The United States military should be the most dominant force on Earth and should kill and deter the enemy.
Hegseth is an idiot, but he has some points.
Why is this an issue?
Lethality is the main goal of the military.
Nothing. It’s just that he won’t make it lethal. If anything, I would expect that the reforms of a guy like Hegseth may inadvertently even make the military less lethal.
Why have a tape measure in your toolbox? What’s wrong with having hammers?
The goal of the military isn’t to “be lethal”, it’s to achieve whatever task it has been set. Which or may not be lethal. Guarding things, engineering works, deterring attacks, patrolling, and on and on; the military does all sorts of other things besides killing. And in many cases killing is exactly what you don’t want them to do; they are supposed to be soldiers, not serial killers.
Also, as said Hegseth is an incompetent who will make the military less effective, not more.
It’s an issue because Hegseth has some dumb ideas about how the lethality of the military is measured.
For example, he seems to feel that a man shooting a gun is somehow more lethal than a woman shooting that same gun.
He thinks that troops hazing other troops will make the military more lethal.
He thinks that using the word “war” a lot will somehow make the troops more lethal.
The basic issue is that Hegseth acts as if he learned about military issues by watching movies. He’s confused image with substance.
The U.S. military is already the most lethal in the world. Ten-fold. Having Hegseth go on a rant about it to veteran generals was kind of a “no duh” moment and him posturing to impress Trump.
Modern warfare is so cutting edge about who has the newest tech that “toughness” in the present is somewhat silly.
Likewise Trump renaming the Dept of “Defense”, which is the goal like Der_Trihs says, to Dept of War was similarly Trump posturing to other nations and purely a provocative move.
He feels that Lloyd Austin was lethargic and not energetic.
Anyone who thinks Hegseth has a point is a blithering idiot. He’s, like his moronic boss, is all yak, no follow-through.
But at least he hates most DoD members as not being of the right (Right?) race or gender. So he has that going for against him.
Hegseth wants the military to be focused on winning wars. There is not much racism in the military when white and black work together and sometimes die for each other. That’s Hegseth’s point.
Not really. His point is to expel the non-whites.
He feels plenty of things, most of them wrong.
Ever heard of the Swiss Army? Ever heard of the Swiss Army knife? Ever heard of anybody taking out some of the tools to make it better?
Is it? That’s not what I got out of reading his remarks. Can you point out what I may have missed?
He feels that there is too much talk about racism, sexism, etc. in the military. He believes that it does not matter if you are white, black, biracial, Latino, gay, lesbian, atheist, whatever.
Drop those labels as soon as you enter work. Doesn’t matter. Get to work and focus on the mission—killing the enemy.
That is the exact opposite of his position. He wants to drive out anyone who isn’t a white, right wing male Christian. He believes that enforcing racism and sexism should be a core goal of the military, and that nothing matters more than if you are “white, black, biracial, Latino, gay, lesbian, atheist, whatever”.
Also the women.
And the nerds.
And the fat comic relief.
Basically, he wants to remake the American armed forces into a bad guy fraternity from an eighties comedy.
Sure, it seems like a good idea but what happens is we have to fight against a plucky underdog army made up of social outcasts? Those guys will kick our ass.
No, this is bizarre. If you really believe that it doesn’t matter whether someone is black, white, gay, lesbian, atheist, etc, then you will strongly oppose all forms of racism, homophobia, etc.
Ignoring these things, banning talking about these things, is the exact opposite of opposing them. It’s not opposing them; ignorning them, letting them go by; letting them flourish.
Hegseth doesn’t think that racism, sexism, etc degrade the operational effectiveness of the military; therefore he has no objection to them; therefore he doesn’t want the military to devote any time, effort or energy to addressing them. You can make that argument if you like, but do not delude yourself that this stems from a profound conviction about the fundamental equality of races, sexes, sexual orientations, etc. This is the position of somebody who doesn’t give a damn about the fundamental equality of races, sexes and sexual orientations; that’s precisely why he doesn’t see racism, sexism etc as intrinsically harmful.
And that’s why one of Hegseth’s rule changes is to back off on investigating claims of bullying and hazing.
Also, the “gender-neutral” standards for fitness are essentially “women will have to meet all the male standards.”
But should the military be interested in that in the first place? It’s not an academic setting.
Gosh, as long as that enemy isn’t, you know, the fucking American people.
You know, the Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape. We have many cities in great shape too, by the way. I want you to know that. But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security. We can’t let these people live. You know, we had no people enter in the last four months, zero. Even I can’t believe that.
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But I want to salute every service member who has helped us carry out this critical mission. It’s really a very important mission. And I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard, but military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city, with an incompetent governor, stupid governor, stupid.
You were saying?