More tooth, less tail. How well that worked for the Japanese. Or the French with their snazzy red trousers and aggressive elan, which cost them 27,000 killed in one single day in 1914
The problem of not winning wars isn’t a military one in the US. Militarily, you can smash anyone in the world, women and minorities serving notwithstanding. You lose wars because your leadership uses the military in ways that it’s not designed to be used, and make plans based on delusional concepts like “We’ll be welcomed as liberators!”
US leadership needs to have more realistic ideas about what can be accomplished using the military. If you’re looking to transform a place like Afghanistan, that’s a multi-generational program, and you’ll need a lot more than a bunch of buff riflemen standing around impressing people to achieve it.
Yeah, honestly it’s probably more than 80% non-lethal, I was just spitballing because I didn’t feel like looking up an exact number.
“Be more lethal” is the general officer equivalent of the CEO’s “be more proactive”. Just a vague directive to be more effective.
On that we can all agree.
Some (many?) of the goals of the US government are best solved not by sending in the military, but by careful use of diplomacy. The United States Agency for International Development, shuttered by this administration, for instance, was an effective way of improving America’s standing in the world.
Exactly so, and in the course of eight months, Trump has damaged, if not outright destroyed, the U.S.'s ability to project “soft power” like that.
It would not surprise me if Trump or Hegseth heard that referred to as “soft power,” and said, “hell no! We can’t be seen as soft, because that means the world sees us as sissies! We have to be hard, and violent, and scare the world into not defying us!”
They’re pursuing an all-stick, no-carrot approach to international relations, and it’s going to bite the U.S. in the ass.
As others have noted above:
- Size generally matters more than spirit. My 100 children with machine guns will win against 10 bodybuilder samurai masters with the ultimately built up Ki energy. Why? Because they have machine guns. The samurai will be Swiss cheese before they get anywhere close to the kids.
- Increased hazing, rape culture, etc. are more likely to reduce the esprit de corps than raise it.
- Modern warfare is more about manufacturing and logistics than about killing. Less than a third of soldiers are ever expected to fight in a war. The other 2/3rds are there to create the support systems and infrastructure to move the soldiers around and keep them armed and fed. And within the realm of killing, a lot more of it is about positioning and communication than doing aerial ninja flips. The Romans didn’t win because they had more muscular, bloodthirsty troops, it’s because they drilled them to maintain a tight shield structure and turtle their way through the enemy. The American military is strong because we can manufacture buttloads of shelf-stable food and boat it to every continent.
All of the above being true, it’s probably more important to note that Donald Trump’s average position on international affairs is that the US should get out of the business of interfering with other people on the global stage. Occasionally, he gets pissed at someone and goes the opposite direction (e.g. after 9/11) but, generally, his position through the decades has been that the US should just turtle and mind its own business. From that, we see things like him calling to reduce the US budget while maintaining Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security yet staying pointedly quiet on the question of the military budget; calling for the US military to focus on fighting city crime (which is against the law and would be law enforcement, not warfighting); and movements like this to focus on national defense over global positioning, or like these to reduce headcount. In general, with all things Trump, you need to focus less on what they’re saying on a stage and more on what they’re actually doing and not talking about.
The more you see a complete 180 between talk and action, the more that you’ve got to be deeply suspicious.
Benedict Arnold, I’m sure, gave a whole bunch of credible and important reasons to defer maintaining the defensive structure of the West Point fortress that he was meant to lead. But the simple reality was, was that he was telling people to do the wrong things to actually maintain a defensive position.
In general, when you’re dealing with a guy who was caught embezzling the charitable givings for cancer kids and veterans - even if he was saying all of the right things, and no one could find a single flaw in the pitch, you should still stay vigilant on watching what actual movements he’s taking and where the cash is actually flowing.
Yep. The Republicans have always had a problem understanding soft power, and that’s been turned up to 11 by Trump and Hegseth. Trump doesn’t want to negotiate with other countries, he wants to dictate terms. You can see that in how he approaches everything.
He hated the Iran Nuclear Deal, because it actually gave Iran something in exchange for their concessions, and was understood to be a foundation on which to build further negotiations. He hated that, “They just gave Iran billions!”, so he killed it as soon as he could. His approach to Iran? Bomb them, and then ask, “Do you want another?” He may have slowed their nuclear project down, but I guarantee you, there’s someone in Iran right now trying to figure out how to continue that project in a way the US and Israel can’t bomb. Will they succeed? Well, North Korea did.
No, he’s working to give money to Argentina and, during his first administration, was doing things like illegally selling arms to Saudi Arabia. His pitch for the Nobel Peace Prize was in using American soft power in Armenia and Pakistan.
Trump is quite fond of an adept at soft power, and just as willing to spend tax payer money to ingratiate himself with other leaders as any other politician.
I couldn’t say, from watching his choices, whether his particular choice in enemies and benefactors is driven by a desire to get friendly with people on the authoritarian side of things (as has been alleged) or simply to do things that create headlines (e.g. threatening to invade Greenland, for no reason). Both feel plausible to me, but I’d probably lean more towards the latter for most such actions.
I doubt that he hates or really cares about, for example, the Swiss. But threatening them with 50% tariffs creates headlines.
Either way, it comes down to taking actions which are beneficial to Donald J. Trump; whether those actions are beneficial to the interests of the U.S. is irrelevant to him.
While this may be true, one of the best ways to win without fighting is to demonstrate to your enemy, convincingly, that you have overwhelming military advantage and they are better off negotiating or avoiding a war altogether rather than beating them in a war. So in a certain sense, lethality - and the credible appearance of such - is the military’s purpose - deterring wars rather than winning them.
I’m not endorsing all of the OP’s views, just to be clear.
It was certainly unclear to me, from a US position, where his fondness for Saudi Arabia came from.
You could possibly make the argument that it might have had something to do with the Abraham Accords - e.g., winning their support for the effort. Except that he continued even after that was finalized and, if that was true, then I’d have expected for Congress to get behind it. But, instead of that, they were actively working to stop him - e.g. by passing laws to stop the Executive and overriding his veto.
It seems quite plausible that the hope was to get Saudi backing for things like this:
And Kegsbreath et al fail to realize that, when you take away all the women, black people, etc, eventually the hazing culture will run out of targets and they’ll start hazing the skinny kid, the LDS kid, the Catholic kid, the kid with glasses. And they’ll prove how tough they are by raping him in the shower. But at least they’re not gay!
As for lethality, when you have the ability to nuke everyone on earth three times over, it really doesn’t get more lethal than that. It also doesn’t do all that much for you, either.
I object to it.
I object to power without constructive purpose.
I object to force without rationality.
According to what cites?
Your second cite says something different from your claim.
What specific paramilitary groups are you referring to?
Misuse of the word “paramilitary”, in my opinion. Any cites for the claims made concerning minorities and women?
In other words, they are bigots that hate and want to persecute anyone who isn’t exactly like themselves. Anyone who isn’t a straight white right wing Christian male, in other words. “Right wing” and “bigoted tyrants” have been synonyms for longer than this country has existed. Right back to when the term was coined to mean support for the French aristocracy.
Hegseth is right wing, which means he wants to drive anyone not a straight white right wing Christian male out of the military because he hates them all and looks at them as subhuman. The “police, fire and military men” who are right wing feel the same; they hate everyone but themselves. All of them. That’s what right wing means.