inclusive, the current status quo.

SoTF what?

Everybody from civilian to senator, and private to generals, is tired of pointless war-waging. And "war on the cheap" failed, as an idea, in 1965, when we tried to maintain parity for the Cold War, while hollowing out the Army for the Southeast Asian War Games. The minute that decade-long error was corrected, the Soviet Union was bankrupted by a NATO and US forces that could have fought it to a standstill conventionally, and could have defeated it strategically, at horrendous cost. They imploded, and that was that.

Saker seems upset that the closest we've come to fighting the AirLand battle after the disappearance of the traditional enemy was the then-sixth largest army in the world, organized on the Soviet model (albeit with far less proficiency), and the battles to erase them lasted, respectively 72 hours in Kuwait and southern Iraq in 1991, and then a whole week in 2003. And after that, no one else wants to play. It also helps that after each of those events, we had a homegrown traitor regime desperate to gut the military machine, and who did so, once in 1992, and again in 2009.

We now have army, navy, and air forces which are approaching or clearly going to surpass the depths of our unpreparedness in the middle to late 1930s, while simultaneously, a shrunken demi-Czar Putin seeks to re-establish the entire Soviet Empire circa 1985 under the new plainly Russian name-brand, and China seeks to become the global power it's never been, and we've been handed the total chaos and warfare of the caliphate ascendant and unchecked (indeed encouraged, supplied, and US-funded, from 2009-2016) by any meaningful, let alone coherent US force, and wholly absent anything like adult supervision, from a general officer corps that's become bloated, toadying, and politically heeled to the point of self-destruction of the military most of us remember or served in in prior decades and centuries.
Well-played, saboteurs.

If that last means more drone strikes, Hellfires up the ass, and less boots on the ground, so be it. It's going to take 20 years to unfuck what successive administrations have done to ass-bugger the necessary defenses of the nation, and a similarly long coherently and continually applied dose of adult supervision from the E4 level to cabinet-level policy makers, to sort out a reasonable and coherent policy and build the machine necessary to serve it.

When we have that, our wars look like Grenada; when we don't, they look like Vietnam, not last of which because the aging anti-American antiwar hippies now wearing suits and ties and feeding at the political trough, are trying to relive in their waning years the glory days of the 1960s, when they did their level best to up-end the entire country, and brought us the beginnings of the Long March of communism under which we all now groan, bitch, whine and suffer.

Between that handicap, and the bills to come due for all of it, it's an open guess whether such is even possible.

So a little less dorm-room bullshit session level of capering around that bonfire probably wouldn't go amiss, especially from someone with a recent history of barely scabbed-over cleat scars in his dick from recent missteps.

The job of the American military is to kill people and break things. Whose things is a function of national policy, ideally discussed and decided on by mature adults, with some wee appreciation for common sense, and our national interests.

We have been bereft of anything like that for at least 8 years, if not like something closer to 30 years. But after Kennedy tried to fight Vietnam on the political cheap, LBJ on the military cheap, and Nixon on the moral cheap, we've only had about 8 years of adult national policy since 1960, in planning, building and deployment of forces in accordance with the principles I described above, and it happened under these guys:

Along with a cast of hundreds of lower-level minions.

The identity of same, above, annoys the living shit out of the Left, (the way vampires hate crosses, garlic, and holy water) and lesser not-so-bright-lights on the nominal Right, who being unable to function at the level of their betters, have settled on functioning just slightly better, on their best days, than their detractors, their entire political raison d'etre being "Vote for us: we suck slightly less than those other @$$holes, and we also promise we'll use more lube when we screw you with your pants on. Every day, forever."

More than half of the good guys are dead, and none of them are paid any mind, least of all by those too busy barking at the dog-whistle of imaginary and real neo-cons, and trapped in sub-par misanalysis of our national interests and efforts to achieve them.

When you're ass-deep in thorns of stupid, the first step is to turn around, and go back to the last time you were on the right path.
True for presidential administrations, and also for those blogging about it.

Just saying.